Heart
(#4 in the D-A-I Series)

Stepped by Xythar for DDRExtreme.co.uk 90's Mix

Do As Infinity debuted in September 1999, fortunately enough leaving me with two songs by them that were released in the 90s. Specifically, Tangerine Dream (their first single) and Heart. Tangerine Dream probably wouldn't make that great steps (well, I never liked it that much, anyway) so the choice was fairly obvious. It was icing on the cake that Heart also happens to be a pretty cool song, really! :)

Heart was released as a single and is also available on their first album, Break of Dawn. It was actually recorded before Tangerine Dream, but released afterwards (in December 1999). Coincidentally, I also happened to make this simfile (or the steps, anyway) before Robot (in SpookyMix Plus), but it's been released after it. Heh.

This is a nice, mellow song, and the steps are quite easy on all four difficulties. They only have a total of 512 steps between them :)

Beginner is I think the easiest beginner chart I've ever done. This chart gives a whole new meaning to 'beginner'! I wonder if anyone would ever actually want a chart this easy, but here it is anyway.

Light has short streams of quarter notes and some gaps. It's a 2, but a pretty easy one to say the least.

Standard is sort of borderline 3/4. In the end I went with 4 because I wasn't totally sure it was worthy of a 3 (and as a 4 it makes 1/2/4/6 anyway). It's basically quarter notes with a few 8ths here and there (mostly threes with the occasional five). I do think that if they were quarter notes in a 184 bpm song then this'd be a 3 easily, but I guess it's harder to read at half that bpm or something. I dunno. The steps are fairly DDRish on this difficulty I think, they follow simple patterns rather than trying to closely match the music.

Heavy is a 6, although it's really only a 6 because of the 16th usage (the red-yellow-blue sequences) and crossovers. It follows the bass drum and guitar for the verse, and then focuses more on the vocals for the chorus. I think these steps pretty much make sense, and they have lots of fun and reasonably complex crossovers (that are fairly easy due to the speed). I used only a few freeze arrows (and only in one part) but they felt like they fit there, so I left them in. Also, every time there was that one four-note melody that shows up a number of times during the song (the one that makes me think of Little Green Bag for some reason >_>) I put down a LDUR sequence.

Sorry for the general rambling nature of this readme, I'm kinda tired right now.

Graphics made in Photoshop. For the BG I used an photo taken by funny-p, available here:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/604695

I wanted to have something reasonably similar to the video (which is a relatively normal one this time, instead of Robot's creepfest). And no, the bit where it suddenly cuts to her face midsentence (on 'kagete') was not a crappy cut of mine, that's what happens in the original video! My cut was later on and you probably didn't notice it :)

I also included a video banner like Robot, although for this one I took part of the video and attempted to sync it the music sample that plays on the songwheel. I had kind of limited success, but at least it is in sync under *some* conditions. :) SM4.0 plays it way too fast but that's SM4.0's fault, not mine. I hope they fit that glitch soon. The text on the banner and background is quite plain, but I wanted a simple, uncomplicated effect this time. It doesn't look perfect, I know, and the banner doesn't really loop seamlessly, but I spent *ages* on that thing (I have like, 9 freaking overlay masks in TGA format that I made along the way) and to be quite honest I just don't feel like messing around with it anymore. :( Oh well, this was my first attempt at making a banner based on the song's video (and trying to sync it to the sample), so it was good practice at least.

Lyrics are from:
http://www.globemoon.net/dai/lyrics/heart_trans.html

They also have a translation, if you're interested. I just put in the romanised lyrics for this one. Please overlook my mid-line song cut >_> (unless you understand Japanese in which case I apologise :P)

Song cut was made in CoolEdit. You know, it still feels really short whenever I play for some reason... even though the cut is 1:54. I don't get why.

Alright, I think I'm done here. See you later! (and I hope you enjoy 'my other stuff' in 90's mix... heheh :) )

Thanks everyone,
--Xythar