Umamusume’s Most Elusive Song
It’s no secret that I’ve had nothing short of an obsession with the songs from the Umamusume series as of late; it’s quite literally the only thing I’ve been talking about in public spaces, and friends of mine would know that it’s practically been the only thing that I’ve been recommending to them. I’ve listened to literally over a hundred original songs from this franchise to the point that I would now consider myself one of the most knowledgeable people about its discography.
It’s worth noting that Umamusume as it exists today was not how it got its start; it used to be a much more otaku-centered ‘concept-girls’ series akin to other series like Kantai Collection, Girls’ Frontline, or Kemono Friends, etc., where the idol elements largely overshadowed the sports elements (something that would very much end up being reversed–for the better if I may add). In the first 2 years of the franchise’s life, they had produced a series of character song and audio drama albums called STARTING GATE, of which 12 were produced in total. These albums had two primary purposes; to introduce people to the various Umamusume characters, and also to introduce the world of Umamusume, through little story vignettes in the audio drama portions. It’s worth noting that the first season of Umamusume: Pretty Derby would begin airing right after the release of the final STARTING GATE album (however the events of the audio dramas are largely unconnected to the anime).
This character is Narita Brian, based on the Japanese race horse of the same name who raced between the years 1993 to 1995. She was one of the very first characters to have been revealed for the series all the way back in 2017, where she had been cast as the voice actress Yuuka Aisaka (whom I know for having voiced Sophie Neuenmuller in the Atelier series). Aisaka would hold this role for a number of years, having brief speaking roles in the first season of the anime and its additional OVA episodes, but more relevant to the subject of this post, she would also sing in the various songs alongside the other members of the cast. In STARTING GATE 06, she would receive her own character song, titled シャドーロールの誓い (Shadowroll no Chikai).
It’s a great song, definitely my favourite of the album. Similar to a lot of the other songs produced for this series, it has a very ‘late 2000s anison’ sound to it, in its combination of elements of rock instruments, driving dance beats, and catchy j-pop vocal lines, though admittedly a bit dated in its overall sound at least in comparison to a lot of music that was coming out at the time.
Now, the title of this post might ring a bit weirdly, because what’s so strange about this song? It was released on a commercial album, it’s part of an established series, what more is there to talk about? Well, quite a bit, actually. Because this isn’t the song I was referring to…
Or well actually, it IS the right song.
But it’s not the right version of the song. We’ll get into that later.
Yuuka Aisaka would unfortunately not remain Narita Brian’s voice actress through the franchise’s growth, as in 2020 Cygames announced that due to various complications regarding her work schedule, Aisaka would step down from the role. Rika Kinugawa would later succeed her as Narita Brian’s voice actress, a role she maintains to this day. However, with the new recast, it sort of paints a lot of the older STARTING GATE material in a strange light, where it feels like it’s representative of a ‘different’ Narita Brian; where Aisaka brought a much lighter take on the character with her naturally higher-sounding voice, Kinugawa’s performance emphasizes her historic role as a “shadow roll monster”, opting for a lower-pitched, less ‘emotive’ tone of voice. In a way this recast is representative of how a lot of the series’ direction changed after STARTING GATE, where Aisaka’s casting would have made a lot more sense for a franchise that was at the time, more ‘idol’ than it was ‘sports anime’.
Narita Brian would get another character song in WINNING LIVE 02, released in 2021. This song would also be used in-game as the ending theme to her main story chapter.
As far as character songs go, it’s safe to say this feels more stylistically appropriate to her current incarnation, with its nu-metal focus and with Kinugawa adopting a much more ‘aggressive’ singing style (It’s also safe to say that the song’s composer/producer Yamato was definitely on a Meteora binge when writing this song). If you directly compare it to her first song, it feels like a huge stylistic departure from シャドーロールの誓い, which – for as much as I adore that song – admittedly doesn’t try too hard to distinguish itself from other equally-tropey STARTING GATE-era character songs. This however, puts Narita Brian in an interesting situation where, as the only character so far to have gotten a recast, her STARTING GATE-era character song no longer feels ‘representative’ of the character most of the fanbase grew to love thanks to the game.
Just to be clear, it would not be accurate to say that Cygames holds any regret for this older media, or that they want people to forget about the STARTING GATE series as a whole; a good chunk of the songs produced back then were brought over to the Umamusume: Pretty Derby mobile game, where you can listen to them as part of the menu’s jukebox (as of the time of this post they are ONLY on the Japanese servers). A lot of them regularly get performed in live concerts by their respective seiyuu, with all of the original instrumental recordings kept intact, however it IS ultimately true that the direction of the series had largely evolved past where it was when these songs were first written.
