Header Menu

Saturday, July 8, 2017

Song of the Week! 8 July 2017


It's been a while since our last J-Pop Saturday feature... isn't it?

 R.Y.U.S.E.I. Sandaime J Soul Brothers
Version
Allx3 (128)x5 (189)x7 (295)x8 (371)
 Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko 3DS 3, Taiko Wii U 3, Taiko PS Vita, Taiko +
 128
 none
 ryusei


One of the most recurring modern tracks for the J-Pop genre (or 'Pops', if you're going with the new genre title in the upcoming PS4 release), R.Y.U.S.E.I. (lit. 'meteor') has been the 2014 theme track of the Tokyo City Keyba horse racing track, which ultimately let its porting in Taiko no Tatsujin games from Murasaki Version onward.

Released on June 25th, 2014, the song has been made from the Sandaime (Japanese for 'Third') J Soul Brothers, a 3rd-generation branch of the EXILE TRIBE unit whose branch's rights are held by the Avex Music Creative label. The song was composed by the nick-named STY and Maozon as a sequel to the single S.A.K.U.R.A., which was released earlier in the same year, with STY writing its lyrics and its music video coreographed by ELLY in Los Angeles. The EDM vibes of the song made it popular since its release week, as it managed to top Oricon charts with over 160k copies sold. The accolades for the song don't stop here, as R.Y.U.S.E.I.'s popularity made it to become 2014's best selling single overall -being a physical Gold (>500k sales) seller and a digital Platinum (>1m sales) one- and also managed to win the 56th Japan Record Award in the same year. Sandaime J Soul Brothers's 5th studio album, PLANET SEVEN, also managed to shatter sales records the following year, thanks to R.Y.U.S.E.I.'s everlasting popularity!

This song's notecharts in Taiko games are quite an odd case to describe, considering the average difficulty standard set by modern 8-star Oni tracks; its note density is one of the all-time lowest for the difficulty range with an estimation of 3.14 hits/second, only lagging behind to PERFECT HUMAN in this dubious feat... yet, it's also the J-Pop song with the highest number of scrolling changes in the Taiko series, consisting of both slow and fast-scrolling sections that range between the x0.5 and x4 speeds as the track plays along. For un-experienced players that want to get used to visual scrolling trickery and some occasional 1/24 spikes, this is the perfect place to start practicing.