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Saturday, May 21, 2016

Song of the Week! 21 May 2016


Once again, we have a Vocaloid/GM pair for our Saturday appointment, both of which will be available in the upcoming 3DS Taiko videogame.

 Lost One no Goukoku (ロストワンの号哭) Neru feat. Kagamine Rin
Version
Allx3 (172)x4 (260)x7 (501)x8 (799)
 Taiko 0 W, Taiko 3DS 3, Taiko Ps Vita
 162
 none
 ???


Today's first song already had a Taiko portable debut, but not at Nintendo's! Coming from Ps Vita's V Version as one of the launch debuts, Lost One no Goukoku (lit. "The Lost One's Weeping") is -at the point of this writing- a 3-years old Vocaloid track from Enmei Chiryou composer Neru.

About the artist, so far it's know that he was born on August 10th, 1992, favoring the use of the Kagamine twins as the main voices for most of his rock-styled songs. While his main alias is the Neru one, he adopts the Oshiire-P (押入れP, 'Closet') nickname due to one of his past comments: "I slept in the closet and used Kagamine Rin and Len."

Originally uploaded on March 4th, 2013, Lost One no Goukoku has reached a quite fast popularity peak, as it entered the Hall of Fame (=over 100k views) in less than two days, with the song itself being about questioning the education system based on cramming every school subject all at once and expecting only the best results. With the song making its album debut on March 2013's Sekai Seifuku (世界征服), Lost One go Goukoku has reached the Hall of Legend (= over 1M views) on May of the same year, leading to another album appearence in November 2013's Vocalofuture by EXIT TUNES, as well as dozens of different Vocaloid/human covers and other renditions across the Internet.

Lost One no Goukoku's Taiko Oni notechart isn't afraid to shine of old-school stamina tester, as the lively BPM pace might make progressively aggravating to clear the entirety of the 1/16-based notechart without errors. We also have quite an unusual numberplay for Oni's notecount value, as the 799 Max Combo leads to think back to the song's own title, with one note being the "Lost One" to round up the ten and unit digits to a new hundred.

 Makaimura (Overworld BGM) (魔界村(平地BGM)) Remixed by ARM(IOSYS)
Version
Allx4 (199)x6 (435)x7 (705)x8 (871)
 Taiko 3DS 3
 74-185
 none
 ???


For something that is making its own Taiko debut with the third 3DS game, here's one of the many software house outsiders treats that Dokodon! Mystery Dungeon is about to receive! This one song, in particular, has been originated from the deepest origins within videogame software house Capcom's history to rise back in form of an updated arrangement for 2013's 30th Anniversary milestone! But first, as usual, let's take a gander at the game itself that originated such legacy.

Known in Japan as Makaimura (魔界村, lit. 'Demon World Village'), Ghosts n' Goblins is a side-scroller game that made its debut on September 19, 1985 as an arcade game running under the Motorola 6809 microprocessor CPU. Created by famed video game designer Tokuro Fujiwara (藤原得郎) with the music by composer Ayako Mori (森安也子), the game's plot involves the knight Arthur in his journey to save the princess Prim Prim from the evil clutches of Demon World king Satan, by plowing his way through its many minions with a selection of randomly-dropping weapons at his disposal.

In 1986, Ghosts n' Goblins was ported to the NES in Japan and (thanks to Taito) America, with the United Kingdom getting several ports for home computers (Commodore 64, 16 and Amiga among those) in the same year. Years later, the game found many other ways to get ported for other systems and the entirety of Europe as well, while also expanding the lore with both spin-off titles (Gargoyle's Quest; Maximo) and actual sequels, with the 1988 arcade hit Ghouls n' Ghosts paving the way. Nowadays, the original game is notorious for being one of the past decades' hardest games to beat, both for its own genuinely-difficult learning curve to master and some cheap programming shots that can (and will) force the players to replay already-completed stages multiple times in their quest for the true ending!

As already anticipated, Capcom as a gaming company has turned 30 in 2013, with part of that year's related celebrations being the creation of the September 25th commemorative album 30th ANNIVERSARY CAPCOM Music Best: Original & Arrange (カプコン30周年 ミュージックベスト オリジナル&アレンジ). Together with many tracks from some of the company's most iconic titles, many song remixes from independent composers have joined the party as part of the album's second CD. One of these tracks involves IOSYS recurrent personality ARM remixing the first two stage BGM tracks of Ghosts n' Goblins into the so-called Ground BGM (Stage 1, 2). Years later, this special rendition was cut into what we know nowadays as the Overworld BGM in order to be a playable song for the iOS version of CROSSxBEATS, Capcom's (still ongoing) rhythm game series. It's then a pleasant surprise for us to see that the Taiko cut is actually the longer playable one, for once!

Occasional changes of note spacing aside, this ARM remix's biggest challenge lies in its length, making for quite the bunch of notes in the chart.