Cirque du Miura is a mixed stream and technical-stream pack by Zaia. It focuses on Drum and Bass (DnB) music.
The pack's theming is based on the Japanese animated film Ghost In The Shell (1995), and it takes its name from the Lamborghini Miura P400.
It is a spin-off to Cirque du Enzo (2018), which featured a sizeable contingent of dnb music.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 165-180 |
| Songcount | 27 |
| Blocks | 9-17 Full range 13-16 Target range |
| Type | Stream |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Feb 06, 2019 |
¶ Structure
IMPORTANT: Two versions of the pack exist:
- The ITG version: Has +0.009ms offsets applied, has 4:3 (800x600) resolution background art
- The “SM5” version: Has no changes to offsets applied, has 16:9 (1920x1080) resolution background art
- It is a misnomer to call it the “SM5 version" because StepMania 5 users still use ITG's mechanics. This would be called the “null offset” version in 2024
Cirque du Miura features four charts to each song, with the exception of songs that have 13-block Expert charts, and the lone 17 in the pack.
Simfiles contain a mixture of charts with technical elements and charts with no technical elements. Technical codes are featured to indicate them. Structural focus on the techs eschews the old lowers model where: Hard had stream but no tech, Medium had tech but no stream, and Easy had neither, and instead keeps technical elements in all charts, electing to only strip out streams as it would be done in a vanilla stream simfile with lower charts. This, however, does not apply to all simfiles in the pack.
Some charts also have aesthetic tempo changes for visual effect.
¶ Development
One of the most prominent charts in Cirque du Zeppelin was Snowman, which was a 174 bpm dnb song with a highly-structured chart. This simfile was one of my most played from the pack, and for a number of years after its release, I often wondered what a pack of “Snowmans” might have looked like. The concept for Miura began with this.
Like many of its forebears, Miura once held the “Cirque du Agera” name, after it was taken from the Amazing Pack (cancelled project). The first song stepped for it was Sky Fracture in May, 2018, which was featured in the Zaia Previews 2018 pack. It was the most popular chart in that pack, and was a factor influencing in which direction I should head in the near future.
A concrete plan to actively develop a full dnb pack didn't materialize until around November, but by that time I was already committing to finish Dragonforce Kaioken. I decided to make them back-to-back productions to take advantage of momentum. After about a month working on Dragonforce, it was finished, and I could commence work on the dnb pack, which was now renamed to Miura.
Work progressed extremely quickly on Miura. It continued at a rapid pace in the last week of December and into early 2019. I saw a message I sent that said I stepped 13 songs in two days, which seems hard to believe at first, but easy to believe if I think about it for more than five seconds - Miura's vanilla stream charts are like 60% copypaste. I continued to listen to songs and sculpt the songlist, which was planned to be 40 songs, expandable to 50 if enough good songs were found. A lot of songs got cycled in and out of the pack, and 16 completed simfiles ended up being removed. I can confidently say I screened about a thousand dnb songs to find the 50 that I wanted to build a pack with.
On February 4 I decided to split Miura into two packs of equal size, intended to be released one year apart. The reason to do this was to focus the songlist so songs ran a lower risk of being lost if the songlist was too large. I noticed that this had occurred to some simfiles in Enzo because the songlist was so large. The second pack would be named Cirque du Miura SVJ. “SVJ” stands for “Super Veloce Jota”, which means “Super Fast” in Italian. The “Jota” refers to a one-of-a-kind Miura chassis that was used as a testbed for racing optimizations.
Cirque du Miura SVJ never ended up being released because the simfile market was progressively over-saturating with 14 and 15-block 174bpm dnb simfiles and I didn't want to add to that oversupply of content. It exists to this day as a completed pack in my unreleased archive.
Cirque du Miura SV was a conceptual tertiary pack made to the series that would have released between Miura and Miura SVJ, adding another 25 dnb songs to the pack. This concept was introduced in Q4 2019 and exists as a songlist only.
