Dragonforce Kaioken is a stream pack by Zaia. It is a resteps pack of songs by the band DragonForce.
This pack is themed after the Japanese manga and anime Dragon Ball Z, and named after a specific technique in the story called the Kaio-ken.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 120-237 |
| Songcount | 32 |
| Blocks | 12-21 (15-19 target) |
| 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
Dragonforce Kaioken is structured like a typical stream pack of mine, but in this case there are three charts per simfile instead of four. Each difficulty slot roughly occupies a small range of blocks:
- Medium: 12-13 with very broken streams
- Hard: 14-16 with some unbroken streams; structured similarly to the original Dragonforce pack (2009)
- Expert: 16-19 with long sections of unbroken streams
Lowers are structured using the cut-stream lower style, but non-stream rhythms are more dynamic and have more variety than just basic vanilla 8th notes. Internal progression paths are employed in this pack.
A number of songs have middle sections with lowered bpms. The stream breakdowns show measure lengths in brackets to represent these slowed sections. Some charts have streams described as “bunch of 1s” or “some 2s” - these are intended to mean that there are a number of measures of stream of the stated length/s, but that the number of which would not be practically helpful if counted exactly.
This pack also contains lyric (.lrc) files, with some of the most epic lyrics CAPITALIZED for more power. They can be deleted without issue if these are undesired.
¶ Development
Super Dragonforce
Dragonforce Kaioken started in late December 2012 as a small-scale personal use resteps pack, inspired directly by a My Spirit Will Go On chart written by Aoreo (JNero) in Beast Aoreo BEAST! 3, which had a significantly increased volume of stream when compared to The Cosmic Pope's 2008 original from Cosmic Apocalypse. I had hit a plateau with my footspeed growth and believed I may have burnt out my growth for that phase, so I made a decision to pivot towards stamina growth to help increase my baseline stamina so that when I went back to training footspeed again, I'd be able to work with a larger reservoir of stamina. There weren't really many 7 minute+ 200bpm songs with heavy stream volumes and short breaks at this time, so I took it upon myself to write some, and DragonForce was a goldmine of potential content.
The first chart written was Through the Fire and Flames, followed by Heroes of Our Time and Heartbreak Armageddon, and before long I had a handful to play. I would religiously exclusively play these charts for the next month, grinding them back-to-back multiple times each week to build my stamina up. B1uEM4oM4o also wrote a Heart of the Storm chart that I played every session too.
This pack was called Super Dragonforce, as a reference to the Super Saiyan legend and how these charts were powered-up versions of TheCosmicPope's originals. I stopped developing the project after I stopped grinding the charts and went back to playing footspeed again. The project went into my simfile archive to remain untouched for the next 2.5 years. These charts have never been released but a couple of videos of them do exist. (See Reception and Retrospect section).
Dragonforce SSJ2
Any ideations to pick up the pack again started around April 2015, when I started playing 200 BPM stamina again, but I only restepped TTFAF at this time. It wasn't until August 2015, just before Bearpocalypse 5 weekend started that I began restepping everything else, as well as finishing the remainder of the DragonForce discography I wanted to do. There was a new album by now (Maximum Overload, 2015) and a number of singles from which to draw new songs from. As every existing chart was being restepped, this was to be considered a new iteration of the pack, and the pack took on the name Dragonforce SSJ2, or "Dragonforce Super Saiyan 2". All 32 Expert charts were written during this time period.
In March 2016 I was approached by Archi if he could feature a number of the charts in an East Coast Stamina 4.5 course for the Dragonforce album Inhuman Rampage (2006). I said sure, but one of the songs had been unstepped, Trail of Broken Hearts, so I was sent a cut of that to step as an exclusive ECS 4.5 course special. This simfile was not released with the main pack.
E.P.M Expert was used for a long-form online event called [Ro]und-based [S]uccessive [E]limination (ROSE) Tournament in June 2016.
A release of this version of the pack was shelved for some years as Drazu and ITGAlex had been working on a DragonForce resteps project of their own. I wanted to wait at least two years after the release of that project before making any plans to release mine.
Dragonforce Kaioken
As plans for a release of the other DragonForce pack never materialized, in November 2018 I decided to clear out the pack from my Production- Ongoing list and get it finished and prepped for release. The only work that needed doing were the Medium and Hard charts to every song. I did not enjoy a single second of this, and having to write the lowers was the other major reason I left this pack dormant in my simfile archive for so long.
