[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCcEbye6wuU”]
Tokyo Girls’ Style – “Kodō no Himitsu”
When I originally wrote about Tokyo Girls’ Style’s “Kodō no Himitsu,” that geographically-accurate idol group getting only the slightest attention as I instead decided to praise chiptune outfit YMCK. Their NES-tastic remix still sounds plenty good, but as the year draws to an end and I look over my (lengthy) list of regrets, I realize I didn’t really give justice to the Tokyo Girls’ Style original. So here I am, resting in bed in mid-December ready to say – pretty good song, Tokyo Girls’ Style, great for you and I’m sorry.
The draw to me is imagining the production styling of De De Mouse recruited by the likes of the Avex Network for more mainstream tastes. That means very little drum’n’bass inspired pounding but plenty of big, bright cartoony sounds like on last year’s excellent A Journey To Freedom. The actual members of the group do a fine enough job, wisely avoiding sounding like AKB (though, only having five members as opposed to four dozen goes a long way). The late-song squiggle out sounds especially fun, just as cheerful as anything on YMCK’s remix.
So yeah, the 8-bit remix is plenty cool, but just because something gets turned into a video game doesn’t mean it’s better than the original.