On April 5th the Japanese musician Wowaka passed away of heart failure, an extremely sad piece of news and considering his young age of 31 an extremely surprising piece of news too.
He did a lot of work with Vocaloid over the course of his career and has put out some of the most well known tracks, a lot of which have been featured in the Project Diva games. Personally I have more plays of the song Unhappy Refrain than any other song in the entire series.
If your interested about the man himself, here's a link to his Wikipedia article
I will round of this post by leaving some of my favorite tunes of his for you to listen to. The guy made a LOT of really good stuff and I recommend checking out his catalogue of work.
Right now Identity Gaming has a number of social media accounts tied to it. Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and as one guy doing this by myself that's a lot to manage. So, I've made the decision to close down the Identity Gaming Facebook page.
There are two reasons for this decision
1) The quality of the page itself is garbage. I've put basically no effort into the Facebook side of this website, I just sort of opened it at the start because I felt that I had to for some reason. So if I'm not using it, there isn't really any point of it existing.
2) Facebook is cancer. I follow a number of gaming groups on Facebook to browse through while I'm bored in the bathroom or on a train but almost every single Facebook gaming group is an absolute shit show filled with the absolute worst people. Have you ever seen someone post a speedrun on a Facebook and then looked at the comments section? The absolute biggest sacks of shit seem to frequent these pages and on the off chance that IG does grow bigger and get a bigger following, I do not want your average Facebook ruining my day.
For friends of mine who may be reading this, this does not mean I'm closing my personal account, I'm still going to pester you all with my links whenever I put out something new. It also doesn't mean that Identity Gaming is in any danger of closing down either. I'm just chopping off the worst part of it
Look at that sexy, sexy man, hanging out in a trolley by the ocean like Mancunian chav trying to get the perfect Instagram picture. This is Kenishi Yonezu, a sort of Japan music sensation who's been around for a good while but has really started exploding big time in the last maybe year or so.
If Yonezu had to be compared to a sort of some kind of Western artist he's sort of like Ed Sheeran. Obviously being from two different parts of the world their actual music sounds way different but they are both pop artists that write and perform their own music and somehow just pump out really good songs constantly.
Usually with the weird, twee, "moe" type shit that infests my playlists a lot my friends hate it when I have control over a music selection but I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't found at least one Yonezu song that they really like. My personal favorites are Mad Head Love, Flamingo and Loser so go give those a Google, maybe let me know what you think and if you find any others drop a comment about a song you enjoy.
Anyway, why the fuck am I talking about this guy? This is a video game blog, not some kind of music blog. I know next to nothing about music so why am I even bothering to make a post about some kind of Japanese music sensation?
So I discovered Yonezu through my wife when she started listening to a song called "Lemon". That sort of set me down a road of exploring his library and learning a few of his songs for Karaoke. One evening I'm in a karaoke booth with my wife and her sister when he sister drops the fact that Yonezu used to make music on Nico Nico Douga (Japanese YouTube) under the name Hachi.
Where had I heard that name before?.....
Oh yeah! He'd just had a bunch of his music featured in the god damn Hatsune Miku games. Open, Close, Demons and the Dead (結ンデ開イテ羅刹ト骸 ) is probably one of my most played songs of the entire franchise and it was written by the man himself. Before he really got going he would make songs with Vocaloid and upload them to Nico Nico which then got picked up by Sega and featured in a number of the Hatsune Miku rhythm games. So turns out I'd been a fan of Yonezu the whole time and just didn't know it!
So go check him out, he's a cool guy. His songs have been stuck on my playlist since at least December and ever month or so I somehow manage to find a new really catchy track buried somewhere on YouTube. It's also inspired me to dig out my Vita and give those Project Diva games another play!