I wanted to find some other aspect of simfiles to experiment with, just like how Rebuild of Sharpnel had experimented with alternate preview music loops. I settled on a StepMania mechanic that gets zero use outside of anime-themed simfiles - simfile lyrics. These are lyrics that are generated and displayed by the game as text lines along the bottom of the screen. DragonForce felt like a fitting project to incorporate these with as myself and my friends often found ourselves singing the lyrics of the choruses of DragonForce songs as we played them, and this provided an opportunity for people who hadn't memorized the lyrics to follow along. Every simfile received a .lrc file. I produced them by using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets by putting in the color of the text (which I kept unchanged) and the timestamp in seconds that they would appear.
Work on the pack finished on the 23rd of December, 2018 and I then immediately transitioned into production on Cirque du Miura.
On February 3, 2019, whilst prepping the pack for release, I felt that a name change was necessary as "Dragonforce SSJ2" felt clunky. I went with the name “Kaioken” because it still reflected the juiced-up nature of the charts and it had some synergy with the “exotic name” criteria I like to satisfy with the Cirque packs.
One concept for the lowers I had was to make the Hards and Mediums swap streams for technical elements, turning them into more technical-stream-oriented lowers. This idea persisted for a while but it was abandoned after just one chart (Doublesteps in Above the Winter Moonlight). The BPM was too high and the length too long to really be able to justify them, and the charts would have required significant amounts of restepping. It would have increased the production time considerably. This technical chart to Above the Winter Moonlight no longer exists.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
As this pack was written in 2015, the stepping style employed is a slightly older one, but even at the time had an intentionally slightly retro feel. I used a lot more box patterns than I was normally using at the time, and candle transitions were generally more ham-fisted and stiff (I wouldn't really start differentiating between candle transition types until Cirque du Enzo's development - not for another 1.5 years). It was important though that these charts inherit some of the original Dragonforce DNA, so the 4x box motif became a commonly-used pattern sequence.
The most significant creative leap forward this pack represented for me was the use of vocal patterning, which is a stepping mechanic that has become fundamental to my writing style. This is the project in which I learned how to write two layers into stream at once:
- The instrumentals inform the rhythms stepped and how streams will be broken up
- The vocals would inform how the notes would be patterned
This type of writing wasn't something I'd really been able to clearly practice. Rebuild of Sharpnel (v1) was more focused on structures on the macro scale; I didn't have the mental bandwidth to optimally manage more than that. I didn't pick up the more specific techniques until the last charts of Helblinde (tension wind-ups, mood patterning and dimensional projection), so most of that pack didn't really have those unlocked. Dragonforce SSJ2 was the first fresh work that took all of the gains made at that time and applied them all at once, and I was afforded 32 opportunities to hone the new abilities.
Patterning therefore was very easy; I wasn't using relativistic pattern scaling much yet, so scaling was absolute and applied 1:1 across sounds. Candles were once again my best friend for this, and significant inflections, pitch changes or volume changes in the vocals received a candle. If more intensity was required, then the sound would receive two candles. This was offset by the use of monodirectional patterns between vocals to act as filler patterning.
¶ Graphics
Dragon Ball Z is a show that defines me as a person, being one of the earliest anime that I watched in the mornings before school on Cheez TV at 8AM in 1999-2001. Naturally, as something that is very dear to me, it was inevitable that it would at some point become reference material for a simfile project.
It was even more inevitable that DBZ would become the theme of this pack, given that I'd named it Super Dragonforce 2.5 years earlier.
I made the graphics in early August, on the same evening I also made my graphics for The Apocalypse Sampler (2015) and Betwixt & Between (2017). The three arts share similar compositions, and all three use the black frame border.
The background images are direct screenshots of the DBZ anime. Unfortunately, I took screenshots from the dreaded “Season Set” (colloquially referred to as the “Orange Brick”) versions of the anime, which resulted in a very bright, washed out and cropped image.
I altered the “400G” to instead say “200G” as a reference to the 200BPM tempo DragonForce songs are famous for being. A filter called “Dark Strokes” was applied to put some more contrast back into the image. At some point, a filter was applied to the image that gave it these unsightly box-shaped artifacts all over the image. I'm not sure if I intentionally did this or not (I'm assuming I must have because its impossible not to notice), but it makes the finished image look really bad. I have a feeling it was intentional, but I don't like it.
