Yoshihiko Koezuka - Akogare

Stepped by Xythar originally as a preview file for Late Night Love with DDRExtreme.co.uk, now available in general release!

This is one of those really slow, easy songs on GF/DM that nobody plays except me. I dunno, there's just something satisfying about sitting down at the Drummania machine right after the previous guy played four ridiculously fast and difficult songs in a row on Extreme (but with autobass, of course -_-) and picking this (or Be Proud, which is 80 bpm and the same kind of thing), thus successfully driving away the accumulated crowd.

Plus I just wanted to step a song with under 30 measures. You know how it is. Originally I wanted to cut this down to about 1:15 or so (by listening to it you can probably see where I wanted to cut from and to) but unfortunately, it wasn't to be. After several attempts that led only to horrific, Frankenstein-like creations, I gave up and went with the original game cut, which is still just 28 measures anyway.

Actually, I wouldn't have picked this if I'd known how much of a bitch it was to sync. Drummania's LYING SONG LIST specifies the BPM only as '65', but as it turns out the song has several slowdowns in there that have required a lot of trial and error to get even approximately right. I know the sync is still far from perfect (especially since the lower the BPM, the more accurate you have to be :/), but there was a certain point at which I had to just stop fiddling with it and move onto my other LNL files. You know, the ones that people are actually going to play. :P

UPDATE! I have now fixed the sync on this for the Bemanistyle release and it's pretty much perfect now, I think :D

Beginner I mainly made as an excuse to make a chart with 37 steps that shows up as a 1.0000 on Stepmania's predict-o-meter. Woohoo!

Light is streamy but it's 65 bpm stream so come on. Only quarter notes here.

Standard introduces a few offbeats and triplets but if Donnatokimo can be a 3, this sure as hell can. See how I'm using my previous decisions to validate my more recent ones? It's cool.

Heavy has a lot of chaos (comparatively speaking, anyway) but I think the BPM still justifies its rating as a 5. There's nothing too difficult and quite few steps overall given the 1:52 length (152 steps, and entirely by coincidence I might add O_o). Yes, it has some double stepping. Yes, that's on purpose, it makes it more interesting. If you really have trouble using the same foot to hit two 4th arrows in a row at 65 bpm (giving you almost an entire second to get said foot from one to the other) then you should really ask yourself whether you're just objecting on principle. :P

UPDATE! I have now added a 7 foot Challenge chart loosely based on some patterns from Be In My Paradise. It is considerably more 16th-y later on however. Still fun I think! Less intentional doublestepping than heavy, no freezes and follows the background instruments entirely and vocals not at all (heavy followed the vocals in some parts). All of this was for the sake of contrasting, of course!

I spent ages looking for a good image for this, eventually I settled for "Reaching" by ~Aimoo which is from here:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/31961197/

It wasn't precisely what I was originally thinking of, but it works.

I guess that's it.

--Xythar