NIKKE - Be My Star (T.T. Star) // Reaction & Analysis

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to another Nikke video, and yes, I'm going to be doing a full cover of True Firepower as promised. We got to the number within a day of it being up, and a lot of people wanted to see it, so it's already in the works. I have my team together. It's pretty much the same team that has helped me out with the Arknights covers I've done, but also a little bit of extra help from some people more directly in the gacha music space. You You're not going to be right if you guess, so don't try, and no, it's not Cosmegraph or 9. Don't even start with it not happening. Anyway, here we are with Be My Star. I've been meaning to get to this one obviously for a few weeks now, so here we are. Without further ado, let's go.

[00:00:41]Oh, it's got like an actual video. Oh, [ __ ] Okay.

[00:00:45]>> [music] >> Woah. Okay, I I skipped everything.

[00:00:52]>> [music] >> That was immediate.

[00:00:56]>> [laughter] >> Subconscious head bob. [music] I've literally skipped all cutscenes and story stuff, so I don't >> [music] >> This is new. I didn't know they did all this.

[00:01:14]>> [music] [music] >> Hmm.

[00:01:27]>> [music] [music] >> Yeah, this is a little bit more standard K-pop, more what I was expecting to hear with the last one.

[00:01:48]>> [music] [music] >> You're telling me I've missed all this?

[00:02:00]>> [music] >> The whole time I've played this story?

[00:02:07]Although for me it was more like just skipping and going to the next battle, but >> [music] [music] [music] >> I'm really happy that they did like full animation for this.

[00:02:45]Weird, it [music] makes it feel more real.

[00:02:50]>> [music] [music] >> Dive into it, dude.

[00:03:03]>> [music] [music] [music] >> This is an amazing hook.

[00:03:21]>> [music] >> It shouldn't be this good. It really shouldn't.

[00:03:27]>> [music] >> Mhm.

[00:03:30]Yeah, that's more what I was expecting with All Eyes on Me, but I mean, I see what they were doing with the other one, but this is much more catchy to me. This is immediately more like, "Hell yeah, that gets me going." So if the last song was Cosmo and Friends just kind of making something that they think K-pop would sound like in this world, this is kind of the happy middle ground. It definitely has a lot more of that expected sound like I mentioned, but it still definitely has the like loose bubbliness that I think that the other version had. So, I think they found a really happy middle ground with this one. And this is just so much fun. It also kind of breaks some slight music rules, but in the proper ways as you expect people like Has Mod to be able to put together and figure out cuz it's not necessarily ruining anything. It's just utilizing the scale in a way that's unconventional, but works really well for melodies especially. So, what we have in this song is mostly E flat, F, and G minor. That's kind of our our main cycle of notes we get. That's most of the chorus. That's basically the whole bassline of the song. And we also do get a little bit of D minor and D, but that's only really in one specific case as they're coming out of one of their reprises for this.

[00:04:47]They kind of come back to And that's like a really quick sting.

[00:04:53]And then it goes right into the chorus from there pretty much. And same thing with like the B's and the C's, those are mostly transitional chords not really used for the greater part of the song.

[00:05:03]The larger majority of it is these three I mentioned earlier. So, that's pretty much the whole song we got going on there. Not much else going on as far as the chord structures. But then what we get for the main melody is what kind of breaks the rules there. We get this like chromatic circle.

[00:05:20]And this really shouldn't work. All three of these notes together do not sound good as you just heard, but what makes them work is just working in that circle keeping it a cyclical transition of just the one note. It feels good and is also rooted in the rest of the chords. Maybe not necessarily the E flat, but every other chord. There's the F there and of course the G there. So, it's like you have this circle going on and this sort of of an adjustment here for this like half step here. That's pretty normal for having a melody.

[00:05:52]There's harmonic scales and melodic scales. That's kind of what's going on here. They're abusing that in one of the cheekiest ways, but also very addicting ways. This is a super like addicting circle to hear, especially underneath the chords that are giving it so much support. So, it just feels really good. And when they go up even higher, it's like And that's that's really fun to me, too, because this also breaks that rule because that's the G minor and that's the note that we get. So, obviously, that kind of crunches in there. Albeit, it's a little bit okay because that's a G sus4 and that's why it kind of feels good. It adds a bit of tension that immediately is resolved there. So, it's perfectly fine to do that sort of thing, but it's the sort of cheeky [ __ ] that makes you go, "Aha, I see what you're doing there.

[00:06:42]Watch yourself." But, it's really fun to listen to.

