Let’s play a game or a song…
[Video][Website]
[7.00]
Iain Mew: This year Japanese video game developers Atlus, who have touched on idol culture previously in Persona 4 and its spin-offs, took things to a new level with Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Despite being a crossover with Nintendo’s medieval fantasy war series Fire Emblem, Tokyo Mirage Sessions features a cast of trainee idols who gain new battle moves via releasing new pop songs, supported by a vocal software character and a blatant Marty Friedman analogue. I loved it. It uses the music industry as a handy hook for the usual RPG themes of friendship and belief and progression, but it also puts its music at its centre, providing many of its biggest story payoffs. It pastiches everything from Vocaloid to traditional ballads with clear knowledge and love, and listening to impressively strong songs sung by characters you’ve spent hours with is a good way to increase their impact. Yet I was still unprepared to be knocked back as much as I was by “Dream☆Catcher.” The identity of Its source material is as obvious as many, but it draws really effectively on a range of Yasutaka Nakata productions, mixing the electro chaos of “Invader Invader” with more refined Perfume grace. And producer KOH and vocalists Ayane Sakura and Inori Minase help it to do much more than replicate, filling an ode to an unattainable moon with yearning emotion that seeps through all of its bouncier moments. Perhaps the fact that the singers are voice actors with half a music career between them helps the precarious vulnerability, the sense of just clinging onto happiness. Perhaps it’s the worlds colliding coincidence of the kind of game I love getting such a specific music I love so right, but my first time seeing the music video in-game I could only react to with disbelieving wonder.
[9]
Katie Gill: Coming soon to a DDR arcade near you! I’m honestly surprised that Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is a single-player RPG because this song has “rhythm game” written all over it…which isn’t surprising, as Yoshiaki Fujisawa (the composer) also did Love Live. That SHOWS. “Dream☆Catcher” is still a good song but it suffers from the fact that as someone who used to play Love Live religiously, I feel like I’ve heard it before.
[7]
Ian Mathers: I’ll admit to liking the concept of the game more than the reality of this particular song, which is fine — it’s a pleasantly gentle bosh, if you know what I mean. Maybe I’m just too stuck on the notion that pop songs with supernatural effects ought to be more overtly dramatic, explosive, etc.
[6]
Juana Giaimo: It always seemed to me that the music of video games could fully transport you to another galaxy, and make you forget that you are sitting down in a chair in your room. But in “Dream☆Catcher,” that galaxy is detached from the game. It stands by itself with its upbeat and fast beat, and childish vocals that have a certain lightness, as if they were flying between the moon and the stars.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I think I like the text best — dreamscape as a vast galactic playground — but to be fair, the wish to stay asleep is so strongly rendered that it’s fine that the track isn’t dreamy. Instead, it mirrors the singers’ will to avoid, kicking furiously against sunrise. (Literally kicking, in the case of that cod-filter house bridge.)
[7]
Ramzi Awn: The straightforwardness of this single is a squeaky clean take on familiar synths and polka dot melodies.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: There are days when I think Capsule’s “Step on the Floor” is the greatest thing ever, and other days when I think it, and much of Yasutaka Nakata’s work is too busy, too buzzy, too twitchy. For those latter days, pop this clean, uncluttered and frisky sounds like everything I could ever want — music I’d be too embarrassed to dance to in public but could bop around to while playing video games. For that mood, I want something lean and hooky and bouncy, and something drawing on my love of 90s happy hardcore and rave-pop as much as J-pop, which are all the things I listened to while playing console games in the 90s anyway. Which makes this 100% fit for purpose and pretty damn catchy. Its tricks are obvious and cheap but it’s fast and flicks from upbeat melody to upbeat melody to not feel like a bore at more than 4 minutes.
[8]
Adaora Ede: In recent times, I’ve realized that I’m way too lazy to actively search for new music. In my desperation, I am assuaged in the recapitulation that is rhythm game soundtracks (although I lack the dexterity to even play them, seriously I can’t even keep Sims alive long enough), tracks that thump along happily, but don’t fare too well when it comes to straying from an exact pattern. “Dream ⭐️ Catcher” makes a grand introduction as a possible polka house banger (with instrumentation that reminds me strangely of The Fame Monster) but rapidly dissipates into shredded synth pop/chiptune. The breaks are legendary in the line of the familiar axiom “DROPS IS LIFE” and at the end of this journey from the grasps of late nougties weeb hell, you end up with shimmery, unreasoned fast paced fun. I’d expect nothing less.
[6]