Ayumi Hamasaki -- Never Ever

via Wikimedia Commons and
Chi-Chuan Chen

 
Hello, J-Canuck here. Hope you have been enjoying the Holidays. Now that we are approaching the arrival of 2025, contributor Fireminer is here with an article on the J-Pop superstar Ayumi Hamasaki. Have a read of his take on "Never Ever".

In my previous article on TM Network’s “COME ON EVERYBODY”, I touched on a Famicom game that had to do with the band and that song in particular. Video games about musicians are nothing new. 90s kids will remember titles like “Michael Jackson's Moonwalker”, “Revolution X”, “Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style”, and “Queen: The Eye”. Then there are also “games” little more than interactive CDs like your “Prince Interactive”, “Kid A Mnesia Exhibition”, and what I want to get into in this article, “Visual Mix: Ayumi Hamasaki Dome Tour 2001 A” (alternative title: “浜崎あゆみ VISUAL MIX”)

But first, the song:

This is Ayumi Hamasaki’s 21st single “Never Ever” released on March 7, 2001. It was later included in the album “I Am…” released on January 1, 2002. “I Am…” brings together dance, rock, pop and ballad pieces with the theme of love, hope and peace connecting them all. It’s still weird to see “Never Ever” stands beside the  fan-favorites “Dearest”, “M” and “Evolution” because it is admittedly one of her weaker songs.

“Never Ever” is quite a straightforward pop-rock song, with lyrics about finding strength from love in the face of despair. The instrumentation sounds a lot like early 2000s stripped back J-Rock in a nice way. What kills this song for me though is the vocals. I’m not really that deep in Ayu’s early discography, and one reason is her nasal voice. She did get a lot better in the early 2000s, but the squeakiness remained for “Never Ever” and prevented it from being a good piece. The song could’ve worked had it been written differently so that Ayu didn’t have to reach for the high notes, but then again, she composed it herself.

Back to “Visual Mix”. It was released on December 21, 2001 for the PS2 as a two-disc package. The first disc has footage of Ayu’s live performance and behind the scenes at the Tokyo Dome on July 6 and 7, 2001 (as part of the Ayumi Hamasaki Dome Tour 2001 A – she also toured the Nagoya Dome, Osaka Dome, and Fukuoka Dome.) The footage was captured by Sony’s Fourth View technology (also called SONY Spatial Video) which was a form of early 360° recording. It was previously used to make a very similar game named “Space Venus starring Morning Musume” starring the eponymous idol group.

In “Visual Mix”, you don’t passively watch Ayu perform “Never Ever” and other songs from “I Am…”. You can change the camera view, zoom in or out, and add visual effects such as fireworks or falling cherry blossoms. “Playing” with it is like messing with a video editor when you were a kid in computer science class.

The second disc consists of a simplified music mixer (“Ayu-Mix Studio”) and a fake web browser (“Ayu Browser”). In “Ayu-Mix Studio”, you get to play around with the remixes of “Endless Sorrow” or “UNITE!”. It’s rudimentary compared to more “professional” fares on the PS2 like “eJay Clubworld”. Ayu Browser on the other hand reminds me of some games like “Front Mission 3” and “Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers” which recreate the 90s Internet experience in a futuristic shell. Admittedly you don’t have much to do in “Ayu Browser” other than decorating it with pictures of Ayu and, more impactfully, sending and receiving prewritten emails to the singer herself. Nowadays we have ChatGPT for that.

All in all, “Visual Mix” is an interesting piece of software. It was released in a time when few Japanese had a PC at home, but many had the brand new PS2 and were all too eager to explore its multimedia capability. “Visual Mix” and the technology behind it were the products of Sony Music Japan, who also had a lot of involvement with the development of the PS and PS2. With “Visual Mix” they had -- in their own small way -- portended how the interactive concert experience would become.