This is divine strike, the ultimate boss song (EXTRA STAGE LEVEL XX) for DanceDanceRevolution XX, a non-profit fan project by Midflight Digital. This piece of music has a development history spanning five years, from conception and rework, to release.
Marten, the head of Midflight Digital, came to me in 2017 asking if I could compose a boss song for a planned final event for DDR SuperNOVA3, which was the organization's previous project for XX. Preceding this song was a track named "return to apollo," so I initially made a concept called "artemis strike," which signified her wrath upon other gods/goddesses that wronged her and Apollo. The concept was later renamed to "divine strike," while keeping the same idea. Initially, the song's BPM was 230-460, but was later updated to 240-480. The artist alias made a change as well, starting with "xRGTMx underground overlay" to just "xRGTMx," as to not copy off existing formats. Unfortunately, the final event for SN3 never occurred, so divine strike was shelved for the time being.
In 2018, Midflight Digital would release DanceDanceRevolution XX to the public, and as years went by, it grew to be a hit. divine strike was once again planned to be the ultimate boss song for the project, while other songs from the SN3 event carried over, including return to apollo. However, when the song was released as a normal EXTRA STAGE, some were point out that the song was plagiarized from another song, and it was renamed and credited properly. From there, we learned divine strike's name change was a dodged bullet. Years later, I would compose a song named "Shoreline Scramble" that would replace the correctly named "Near The Ocean -XX Edit-," taking reference from the step charts made for it as the song's rhythms and melodies.
During XX development in 2019, a group of four artists within Midflight Digital (funkyzukin, Dynamite Grizzly, saiiko2, and leeium) came together and created an event and series of songs called Quad Strike. In this event, an artist would make a variant of the same song, while choosing a song from four different BEMANI titles to be stepped for DDR XX. Around early 2020, when I myself joined Midflight, I discovered the stem files and initial MIDI's that leeium, Quad Strike's composer, posted for himself and the other three artists to use. Once Quad Strike was done, nothing else related to that event was planned. This gave me an idea...
In late 2020 to early 2021, I proposed to the XX team that we make an event that would end the project with a bang and to tie Quad Strike together. It would be simply named THE END, and the first two END phases involved players submitting courses containing all of the chosen BEMANI songs from Quad Strike. The first reward were four more BEMANI songs that were stepped, but from four different titles. The second phase involved just two courses; one for the newly released songs, and the other for the four Quad Strike variants. The second reward... was this song, as EXTRA STAGE LEVEL XX, a set of Challenge charts for a different EXTRA STAGE song (BURN OUT, by leeium), and a new ENCORE EXTRA STAGE song named "heart of XX," by saiiko2.
What's special about the PHASE 2 release is that during development for this event, divine strike was still shelved and unreleased to the public. I had decided since I was not pleased with the quality of the original song draft at the time, not only would I rework the song, but incorporate elements of Quad Strike into it. This led to the jacket artwork being updated with the four colors, and the addition of two key Easter eggs found in the song itself. One is a callback to the original melody, while the other contains reversed samples of all four songs. As a nod to the series of songs, the artist alias was finalized to "f(QS)," or "function of Quad Strike." Finally, the BPM was updated to 99-999.
THE END launched in 2022, and finally, after five years, the song had emerged from development hell for all to enjoy.
