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Saturday, October 5, 2013

Song of the Week! 5 October 2013


It's no longer just a niche; the Vocaloid craze had invaded most of the Japanese rhythm games as mainstream additions. It's so big that some songs are used in more than one rhythm game from more than one different manufacturer! Today's song is one of them.

 Houkago Stride (放課後ストライド) Last Note. feat. GUMI
Version
Allx3 (105)x5 (217)x6 (404)x5 (504)
 Taiko 0 S
 225
 none
 gumihk


Another of Megpoid Gumi's 'Hall of Fame' songs (with over than 100k views overall), Houkago Stride is one of the many new Sorairo songs starring the green-haired virtual singer. Unlike the Crypton Vocaloids on Sega arcades, Gumi is not tied to any franchise or publisher, and as such is much easier to pot between arcades, such as Konami (SOUND VOLTEX and pop'n music) and Namco's Taiko games. And since the hit song has just hit Sega's Maimai GreeN this Thursday, it's appropriate to talk about it.

Houkago Stride (lit. 'After-school Stride') is composed by Last Note, for the song series Mikagura School Suite (ミカグラ学園組曲), illustrated by Akina. Much like other Vocaloid series of songs, the songs tell a story describing a main character's feelings much like a musical feature film. In this case, the series is about a bunch of students in the Mikagure High School, an institute where after-school cultural clubs are a big thing for the students' lives. So far, all the songs in the Mikagura School Suite series use Gumi as the singer.

After being featured in a couple of Last Note.'s albums (first trip and Setsuna Code), Houkago Stride joined the Taiko ranks as the easiest Vocaloid Oni chart ever (which for a genre whose Oni rating average is around 8.3, this isn't necessarily a bad thing). Nonetheless, this still stands up as the 5* Oni mode with the highest basic BPM yet, and this reflects on its note patterns as well. After all, when was the last time you saw 3-note clusters in a 5* Oni song of over 200 BPM?