As already mentioned in our launch-window update post for the incoming Nintendo Switch Taiko game (link), the game got leaked online in its entirety; as the writers of a Taiko-oriented news blog, we're not spreading this piece of information as a means to spread piracy-oriented practices, but rather as another way for us to get to know more about the latest game's launch contents!
Some of the game's files, in fact, have been extracted with the use of hex-editor applications and had their respective text-format codes shared online for everyone to see. After the jump are listed the main discoveries that can be discerned through the analysis of three selected files, together with an extra bonus...
Shoutout to Taiko no Tatsujin Discord user Bui for the test versions of the spotlighted files!
-) wordlist.json
This first file's code shows pretty much the lines of text that are displayed into the game, with references to the already-planned, non-JP languages (namely English, Chinese and Korean) already available in there in some form.
What's interesting from this long wall of text, however, is the odd presence of four other languages, the ones that -complete with the already-known English- form the PAL-5 standard for European games: French, Italian, German and Spanish. A big share of the already-featured text is also already displaying the text over those language versions, no less!
-) gistfile1.txt
From this file, the face data of the game's starting song list (with unlocks) has been taken out, complete with star ratings for all the available modes and the English names for each of the songs for the non-Japanese language versions.
It's worth mentioning that among these names also comes out another returning Namco Original, Ramen de Yo-Men!! (listed as no.67); however, reports from the Switch game data leaks deny the presence of any trace of the song in question's audio/chart files in its vanilla version, leading to assume that this revival was scrapped out from the the game's final version at some point.
-) unlock_data.json
With this final file, we're given a code-based list of the unlockable elements counted, with each of these being grouped and defined by four different strings:
-item, for the kind of unlockable element described (Performance Mode character/Party Game minigame/Song);
-type, defining the unlock criteria (for example, "Play Performance Game/Party Game X times" for the songs);
-count, defining after how many times the unlock criteria is triggered;
-unlockKey, the code that defines the element that is unlocked (for the songs, it's their songID).
With these four elements being set in stone, we already have a general idea of what is unlocked with what condition at this time, having the photographic evidence from the NSwitch Launch window update post and some basic knowledge about the Taiko no Tatsujin series' characters from the lore. We're also mentioning this file's relevance as the previously-quoted Ramen de Yo-Men!! song is not appearing alongside the other tracks of this unlock-related code file, further proving its removal from the vanilla version.
To put a close on this whole datamine-heavy post, one user over Twitter (link) has discovered a bunch of unused image assets lurking inside the game's files, including what looks like to be a tentative logo for the game in an hypothetical non-Asian release of the game, with the 'Taiko no Tatsujin Drum 'n' Fun!' name we've already seen several times during the past few weeks.
Quite a lot of factors to weight it, for a Japan-rooted game franchise's tentative return to the West...