THE FOLLOWING SECTION REFERS TO AN OUTDATED AND HISTORICAL FORM OF THE TECHNICAL CODE NOTATION SYSTEM. IT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE CURRENT SYSTEM
The Technical Code Notation System received its first major upgrade as the use of technical elements expanded to include more variations of techs that were significant enough to justify having their own code. This variation of the system uses two “levels” of codes:
- The base code - the basic variation of the technical element and acts as a top-level “category” code
- Example: basic footswitches would be marked as
FS - Basic crossovers would be marked as
XO
- Example: basic footswitches would be marked as
- The expanded code - adds a
+marker to the tech code. It represents a complex or advanced form of the element and techs would fall into “sub-categories” of their parent code- Footswitches marked as
FS+might be sideswitches, or they might be footswitches of three notes or more - Crossovers marked as
XO+could be Scoobies/Afronovas/Laterals
- Footswitches marked as
This + system also made allowances for hybrid versions of techs that increased the execution/parsing difficulty significantly
DS+could have been used to mark crossed-over doublesteps or triplesteps
Quantizations higher than 16th were also given a code to help identify the presence of footspeed bursts
- They were marked as their respective note division amount within brace brackets
Regarding tech code ordering, the codes were ordered by frequency within the chart, with the exception of higher quantizations, which were placed at the end of the tech code string.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
Drum and bass music is shockingly easy to step. I think its one of the easiest genres to write for but at the same time it has a fairly low creative ceiling, owing to the pervasiveness of drum breaks like the Amen Break showing up frequently throughout the genre and causing every song to directly or indirectly adopt a similar structure. My goal with Miura was to find and bring together dnb songs that were not overly similar to one another, and that had interesting and unconventional melodies.
Western dnb tended to be the more similar ones - especially those from artists associated with labels like Hospitality Records, but they were the ones with the amazing vocals, so in spite of their structural similarity, I didn't really care and added them because I really liked how they made me feel. Japanese dnb seemed to be the more rhythmically and melodically experimental side of the genre, though they lacked the touch of a voice to humanize them. To help maintain a balance, the pack was about half of each type. The differences also affected how their charts were written.
One conscious design choice I made was to give this pack a retro feel, a bit like Betwixt & Between before it, but to a more serious degree. This meant more boxes and UU/DD patterning than I had been using in the year preceding, and moving away from individual patterning and more towards segments of patterning (8-16 notes) informing the core building blocks of a stream. Doing this was a great way to sharpen my patterning beyond the basics and I learned a ton of interesting segments to try out in other songs. I spent time studying the Pendulum pack (2012) for pattern inspiration. In essence, what I was trying to write were old-school patterns but with modern transitions and pattern structures.
The songtypes generally divided into two general genres: industrial and dark or liquid and bright. I tried to use different stepping styles between charts by making the dark songs feel more aggressive and short with their transitions, and the bright ones gentler and smoother, using longer transitions between patterns.
Tech use was expanded considerably after its introduction in Cirque du Enzo. The intent was to “normalize” the presence of tech in stream charts and to make an effort to bridge the tech and stamina communities by generating content that had elements of both chart styles in them.
¶ Graphics
The pack's visual theme is based on the Ghost in the Shell anime film from 1995. One of my favorite anime films, Ghost in the Shell depicts an urban environment intimately and at the ground level, rather than from a distance. In contrast to Enzo, which was associated with daylight, brightness, the sky and open spaces, Miura was going to be associated with darkness, nighttime, urban clutter, machines and industry.
One visual concept was to continue the Akira theming that began with Enzo, to help thematically link them to one another. The art used was a screenshot from the Akira film showing Akira's organs in a jar, with the name “Akira” edited to show “Miura” but using the same hand-drawn animation style so it would blend into the frame as if it was naturally there. This version of the background art was accompanied by the tagline “The Circus of Drum N Bass”, referencing the english translation of the word “Cirque”.
