Today's the official launching of Taiko Momoiro in its first location outside Japan, and its neighboring country, Taiwan, gets it first! The team even flew a rep over to one of the arcades to commemorate the launch with a photo!
However, not all is sunshine and roses just yet. Remember that arcade Taiko was never officially released outside of Japan before (with the exception of the two 'Asian Version' machines which performed well, but lacked popularity tracking), and thus Namco has a slew of licensing and copyright issues to settle, which explains the complete lack of Taiko HD outside of Japan up till now. As such, many songs, especially licensed, have been cut out.
The songlist for Taiwan's Momoiro is significantly smaller at 212 songs. Below are images by crystal and information by tetsu, reposted from the Taiwanese community at Plurk.
22 J-Pop songs compared to 67 in the Japanese version. Kurenai, Telecastic fake show, all AKB48 songs, all 9mm Parabellum Bullet songs and maximum the hormone are among the cut songs, which is regrettable; a lot of them are high Oni challenges!
Anime is down to 31 from 68.
Only 3 songs in Variety.
Even the originals aren't safe, down to 99 from 125 (though this number doesn't include unlockables so it should go up more). All the CreoFUGA songs, which have the highest potential for licensing issues, made it though.
Game Music is down to 28 out of 39 total, not counting unlockables. Music Revolver and Extreme MGG are among the unfortunate victims. Pokemon XY is here though.
Only the Classic genre's 14 songs managed to survive wholly.
Namco have stated that they are continuously working to solve the remaining licensing issues and slowly adding them to the Taiwanese Momoiro songlist. Hopefully if those are fully sorted out it would mean a much easier effort of exporting Taiko no Tatsujin officially to the other countries!
