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Friday, March 23, 2012

Namco Taiko Blog (22 March 2012)- 3Q-4U-AC00


What if....the Taiko arcade was alive? What if it was there to see you play it? What would it be thinking of?

It's the Taiko Team's feature today, and a weird and somewhat creepy inspiration for the Taiko 10th anniversary appreciation song, 3Q-4U-AC00. Released in the Donderful album last year, the team confirms the pronunciation of the song title as 'thank you for you AC zero zero'. For today's blog, they hook up Oogami Masako, the person behind the composition of the song.

Apparently Masako thought up the song when he was dreaming. In the dream, from somewhere he hears a girl calling out to him and wanting him to 'transfer my thoughts to everybody out there'...

...

"...hey can you hear my voice? I am your friend 'Taiko no Tatsujin'. That's right, I'm the arcade game machine. Do you know me?"

"The place where I'm at, the kids come around to play on me, they're looking at me, awestruck. There's shining stars in the middle of me...wait they're not stars, they're notes (don and kat). Whatever, both are fine....but I can't really see into myself, oh why, my forehead feels like it's burning. Ah, it's because of the tamashii gauge on the screen...The kids look like they're enjoying themselves so much, like they're transmitting electrical signals to me. It feels like...I'm on a rocket blasting off to space. Do you understand that feeling? It's like, a bottle of beer you drink after coming out of a hot bath. I can't drink or eat..."

"While I'm working away, I see the kids' smiling faces, and I'm having so much fun with them...feeling so happy."

"All things said, thank you for being by my side and playing me for so long....you've heard all I have to say, you can make all my thoughts and put them into a song....please tell everyone what I feel for them too...okay? Thanks. I feel good now. 4649 (yoroshiku)"

And then he wakes up the next morning, apparently still having fresh memories from that night. The girl's voice was almost mechanical, robotic-sounding...it was almost real, and he gets images of electrical signals running around making sounds, and the image of outer space (which explains why this line was in the lyrics, you can check em out). Although he doesn't really know, what he does know is that he has to show this appreciation for players at this time.

...and so this special ac. series song was born! The '00' was given to it for no apparent reason, but like we said before, it relates to the series' reboot on the arcade scene. The ac. series songs before this (Akuukan Yuuei ac12.5, Numujika ac.10) were all about emphasis on difficult patterns, but this one is deliberately made easy just so that everyone playing it can manage to have a good fun time (doesn't explain why it got the 8* though...this should have been lowered with the software patch or something)

Absurd or not, this is quite the fascinating story of how a song is made at Namco.

And so the Taiko Team thanks all Donders on the series' 10th anniversary. Thank you for you!

Oh, and the next blog update will be on a Friday, March 30th, at 11am.


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