Gitaroo Man and how it, in a way, impacted my music taste

HOLD UP! (Sick SVDDEN DEATH ID BTW)

This post not only talks about one of my favorite games of all time, but also acts as a sort of "Context post" for my RL Grime - PLAY blog, in which I mention multiple times about "a certain goth character from Gitaroo Man." This post explains that goth character and how it relates to my attraction toward darker, heavier dubstep which I mention along with that character. Buckle up, it's a long read.

        So one of the things that I mention in my interests is "Gitaroo Man." Story goes, it was this obscure, guitar themed rhythm game from 20 years ago that's basically if Guitar Hero and DDR combined and became an anime. It's awesome. I got into it about 5 years ago because of this Clone Hero dude named Acai, one of the most popular Clone Hero content creators. He played a Modchart that combined Guitar Hero and Gitaroo Man, specifically of the song "Born to be Bone." Felt like I needed to look more into this game. 

        I was curious, I was like, "What the heck is this, it looks kinda cool." I wanted to learn more, so I clicked another video. Little did I know that one video would suck me in to loving this game. The video I clicked on was of the Modchart for the song, Tainted Lovers, and instantly I was blown away. It was one of the coolest audio-visual combos ever. This awesome, insane metal song going off while U-1 (the main character) fights this insane, goth looking dude who was dancing like crazy (See gif below) and screaming "Beauty is a sin! Oh God!" That day and the days that followed in 2018 would see me visualizing a whole band of all of these Gitaroo Man characters playing a concert in my head while I was listening to freaking meme song mashups, which was what I was into at the time. 

        The goth dude was named "Gregorio III," and he instantly became my favorite character, Tainted Lovers becoming my favorite song. Unfortunately, the following three years I had lost interest in Gitaroo Man, but time to time I had mentioned it to different people (I think I only did it like, once when I was trying to find out if the soundtrack was on Spotify, was in a very OST kind of mood that day). Flash-forward to early 2022, I don't know what happened but it can only be described as a "reawakening" (If you want to go the pun route, a "Resurrection," in reference to the final boss Zowie's song of the same name) of my love for Gitaroo Man, but this time it was like, tenfold? The thing I think that really started it was me discovering that the "Collection Screen" (Full of badges of the characters you get from beating the levels good enough) entries were written and narrated by guess who? Gregorio III! I think it was that combined with testimonies from his voice actor about how much of a "lunatic [sic]" he is. That combined with the collection screen led me to learn more about this unfortunately very enigmatic character.

        One thing that Gregorio mentions in his collection entry about himself is that he "finds inspiration for [his] art through tragedy and pain," that combined with the fact that he is supposedly insane (woo that rhymed) and that his weapon is his entire cathedral (dubbed "The Cathedral of Madness" in the instructions entry about him), for some odd reason led me to want to be as awesome as he is. This came in the form of a change in my music taste.

        The change in my music taste that this guy caused was not really that violent, in that I didn't start listening to freakin Judas Priest or Iron Maiden or Evanescence or [[insert other remotely goth metal bands here]]. To preface, I was always an EDM kid, and Gregorio just kinda, made it more brutal. Lots more SVDDEN DEATH / VOYD, lots more MARAUDA, lots more brutal, lots more tearout, even going on Unreleased Fire (Sick channel for sick unreleased dubstep IDs) for unreleased SVDDEN DEATH / MARAUDA IDs. It's safe to say that he changed me, for the need of a better term. It made me more into large, brutal, head banging drops and I'm here for it.

        This obsession led me on a pursuit to find a Gitaroo Man Discord server, which I did, play Gitaroo Man, and overall, made my taste in music more brutal-based. Sidenote, there's this really cool LED lamp I have in my room, and there's this lighting setting that essentially just blasts color at you, but then I noticed that slowed down, it looked like the lighting tiles lining the side of the Cathedral of Madness, so I had that as the lighting setting for a while. Now it's just violently red. 

        I even had dreams that contained mentions or inspirations of him. The more recent one I remember was the fact that I was playing this VR game where you fight a bunch of bosses, and one of them, whose name was "Prince Angel" (Not sure if that was his actual name as this was a dream), was heavily inspired by Gregorio III. Even the environment you fought him in looked like the Cathedral of Madness. The second one I had was about me joining a magic class in an attempt to be like Gregorio, but I was pretty much shunned for being a dark magician by the class when I told them my intentions. Cut to an entire riot in the front yard and driveway starring my classmates. When I tried to shoo them away, they weren't doing anything except for getting tired for some reason. My brother thought that with the way I was moving my hands, I was hypnotizing the rioters, which turned out to be true as when I told them to go to sleep when I snapped my fingers, they went to sleep. Cut to me franticly trying to drop this class because of my false-but-kind-of-true rumors (Also there was a Mr. Wilhelm in the school in that dream, the significance of that being that Gregorio III's last name is Wilhelm. That was kinda weird. Thankfully it was just some guy with the surname "Wilhelm" because if it was actually Gregorio, that would've been super chaotic). Both dreams live on in the form of literal essays in my notes app, the latter dream being so real that I woke up still thinking I was in that dreaded magic class.

So yeah, there's my multi-paragraph long rant about Gitaroo Man, one of its characters, and said character changing my music taste.