[00:06:46]It's just it's such a fun loop. Like, the traditional circle for this for the chords, if you wanted to do the four chords standard, would be this, this, this just as we've known, but then going straight down to the D minor to add a little bit of tension before going back up. So, >> [music] >> So, doing something like that would be a lot more normal. Maybe >> [music] >> something like that, a little bit more emotional in that pattern. And that's what I talk about a lot here is that there's different patterns for these chords to be able to be utilized in different emotional ways. And for this song to be something that's just energetic and bright and bouncy, it needs to just keep going up, which is exactly what it does. And if we do need to go down, we kind of go from here to here to cuz it adds that tension right at the end before we lead back into it. So, it kind of uh corrects itself there and it's kind of abusing the relationship of that that I mentioned earlier. So, it's just kind of playing into that a little bit there. And the B flat that I mentioned earlier, just another chord that kind of works in the scale. Same thing with the C, it's not like it's out of place, but it does act as a good transitional.

[00:08:00]Coming out of that, you can hear how it like adds a little bit of tension before you could either go down, which never really happens in this song, or more what it does do, goes right back up into what it knows.

[00:08:11]So, there there's a lot of fun in this song, and as far as the mix and general structure of this song goes, it is a lot more standardized to what I expect and everyone listening kind of expects out of this like bubbly K-pop sort of sound.

[00:08:24]But just lyrically and energetically, this is a lot more in line with what I wanted to hear the first time, and I wasn't really like underwhelmed with the last song. It was just more of a shock that that's the direction they decided to take. But again, in the lore, it does make sense with what was going on and why they wanted it to sound that way, so I understood. But it's also like, okay, this is more of like what sells the game, you know? This is what you ship out to let everybody watch on their [ __ ] ads and everything. This is the ad roll queen here, and all three of them happen to be the ad roll queens here. And I'm sure that that's how they marketed it for this event because damn, that's really fun, and why else would they put in that much money for all the animation they had there, too, which I as an animator do adore that they put in that extra effort to have that much going on. I know that Nikke has done the anime thing before, but like, god, it looks good. You like, when they hire their teams to do it, they always get such great artists behind it, not just in music, but visually as well. And they just nail the whole aesthetic every single time. They always know who to bring on to the teams, no matter what they're doing, and they always knock it out of the park. They have some amazing visual and audio depth people for Nikke.

[00:09:38]It is unfair, frankly. I feel like they're monopolizing all of the talent in the agency over time. Like, eventually we're going to start seeing the big names from other like indie groups that get hired by other companies start to be usurped by Shift Up and they're going to start paying them to do stuff and they're going to start showing up everywhere and I hope that happens cuz that'd be hilarious. But man, they keep doing this. They keep having these amazing tracks and people like Cosmograph and everyone he's worked with on this song, the vocalist as well, phenomenal performances. Just everyone involved with this made it work so [ __ ] well and it's just such a blast to listen to. I just have no arguments with this song at all. It sounds good, it feels good, it's written extremely well both lyrically and just general instrumental. The [ __ ] artists that made it are just brilliant artists. Come on, man. Like, what what am I supposed to say? Not that I'm looking for anything to nitpick, but whenever I get songs like this and especially coming off of True Firepower and that hyping me up last week, this is a really good masterclass showing of why we like Nikke content. I don't give a [ __ ] about the gooner stuff. If you do, power to you, I suppose. I don't care about any of that.

[00:10:47]What I love is the media that comes out of it and the story it tells is surprisingly deep, too. I've heard things about this story that I'm like, "Oh, really?" But I haven't done it myself, so I need to do that. I have like what, 3 days as of recording to be able to go through the story. Now that I've heard this, I think I've heard everything that I need to worry about and I'll be okay, maybe. Stop me if I'm wrong, though. So like, let me know in the comments if I need to like listen to more songs or something. I'll play muted, but story wise I think I'll be okay if I play on mute now. But hey, I'm going to stop yapping about it. So thank you all so very much for watching. If you enjoyed this video and you want me to get to something else from Nikke, by all means drop in the comments below and I will do my best as always to get to those. Or if you don't want to do any of that, maybe just want to follow me and support me for the eventual True Firepower cover that will be coming out at some point in the next few months probably. I don't really have a true gauge of when that will come out, but it's being worked on. I'm learning it on the drums. I'm learning it on the guitar a little bit, too. I'm trying to figure out how to sing it as well. That'll be fun. And we will manage what we do, but at the same time it's going to take a while. So, if you want to hang around for that, you know how to follow me and support me and all that, and I'll see all of you in the next video. Goodbye.

[00:11:59]>> [music] [music] [music]