The Taiko Tower challenges in Taiko no Tatsujin: Doka! to Oomori Nanadaime (a.k.a. Taiko PS2 7) are a series of ten survival challenges against all the tricks the game can pit against you. It's a minigame found in the Waku Waku Bouken Land. The rules are slightly different in that unlike the regular mode, it's possible to fail in the Taiko Tower if you do badly. The 魂 flames on the top-right corner of the screen indicate how many times you're allowed to miss before you lose. While all this is happening, Don-chan continuously climbs the tower to its summit on the bottom of the screen, and announces each time he climbs ten floors.
Most of the Taiko Towers let you play without any music in the background, but with a slowly building BPM that goes faster and faster until you finish, piling on the difficulty and the speed. As mentioned before, there are ten in all, each harder than the last. Two difficulty settings are available, Ama-kuchi (甘口) and Kara-kuchi (辛口), the latter being Hard mode. All videos below are done on Kara-kuchi.
In all the Taiko Tower challenges, the Bachi o Sensei wear different clothing.
Tower 1
Song used: None
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 167
Number of floors: 35
Basic training, featuring simple note patterns typically found in lower difficulty Oni songs and higher Muzukashii songs. Has only 35 floors, so the BPM won't get a chance to go up that high yet.
Tower 2
Song used: Takkyū de Dakkyū (卓球de脱臼)
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 230
Number of floors: 63
Takkyu de Dakkyu is used here, and players are forced into Master Notes from the very beginning. But even on Hard difficulty, this is even easier than Tower 1, and has zero note clusters.
Tower 3
Song used: Sakura (Haru) (さくら（春）)
Lives: 2
Max Combo: 80
Number of floors: 39
A novelty Taiko Tower played after Sakura (Haru), with only 80 notes. The trick? Tons and tons of balloon and yam notes, usually placed dangerously close before another upcoming note. If you don't clear the yam notes fast enough, you won't have enough time to see the next note coming at you!
Tower 4
Song used: None
Lives: 4
Max Combo: 341
Number of floors: 35
Same length as Taiko Tower 1, but with more advanced note patterns and harder rhythm. It gets worse towards the end of the song. Beware the final long string of notes!
Tower 5
Song used: None
Lives: 4
Max Combo: 506
Number of floors: 67
This is the middle tower, and another practice session. Streams of beats are presented, and get closer and closer until they become a string of notes, then get further away again. This is repeated in a variety of patterns, including 1/3 notes and then a combination of both regular and 1/3, and a combination of red and blue notes together. The final long balloon note at the end of the song needs a whopping 108 hits to break.
This tower was brought back in Taiko Wii 2 as a challenge in the Everyday Taiko Dojo, known as 'Mesaze! Taiko no Tatsujin 8' (there are ten of them, just like the Taiko Towers), but without the freak balloon note.
Tower 6
Song used: Gekkabijin (月下美人)
Lives: 1
Max Combo: 209
Number of floors: 81
This tower is pure cheating. You only have one chance to hit all the notes, and all the notes are presented to you in ninja fashion- scrolling fast and hidden behind a large, slow drumroll so you only have a fraction of a second to see each one. Good reflexes, memorization, and lots of luck are needed to clear this tower. Gekkabijin is used as the background music.
Tower 7
Song used: None
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 659
Number of floors: 75
The first Taiko Tower to speed up all the way to the maximum limit of BPM 250, with many basic note clusters along the way. Features the most famous note patterns from series' classics KAGEKIYO and Saitama 2000.
Tower 8
Song used: None
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 713
Number of floors: 75
Much harder than Tower 7, not just because of the increasingly complicated note patterns, but also because many notes are placed in between beats and backbeats, or suddenly swap from being on beat to off-beat, making for an almost impossible rhythm to grasp.
Tower 9:
Song used: Yawaraka Sensha (やわらか戦車)
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 889
Number of floors: 65
The basis for Yawaraka Sensha's Ura Oni difficulty when the mode was introduced in arcades on Taiko 11. The trick used here is extreme stamina-draining streams of notes that don't stop at all. 380 notes in a row on each one! The lyrics of Yawaraka Sensha make a lot of sense here:
やわらか戦車の 心は一つ
生きのびたい 生きのびたい
'The squishy tanks' hearts are united for one goal, to survive, to survive...'
Tower 10
Song used: None
Lives: 5
Max Combo: 773
Number of floors: 75
The final Taiko Tower, and the toughest challenge in the entire game. Even when stacked up against the hardest songs in the series, Taiko Tower 10 still stands its ground. Speed up goes to BPM 250. The low BPM notes have many hard-to-clear portions including 1/6 notes, and the high BPM note streams are intense and continuous. Missing under 5 notes in this abomination is an extreme feat, let alone a full combo.
Back to Taiko PS2 Nanadaime song list
