Logo cropped from JAIA Press Digest July 2018 issue
The Tenkaichi Otogesai 5 main site is officially open with actual information! Seeing we have already kinda already leaked the participating games, we'll proceed to the dates and contest details.
The Shop Preliminary will hold across the week of November 3-11 2018 in various participating arcade centers across Japan, and respective winners go to the Block Finals on December 15 and 16. The winners of those will enter the hosted on the floors of JAEPO 2019 on January 26 2019. The preliminaries will open for registration starting from October 13 on a first-come-first-served basis at up to 12 per shop, but any absence can be filled on the spot entry. The first songs for the tournament is expected to hit in mid-October to participating JAIA shops.
A special note for Donders is that the Official MyBachis (remember those?) are still not allowed to be used in all Tenkaichi Otogesai 5 proceedings in the Taiko no Tatsujin sector, or pretty much any form of MyBachis at all.
The last major change for this year is the participation reward. In previous years AOU gave out fully-printed CDs containing the tournament's selected songs to participants and lucky audience members, but this year they are saving on CDs by just giving out the Otogesai Music Card (音ゲ祭音楽カード) with the SONOCA service. Each shop is allocated 15 cards per game they host a preliminary on, and those who win one can download the SONOCA Player app to access the music. The card comes in five varieties, four of which contains each of Namco, Konami, Sega and Taito's song choices, and a special fifth that contains all the song choices from all four makers.
Note: We did not separately report this back in April 2018 when it happened, but AOU has since merged with Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association (JAMMA) to form Japan Amusement Industry Association (JAIA). From this onwards, we're gonna slowly transition in terms of those names when talking about Tenkaichi Otogesai.