An alternative visual concept was Houseki no Kuni, which had been considered for Cirque du Huayra but rejected. This one had no thematic link to Enzo, which compromised its viability as a serious theme, but I wanted to try some concepts for it anyway, since I still wanted to use the property as a pack's theme someday. Some mockups were made using the preliminary “Cirque du Miura” title styling.
The original title styling came directly from the emblem that is attached to the car, which displays the word “Miura” with stylized horns and a tail (representing the Lamborghini bull).
A Lamborghini Miura can be seen in the background image (but not the banner). This one is quite large and visible, unlike the others, which were edited to be small and inconspicuous.
¶ Songlist
Cirque du Miura contains 27 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2D Universe | Street | 174 | |
| Apollo 69 | Reso x Frederic Robinson | 178 | |
| Astral Traveller (Xenofish Remix) | Mellow Sonic | 177 | |
| Black Church | Dimension | 174 | |
| Control | Matrix & Futurebound ft. Max Marshall | 174 | |
| Cross the Line | Camo & Krooked ft. Ayah Marar | 175 | |
| Dirty Love (Dougal & Gammer Remix) | Riskee | 170 | |
| epheniks | PHQUASE | 174 | Has high-bpm speed changes for visual effect |
| Filth Friends Unite (Celldweller Remix) | I See Stars | 180 | |
| Fury | Feint | 174 | |
| Golden Love (Mr. Frenkie Remix) | Guru Groove Foundation | 172 | |
| Happy (Makoto 170 Edit) | Pharrell Williams | 172 | |
| I Am A Hero! | Street | 174 | |
| Kyoumen no Nami (Jun Kuroda Bootleg Remix) | YURiKA | 174 | |
| LOVER (El Poco Maro Remix) | m-flo | 176 | |
| Master Of Puppets (Pendulum Remix) | Metallica | 174 | |
| Motion Blur | Indivision | 175 | |
| Nyx Metropolis | polysha | 175 | |
| Our Black Den | Taishi | 172 | |
| Retro Junktion | lapix | 175 | |
| S.T.A.Y. (Delta Heavy Tribute) | Hans Zimmer | 174 | |
| Sky Fracture | Getsix | 176 | First featured in Zaia Previews 2018 pack |
| Stealth Dash | かめりあ (Camellia) | 174 | Has high-bpm speed changes for visual effect |
| The End | zircon | 165 | |
| The Picker | kohaxy | 172 | |
| Urbanlights (Takin' 2 The Beat) | DJ Noriken | 174 | |
| Winteright | Taishi ft. Kumagai Eri | 175 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Miura released to a warm reception. It was critically very well-reviewed, but not as popular with players as previous entries in the Cirque franchise had been.
The attempt to cross-pollinate stream and tech to appeal to both sides ultimately did not work and ended up appealing to neither. I realized that it confused the intent of what the pack was, and it created “dead picks” of content (these were charts that were unviable for a player, meaning that for them, these charts do not exist in the pack). For a pack of 27 simfiles, where 20 are vanilla stream and 7 have techs, for the people who aren't interested in playing any techs at all, the pack's size for them is 20 instead of 27. Cirque du Miura was a lesson in keeping the pack focused, clarifying its intended chart theme and limiting room for confusion by sticking to it. This is one of the reasons why Miura SVJ still has not released - it suffers the same clarification issue and would need to be addressed before progressing any further with it.
Another reason for its lukewarm popularity could have been the lack of a marathon, which were becoming a staple element of stamina packs.
¶ Trivia
- The pack received a patch on Feb 19 to fix three incorrectly-named music files for these simfiles:
- Control
- Cross the Line
- Retro Junktion
- epheniks broke Archi's stream parser tool when the pack was sent to him to produce breakdown data for the information spreadsheet
- Something in the bpm changes had caused it
- Kyoumen no Nami (Jun Kuroda Bootleg Remix) was used in ECFA2021 and received custom graphics
- The song is a remix of the OP from Houseki no Kuni, one of my favorite manga/anime
- Our Black Den also received custom graphics for ITL2022
- Wings (Nu:Logic Remix), in Cirque du Miura SVJ, is my favorite dnb song of all time