The 4:3 version of the background was stretched vertically to fit into the frame. I hadn't known about the original 4:3 aspect ratio the 16:9 Orange Brick version was cropped from, so this is a case of FB FP image cropping. You hate to see it.
The logo styling was always going to be the DragonForce logo with a super saiyan aura surrounding it. As it was now super saiyan 2, this required some lightning effects to be added. I can't recall where I got the source images for the lightning; I vaguely recall I had a still image of super saiyan lightning either from a game or a fanart, and I did some digging around for anything, but I found no leads. The aura is actually an image of an aura turned 90 degrees and cloned and rotated 180 degrees. The glowing inner aura is the same image flipped vertically.
¶ Songlist
Dragonforce Kaioken contains 32 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Above the Winter Moonlight | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Black Fire | DragonForce | 133-200 | |
| Black Winter Night | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Body Breakdown | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Cry For Eternity | DragonForce | 130-200 | |
| Cry of the Brave | DragonForce | 215 | |
| Defenders | DragonForce | 190 | |
| E.P.M | DragonForce | 190 | |
| Extraction Zone | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Fallen World | DragonForce | 220 | |
| Fields of Despair | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Fight To Be Free | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Fury of the Storm | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Heart of the Storm | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Heartbreak Armageddon | DragonForce | 150-195 | |
| Heroes of Our Time | DragonForce | 175-200 | |
| Inside the Winter Storm | DragonForce | 140-200 | |
| Lost Souls In Endless Time | DragonForce | 123-200 | |
| My Spirit Will Go On | DragonForce | 170-200 | |
| No More | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Once In A Lifetime | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Operation Ground and Pound | DragonForce | 120-200 | |
| Revolution Deathsquad | DragonForce | 200-250 | |
| Scars of Yesterday | DragonForce | 130-200 | |
| Storming The Burning Fields | DragonForce | 200 | |
| The Flame of Youth | DragonForce | 200 | |
| The Game | DragonForce | 237 | |
| The Warrior Inside | DragonForce | 200 | |
| Through the Fire and Flames | DragonForce | 170-200 | |
| Tomorrow's Kings | DragonForce | 185 | |
| Valley of the Damned | DragonForce | 138-200 | |
| Where Dragons Rule | DragonForce | 141-195 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Dragonforce Kaioken and Cirque du Miura released as a double feature to decent popularity and high critical praise, though some of it was muted due to a small range of factors. In the case of Dragonforce, as it wasn't an entirely new property, and some of the capital charts had already been used in ECS nearly three years earlier, and numerous other stamina charts had caught up to and exceeded the play range of the content for the top level, this blunted the impact on the metagame that the project could have had. However, it has maintained a solid following, especially through its lower charts, which fill a rare content gap (low-density, 7+ minute length, 200 BPM stamina training). Contemporary upper end stamina charts did not have lowers that went down to the levels the Mediums in this pack did, so this allowed it some exposure as a conduit into longer-form stamina, and the internal progression paths meant increased likelihood of player retention.
I find the patterning used in this pack to be refreshingly loose and it strikes a nice balance between freeform writing and planned structure. This was not intentional - it was simply the peak of my performance of the time, but I compare it favorably to my more modern styles that are generally more structured and intentionally designed - something that occurred naturally as I attained greater command over the music and what I wrote. I would like to be able to emulate this style again in the future as a preemptive means to prevent my stream writing from becoming too predictable in design.
Original Super Dragonforce videos:
B1uEM4oM4o - Inside the Winter Storm
¶ Trivia
- The band name is stylized as “DragonForce”, but this pack stylizes it as “Dragonforce”
- Dragonforce Kaioken and Cirque du Miura were released alongside an upgraded and optimized simfile release spreadsheet. I managed to reduce the number of spreadsheets per pack used from 3 to 2, whilst maintaining the quantity of information shared
- The stats sheet now showed every chart next to each other, and was set up so that alphabetical ordering would display all the information in correct order to allow sorting of charts for set planning
- E.P.M is an abbreviation of “Extreme Power Metal"
- There was a plan to step Road of Resistance, the DragonForce collab with Babymetal, but I wanted to keep the anatomy
- There was never a plan to step Soldiers of the Wasteland. Aoreo would go on to step this song for Jimmy Jawns 3
- A marathon version of Inhuman Rampage was compiled by Freyja for Stamina RPG 8 (2024). This version does not include Trail of Broken Hearts