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Thursday, October 19, 2017

Namco Taiko Blog (19 October 2017) - Behind the Notechart: HARDCORE no Kokoroe



This week's Thursday blog entry features the latest seasonal Rewards Shop song's Oni chart analysis, as introduced by the usual Yamaguchi and told by a brand new member to the Taiko Team...

Indeed, HARDCORE no Kokoroe has been charted by the hands of the latest newcomer to Taiko gaming's charting crew, going by the nickname of Emukepi (えむけぴ). Having heard in advance the coming of DJ Myosuke's first original song in Taiko gaming, he waited for its finished version in order to claim the charting job for such an unique-sounding song, which he ultimately got!

Starting from the overall musical theme, the more music-driven portions of the Oni notecharts have been a result of two concepts' clash with each other: Gimmick Notechart (ネタ譜面) and Serious Notechart (ガチ譜面). Emukepi's mention of Gimmick Notechart is his own term to describe the charting elements that make for a flashy appearance, which in Taiko charts is mostly expressed with scrolling speed changes.

Here are a couple of examples for this trend, straight from a cropped Auto-Play segment of the song:

For a sped-up Gimmick Notechart example, here's a speedy drumroll that partially covers what's next...

...while for the opposite example, here are some slow-flowing note markers that are hidden behind the regular-sped notes!

As Emukepi's speed changes do also reflect on the bottom-screen dancers moving on rhythm for each speed change, we have both BPM and scrolling speed changes to thank for such a variety of examples... but don't worry- each note still follows the song's rhythm!

The Serious Notechart approach, on the other hand, opts to valorize a song's musicality with a direct beat-to-beat Taiko notechart translation. Being a boss-sounding song with several kick-based portions, most of the long 1/16 clusters do reflect those portion in Taiko form.

One of the quotable examples on Serious Notechart, the pre-break long cluster!

The overall chart's Musical Notation, of course, doesn't stray that far away to the two rule-of-thumb categorizations that were introduced into Yamaguchi's first "Behind the Notechart" features, so here's like the Musical Arrangement and Game-like Arrangement schools of thinking have molded HARDCORE no Kokoroe into its finished state!

The Musical Notation for this song rotates around, once again, the bass-drum kicks that can be heard all throughout the song, which also helped scaling the note amounts for the easier modes. For a quick comparison, the same idea constitues great part of Kita Saitama 2000's difficulty scaling between the 4 modes!

Oni/Muzukashii comparison of the same portion, with Kat notes marking a slight difficulty increment from the two otherwise-identical portions.

The Game-like Notation approach, on the other hand, played more on the last chorus for the desire to make a differently-sounding rhythm that feels challenging to follow, which relyed on pattern repetitions that run at different timing signatures. For evidence, ...

Pictured above is a 4-note cluster running at 16 beats per measure (1/16), which gets inherited alongside the entire note stanza, but running as a 24-beat/measure (1/24) cluster instead.

Similar example but different time signatures: an 1/8 beat succession of 4 Kat notes that later is repeated with the previous stanzas at 1/12 beats, an alternation example first seen with Joubutsu 2000.

Emukepi has also been glad that his Oni notechart for the song has been deemed worthy of being featured in one of the latest Dojo Ranking's final main courses! Being a project that took both direct and indirect approaches to best represent the track in chart form, he's satisfied with the final result, up to the point of looking forward to chart some other boss-like songs in the future.

The last lines of this blog entry included the names of other recent songs that have been charted by the newcomer Taiko Team notecharter sentai:

Mirai wa Joe! joe!
Mezase Pokemon Master -20th Anniversary- (Oni/Ura Oni)
SHINY
Youtube Theme Song
INSPION

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