Fidelity Wars #14: THE iDOLM@STER – “GO MY WAY!!”

We’ve survived yet another year and 2009 is upon us. Let’s all work real hard and hope everything will go our way! So for this week’s Fidelity Wars, the first of the new year, here’s the perfect song to start us off.

THE iDOLM@STER – “GO MY WAY!!”

Apparently there is a Japanese arcade and console game called THE iDOLM@STER – with capital letters but a small i and an @ instead of an a. Equally apparently it’s a music slash rhythm game with a group of young girls aspiring to become successful pop stars – or idols, which is less like being a musician and more like being a franchise. You, less apparently, play the role of producer and are to help one (or maybe more?) of the girls achieve this goal. How the gameplay actually is is a bit of a mystery to me, and as the game hasn’t been given a release outside of Japan (from what I can tell) straight forward English language reviews of it aren’t that easy to come by. The game features a number of what I believe are original songs (but I may be wrong – they may be classic Shinto hymns for all I know), and the songs all have vocals recorded for them from all the girls, so the vocals you will hear for the songs will be relative to the girl(s) you’ve chosen to flourish the spotlight.

A few weeks ago I stumbled over a collection of music related to this game called Live For You! – Master Box IV. It’s a gigantic five disc collection of music from the game, which seems to me to be alternate versions of the originals. Each disc focuses on two different girls, the first half devoted to one and the second to the other. Each half has the same track list (except for different karaoke tracks  featured at the end of each of the five discs), but the first is sung by one girl, the other half by the other girl. So what you have is 16 songs in all, sung by the different girls of the game. And this seems to be the fourth volume. A bit daunting, I’d say.

I believe this song, “GO MY WAY!!” – written in all caps and with two exclamation points – was what made me aware of this game when I stumbled over some video clips of it on YouTube. Here’s one of them, which shows several of the different girls taking turn singing separate lines of the verse and all of them joining in on the chorus.

This song has been on high rotation on my play list over the past few weeks. Equally catchy and cheesy, it’s full of cheery Japanese goodness. Not being versed in the language, I can only guess at what the song is about from the song’s mood, melody, performance and the English chorus. So my scantly educated guess is that it’s an optimistic song about things going your way. The version of the song featured in this set is a piano and solo vocals version, and there are ten versions of it (or eleven, if you count the karaoke version) – all identical, except for being sung by a different girl. To make it easy on me I chose to feature the first version on the first disc, sung by the character Haruka Amami, but I think I might also prefer her vocal performance on this song to the others. Or perhaps I’m just reasoning backwards.