It's true!
— Bandai Namco Amusement America (@BandaiNamcoAM) February 23, 2023
The beloved Taiko no Tatsujin is on location test in America. Get your Taiko on! 🥁#taikonotatsujin #太鼓の達人 pic.twitter.com/JCrJQV6WRf
If you caught up on our Twitter feed, you already knew the following since yesterday but the news are officially being spread by actual Bandai Namco feeds: arcade Taiko no Tatsujin is officially checking off another continent from the list!... on location test grounds, to the very least.
Credit to user branflakes from the TnT Discord server for the following snapshots and direct-video feeds!
Leaving aside the Yu-Gi-Oh! GX-esque manner it was announced in the top-heading tweet, the American location test for the latest arcade iteration actually started yesterday in a joint of the Round1 game center chain in Illinois, with another Nijiiro loctest starting in the very same city's Dave and Busters game center from tomorrow, as confirmed by the same Bandai Namco Amusement on Twitter (link). Both venues are scheduled to last for about two weeks each, with the reception of each being key in order to decide whether or not to spread the arcade Taiko action across the United States en large.
Being already open to the public for one day, we got a few snapshots of the Taiko arcades in Uncle Sam's land, with a few key pointers from the following images and a brief glance at the available tracklist, the majority of which being displayed in a trio of videos being tipped to us yesterday (Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3).
The partial track list rundown we got, coupled by the fact of the location test arcades running with the current Nijiiro firmware that's on place for non-Japanese Taiko arcades (V26.04) leads us to believe that the NA Nijiiro firmware is basically the same as the non-General-Asia firmware that continents like Oceania arcades were reported on having a hold onto, meaning that it has about a hunded less songs than the ongoing General Asia cabs. It still ends up with a quite-respectable 800 available songs across all genres, something that is also advertised on the tweet we shared at the very top of this post!
One last thing that loctest goers might find helpful to know in advance is that both Banapassport and QR-reading features are not available for these Nijiiro showings, at least for the time being. You're out of luck if you were planning to rev up your Taiko avatars of make innocent bystendars have a heart attack with Ka, but for everything else is just as performing as the current-gen arcade family models are!
