It's Halloween once more, modern pride and joy of dentists everywhere as well as a time of spooks and chills of all sorts in general. We've already had a couple of Saturday features falling on the fated day, exploring the theme of spooks between originally-composed frights and actual fears from yours truly, but for this third iteration, we're up to explore some other kind of music-game-related horrors (and a less-common one at that).
You'll see what I mean soon enough, after the jump...
Deus Judicium Kurokotei vs MIssionary
黒皇帝 vs MIssionary
| Game | Genre | I | II | III | IV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rotaeno |  | 3 443 | 7 559 | 12 1309 | 13 1904 |
222...wait, don't be rash- your thoughts are as clear as day for me, even without a quick Ouija board session. "The gameplay video shows a spinning boat porthole, for some reason? What are those markers? What kind of Taiko game is 'Rotaeno'? Why have the difficulty symbols been replaced with Roman numerals? WHAT IS GOING ON?!?" I hear you, but before jumping to the answer (for the not-scrolling-down impatient folks out there), let's trace a few steps back to have a clearer picture of the whole situation. It's like a murder mystery in a sense, except there's no murder and the only mystery lies in the motives!
We might have just dipped our proverbial toes in the 'vs. artist credit' rabbit hole, but this peculiar kind of multi-artist crediting goes way back, and in many a quarter and continents! For the 'vs' track in question, in fact, we got Europe and Asia united as one, with the French composer Kurokotei (X account; SoundCloud; YouTube) and the Hong Kong-based MIssionary (X account; SoundCloud). The latter found a veritable stride amongst C4Cat's mobile music games as one of Dynamix's earliest music contributors (Tsumikyoku, Nanashi no Senkyoshi among many), whereas the former's reach was HUGELY boosted by a couple of YouTube-viral Touhou arrangements from Undefined Fantastic Object: Galaxy Collapse and Scattered Faith. cross the years, both artists also threw their hat into the BMS OF FIGHTERS fore, both with solo instrumental pieces (citing Kurokotei's Chronostasis and MIssionary's Forgotten Martyr) and dual-artist compositions, including the vocal-lead Belle de Nuit and About The Universe.
Deus Judicium (Latin for 'God's Judgement'), the song at hand for today, came to be as the hidden boss song for the Burning Heart DLC pack in Dream Engine Games's Rotaeno, a mobile rhythm game that launched in 2022. The flagship feature for the title is the active involvment of smartphones' gyroscopic capabilities to play along with the track, so that not only there is a selection of markers to tap/hold/flick with your finger to register music-attuned hits, but also position-based markers whose hits will only register if the screen's horiziontal axis is directly aligned with select 'Catch Notes' or even quick sideways phone spin motions for the external layer's 'Rotate Notes'. If the song is of your liking but motion-sickness plaed its hand heavier on your eyelids, let it be known that Deus Judicium was also ported to Rayark's Cytus II, as part of a collaboration song pack release (link).
At this point, you might be wondering why am I talking about a song from another rhythm game... to which, I reply: remember today's 'theme' of sorts? Unique music gaming fears, one of the less-talked-about ones that (not necessarily) doesn't involve your average music game enjoyer but rather, the composer/s on display and to be more specific, the fear of rejection... as music input submissions. As it turns out, in fact, Deus Judicium doesn't start as a Rotaeno-original song, but rather as a contest entry for 2021's Taiko no Tatsujin music recruitment contest, the first one hosted by Columbia Makes. This is one of the "happy ending" cases where the song actually found a place to call its home even after being Taiko-rejected, but considering it got no Honorable Mentions of sorts (similar to others' lucky tune catchups from past and future contest iterations), to those hoping for a "crossover comeback" story of sorts into Taiko, all I have to say is: I wouldn't hold my breath, if I were you...
