With this year's Summer season still going strong, Bandai Namco's Taiko and Synchronica teams have joined their forces once more for a nearly-4-hour broadcast, in order to spotlight the most-immediately incoming content for both series.
Of course, being a Taiko blog we're going to focus more on the former, but who knows if the 2nd block might have some surprises along the way...?
Starting from the pre-livestream portion, its highlight peak is the Dojo Ranking raw call (in video form) for the players of the White Version edition, while Kagutsuchi and many Zeami songs are played in the background. This time around, the appearance of ≠MM has blocked all the attempts for a Tatsujin gold clear, but a group of energetic players managed to beat the hardest trial anyways!
After the break and into the 'real portion', some more graphs are displayed to reveal the full statistics of White Version DR clears (between Normal and Gold ones) in both pie and stack forms.
But enough looking at the past- here's a meaty teaser for Red Version's own Dojo Ranking mode!
Before the actual new changes/tweaks, we are greeted with a few recap slides explaining the mode for newcomers, such as for the fact that it's a full-credit play mode with three songs and a selection of trials of 3 songs to clear while clearing up to 3 objectives.
Pairing the mode is the return of the Banapassport-exclusive Taiko School, which will lend aid to players trying to clear the last-failed trial (or the next one after a victorious play) with a selection of songs aimed to improve the players' skills for their next big challenge.
This time around, Red Version's Taiko School will also host some new features, such as tips to clear the actual trials and up to 25 songs from recently-released home console/portable Taiko titles on which players can practice before tackling the arcade mode once again.
In a peak of generosity, the Taiko Team has fully unveiled the course content of the easier half of Dojo Ranking trials, complete with both songs involved and Normal Clear criteria condition. These hints, however, are only good until Godan...
...as from Rokudan onwards the tables have some blackened-out areas to figure out when Red Version's Dojo Ranking actually comes out! Down there, for example, we can see that 2 out of 3 clear conditions are not visible.
For the following 4 ranks, instead, even some of (if not all!) the songs' names have been covered, only giving out some highly sped-up audio cues as hints to the mystery songs' identity.
That, however, didn't stop the work of some dedicated Taiko fans on Youtube, who have recorded the Dojo Ranking portion and slowed it down to nearly x0.135 its original speed to figure out what the mystery songs are! The video below sheds some light to the mystery tunes with the slowed-down audio cues as confirmation.
If you want to hear more about the Kurouto-and-up courses, you'll have to wait for the DR mode to be out in the future, as the Taiko Team ended the segment with a simple reminder of the hardest courses' existence.
Actually, that wasn't the true end of the portion, as Etou had to warn Taiko fans about the arcade alignment of a couple of planets! Starting from Saturday 20th and up until the next month, Namco Original Gekkabijin and Classic song Mars will be temporarily added to Red Version arcades for everyone to enjoy.
DISCLAIMER: During the livestream it hasn't been clarified whether these songs also appear on Asian White Version or not, but we can confirm that both songs do appear overseas as well, thanks to the listing of Japanese Taiko wiki wikihouse.
EDIT: Asian ver. White ver. announcement confirms.
Ending this portion is Etou playing Godan live with an early-updated Red Version build. Tensions were high until the very end, but the Taiko Team leader scored a Normal Clear despite some struggles with Rumble Ranbu!
When Etou comes back to the hosts' desk, someone else seems to have taken Etou's seat...
...but before chatting with the newly-arrived guest, enjoy some unscheduled Taiko 3DS 3 talk!
From September 1st, a couple of song packs will be made publicly available, with the former having all songs that are somehow related to heroes and the latter delivering another load of WCS2016 songs for the first time in Taiko console grounds.
On top of that, there's an additional free song to download until October's beginnings! enjoy EZ DO DANCE while also reminding to get the previously-released free content until the end of August.
After the console front, it's time for the new collaboration corner which ties in Taiko no Tatsujin Red with the Tekken 7 arcade version's update, Fated Retribution.
For the Tekken side, this is translated into new custom elements for Banapassport players. Feel the magic of the April Fools-inspired Dokodon Fighters aestethics!
