To tide the way to upcoming Taiko news talk, here's a little something that eager Donders may have already caught up by browsing the many Donderful/Rhythm Festival "Release-Day Announcement" official video variants that have scattered across the Web, something that also leaves us a little bit of public insight on the development team's behind-the-scene workouts...
Additional screenshots courtesy of users jC and mariochua from the Taiko no Tatsujin Discord server.
Let's start with a little bit of trivia. Since the late 3rd-gen Taiko gaming, both console and arcade entries have been enriched by a playable debug track that is put inside the game's code as a tentative placeholder for note-placement purposes under a simple beat, temporary song list display arrangement and whatnot. Said track tends to appear in modern games under the title of 'tmap4', a track which is unavailable to select by regular gameplay means and needs a proper debug access insight to take a gander at, always appearing as a 1/1/1/1 KFMO Namco Original and always sporting this here chart which is most likely a test chart with simple beats in order to test charting and scrolling speed for the official songs in each game. We might come back to the subject in a future article a-la 1STPAI of so many years ago but before that, I ask you to take a closer look to the top-post picture (even expand it with a click/open it on another tab, if you must)... Noticed anything off?
That's right- by some sort of accident, it looks like the Taiko Team has forgotten to remove the tmap4 test chart from the song list in some of its Reveal Date videos (all-1* ratings and all), the top-page screenshot of which belonging to the extended General Asia trailer that Japan also got (link). Japanese-only players were spared from this funny goof-off solely because of the brief song list reel starting at a different point from the General Asia video's!
But it's not like this went completely off the Taiko Team's radar, either...
The screenshot above those lines belongs to the extended trailer of the Korean version of the game (link), which basically uses the same video of the General Asia edition, with one major difference... the all-1* tmap4 test song being completely erased, with the placeholder selection tile still in plain sight!
This funny occurrence also allows us to chronicle that the South Korean version of the game will come out at the same time as the Japanese version of the game, on September 22nd.