While I was scouring the fan-run Umamusume wiki (shoutouts to those guys), I was curious to see whether or not Shadowroll had been a part of any live performances, and it was interesting to see that it did get its first performance in the very first live event they had organized for the series, so Aisaka did get a chance to perform before her departure, but… huh?!
A whole 4 years later, they had apparently brought this song back, presumably to be performed by Kinugawa. Knowing this, I knew I HAD to find out what this sounded like, but I could unfortunately not find an upload of this specific leg of the concert uploaded on any of the video sites I usually frequented. In that search however, I came across this YouTube upload by a channel appropriately named umamusume.
My jaw dropped… this was it, this was what I was looking for; a brand new version of シャドーロールの誓い performed by Narita Brian’s current voice actress Riku Kinugawa… but not only was it just a straight cover - no, this was an ENTIRELY new arrangement of the song; the song was brought down a half-step from F# minor to F minor (likely to sit more naturally within her range) and the instrumentation loses a lot of its airy synth-pop elements in favour of a more ‘mature’ sounding rock-orchestra-focused palette, essentially modernizing the STARTING GATE-era composition into a WINNING LIVE-era production. To me, this felt like the perfect bridge point between the two ‘eras’ of Umamusume music; taking the new direction they had set up with BLAZE and reimagining this older composition to fit with that vision. Reading a few of the comments on the upload confirmed that this is indeed the arrangement that was performed at the 5th EVENT -NEW GATE- concert.
But putting that aside for a bit… Where the HELL did this recording come from? It didn’t sound like a recording from a live concert, it was 100% a studio recording just from listening to the production quality, but where would they have distributed this specific recording of the song? It wasn’t on any albums or singles - not even the obscure non-digital releases I could find documented online. My next thought was to check if it was in the in-game jukebox on the Japanese server, because in that case it could’ve just been an in-game recording or gamerip.
Lo and behold, here it is – with additional production credits to boot! Haggy Rock composed, arranged, and wrote the original STARTING GATE song, but this specific version was arranged by Ash Inoue, with additional string arrangement by Hinako Tsubakiyama.
But wait… all of the jukebox versions of the character songs are shortened to about 1 minute and 30 seconds… but the above YouTube upload is the full version of this song. So, that did not answer the question of where this specific recording came from! This so-called umamusume individual somehow got a hold of the full 4-minute long studio recording of this specific version of this song that for all we knew, was specifically created for this one live concert. For an entire week following this I had pondered this, but I had come no closer to finding my answer, until I randomly came across this specific livestream VOD in my YouTube recommendations…
This is an 8-hour long compilation video uploaded by Lantis Channel (NOT Cygames or the official Umamusume Pakatube channel), featuring various songs from the Umamusume franchise, all selected based on individual recommendations by the entire cast. For those unfamiliar, Lantis is the music publishing subsidiary of Namco Bandai that publishes pretty much the entirety of Umamusume’s music. I had saved this video for later, thinking I could use it as background music for some kind of working or chatting session, but I was curious and decided to skim through a bit just to see what songs were being recommended.
…only for me to find exactly what I had been looking for this entire time.
At 5:33:55, in its full-length glory, the song picked out by the recommendation of voice actress Meiku Harukawa (voice of Symboli Kris S) was none other than シャドーロールの誓い (The Solid Revision). To rub it in even further, the comment that she included with her recommendation even mentions that the song is ‘currently not available on any official CDs and can only be heard through the (in-game) Jukebox’. Knowing this, it’s likely that this umamusume individual likely recorded this part of the livestream VOD and uploaded it as a standalone upload of the song.
This journey of mine had lasted no longer than 2 weeks, but as someone who had made Umamusume’s music such a strong hyperfixation in the last half year, it truly made me realize aspects of this game’s musical direction that I don’t think I would’ve picked up on otherwise. It is specifically this version of Shadowroll that ended up becoming one of my favourite songs in the series, and it's honestly a bit crazy to think that this full-length studio rendition of the song could potentially never have been shown to the public, had Harukawa not specifically picked it as her recommendation... and for that I have nothing but my sincerest gratitudes.
By the way, I did manage to snag footage from the 5th EVENT -NEW GATE- live concert thanks to the help of a few people, and yes, the performance was every bit as incredible as I would’ve hoped it was.