Rip of the week: 24/06/2024
YO-Kai Direction
Season 7 Featured on: Now That's What I Call Quality! 3
Ripped by DonnieTheGuy
Y'know, funny story: a part of me genuinely thought I'd made this post already, and I had to double-check my posting archive three times over just to make sure. Because for as much Season 7 glazing as I've done on here, YO-Kai Direction is the kind of rip that absolutely deserves that love, as such a perfect rip from one of SiIva's most surprise breakout events in recent memory. Hell, last time I was covering the event in question, this rip only barely lost out from being covered instead of Beautiful Dreamer - but, in earnest, I believe two legends should indeed be able to coexist.
I've learned a lot from running this blog, but one of the biggest breakout surprises to me was learning just how incredible of a ripper DonnieTheGuy truly is. He joined the team around when I was paying less attention to the channel in general, and didn't exactly have a loud internet personality for me to learn of otherwise - yet rip by rip, from the blog's very first in Running Through Cookie Country to later-covered examples like Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier and Remember when this song was the one related to toilets?, I began realizing just how powerful the guy is. A master chef that works in the background, even working to provide tons of assets to help people get into ripping themselves, sharing samples, samples and much more. But even if I wasn't aware of all that, even if I wasn't aware of just how much of a menace he is even off of SiIva when it comes to Twitter shitposts (the Digital Circuit edit trend where he made like 20+ edits on his own for instance), YO-Kai Direction would've likely convinced me on its own of DonnieTheGuy's prestige.
I recall saying to myself back when I wrote Beautiful Dreamer that one of the reasons that I picked it over YO-Kai Direction was just due to how much I'd already featured YO-KAI Disco, and Yousuke Yasui's music in general, on here. 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT) was effectively the rip that made me INVESTED invested in the art of high quality ripping, WA-HOO DISCO shows just how much Super Mario 64's sound can and has been pushed by the SiIva team, Siiva Lining just outright slaps - you get it. But we're now in the golden age of ripping quality, where it feels as if every rip made is touched by some benevolent gods ensuring that it does WAY more than it necessarily needs to in order for its proposed joke to work. Because like, YO-Kai Direction is an incredibly simple premise on the surface, mashing up the all-too-known YO-KAI Disco with What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction as part of the One Direction event. Back in, say, Season 1, that would've been the end of it, but there's so many small touches added by DonnieTheGuy that shows just how invested he was in utilizing One Direction's sound to the fullest.
And honestly, when the One Direction event began, I was initially a bit disappointed, as it took the place of the channel's annual "9/11 event", which had previously given us incredibly bait-and-switch events like what brought us SUNGORE in 2020. Initially I figured that I had no stake or familiarity with One Direction and so the event was completely out of my wheelhouse...but not only was I SURPRISINGLY familiar with What Makes You Beautiful in particular, I also had no clue that the team was so excited and ready to start using it. It gave me flashbacks to Season 6's Big Time Rush event which brought us Famous Surprise, only with even more people firing on all cylinders for it. Because again - in many other eras, YO-Kai Direction would've just been a mere mashup, but DonnieTheGuy goes the extra length to pitch-shift it all to something absolutely heavenly.
Without ever leaving that original pitch for the rip, YO-Kai Direction masters the art of escalation in a way that's so well done, it's hard to even notice with how well it fits in. It begins as a seemingly normal mashup with a slightly increased BPM speed of YO-KAI Disco being used as to match the One Direction song, but then at the second go around at the verse's melody it becomes more YTPMV-esque, editing soundbytes from What Makes You Beautiful into the melody of the source track, as if to communicate the two tracks merging - "You're insecure, but you walk-walk through the do-o-or!" is pulled off with just a slight stutter and pitch-shifting that's immediately noticeable if you're paying attention to it, yet fits so well as to initially sound just like an extension of the initial mashup. This then carries on into the bridge, before finally exploding in the chorus - wherein every part of One Direction's vocals are pitch-shifted to amazing effect. It's hard to put into word without repeating myself just how well done this build-up is, but the end result is obvious - a genuinely amazing listen.
All the while, slight elements of What Makes You Beautiful's instrumentation seem to be sprinkled into the rip, sounding almost as if they had just been dug out of the mix of the original YO-KAI Disco. That's the theme of the whole rip, and to be clear - ABSOLUTELY not meant as a negative. The way in which DonnieTheGuy managed to make YO-Kai Direction sound almost as if it was a natural collaboration between One Direction and Yousuke Yasui is actually insane, yet it still subtly honors the traditions of what makes the greatest SiIvaGunner rips as good as they are. I won't sugarcoat it - on many days, humming YO-KAI Disco in public, THIS is the version I'm humming.