More specifically, each character can be equipped with Taiko gear while playing, mainly consisting of one of the Taiko siblings on their shoulder and a white Tatsu-Don t-shirt.
Some characters will also get their own custom Taiko avatar to overseer each of their very moves, like Heihachi Mishima down there!
Other Taiko-themed elements will be added to this Tekken arcade in general, such as the custom battle gauges shown earlier or pre-battle message plates like the ones below.
Before knowing what the Taiko series will get in return, there's the next Don Challenge talk to be digressed, whose 2-part outfit for the month will turn your drum into a cat! During September, grab the Cat Face by playing once with the arcade and buy the Cat Tail from the Rewards Shop in order to assemble the outfit combo.
Making its arcade debut with September 2016's DonChare is Namco Original Shining 65, of which we also talked about in a Song of the Week some time ago.
We now delve to the next update's content which, while not being defined by a release date yet, it sure is set to close some ends!
Among the newly-released songs are the massive Touhou collaboration track from the previous Niconico Chokaigi/Reitasai, a song from Tekken 7 FR for the newly-announced collaboration and two popular songs provided by Cranky, with both his first Namco Original and the very first BMS song ever ported to the Taiko franchise.
If you're still in vein of the WCS2016 competition heat, by playing the Finals songs will be possible to unlock a couple of related clothing gear, in both Don and Katsu's color schemes.
Another aspect being enhanced with the same update is the Banapassport-exclusive Tokkun Mode, which will have some extra markers to keep track of the player's progress and the notechart details in general. From left to right, the newly-added markers are:
- Number of drumroll hits by the player
- Current beat stanza's number/Overall number of beat stanzas in the song
- Drumroll start marker
- Go-Go Time Tracker
Red Version's Dojo Ranking and Taiko School will also be added... After all, why else did the Team would do an hour-long explanation of the new mode for?!?
Looming over the players' heads for the time being are also a couple of events with Dokodon! Mystery Adventure and the Touhou Arrange trend. While we already all about the former, the bullet hell-related event will have some more unadvertised elements for its Red Version rerun!
Together with the new elements we already knew from the past Reitasai's footage (namely Flandre Scarlet and the Komeiji sisters as Petit Charas), the returning event will also see the coming of six new Touhou-related title parts and two additional mystery Petit Charas.
This Touhou Project event will go live after the next update, and will last until the next one.
After that all the main arcade talk is dished out, it's time to officially welcome this broadcast's special guest: t+pazolite! He even exited and re-entered the room to make the official introduction more official-looking.
The popular HARDCORE TANO*C composer has joined the Team to unveil his very next song for Taiko no Tatsujin, whose title actually challenges some of our humble blog's capacities...
As there's no Unicode equal for the empty Heart symbol, it's possible that many of you can see three horizontal lines instead of a heart in each page where it's featured for a song title. Rest assured we'll try to find a suitable solution to this issue in the coming months...
But before that, why don't you have a sample of the new song by yourself? After all, it doesn't happen every day to see a song whose title calls to mind to one of our contributors's nickname!
After talking a bit about the new song, the Taiko Team portion of the livestream has ended. With t+pazolite around, you know what this usually means...
After a !!!Chaos Time!!! that is big enough for both the Taiko and Synchronica teams to join the fun, the last-hour block featuring Bandai Namco's other arcade music game series began. While -again- nothing of Taiko pertinence was announced, we might as well share the reason behind t+pazolite staying for the ending portion of the livestream...
Namely, this trio of songs! Among September's 5 new song announcements, 3 of these were for t+pazolite songs, featuring one new track specifically made for Synchronica gaming and two of his most popular releases being published from some of his past albums.
For the latter category, we happen to find the replay2014 version of Kick-ass Kung-fu Carnival (the head-starter of the Kung-fu song cycle of which Taiko's Shiny Kung-fu Revival is a part of) and It's a "10 Bats", with Rizma as the singer.
Synchronica's t+pazo song is titled Surf Zapping, which -unlike Doku L0CANdy♡- has been fully played during the final minutes of the broadcast. You can hear it too through the video below!
After some reminders about the ongoing Synchronica events and the game's first soundtrack, the broadcast meets its end. See you next time,
