Once more with passion, here we are for a final livestream recap for all things arcade to come for this year's final month and well into 2024's first half. Even if the lion's share was about the upcoming Nijiiro Version tournament, there are still a few news nuggets that more than the top 1% of Donders can enjoy!
Starting in general Nijiiro Version talk, it appears there's still time to squeeze in one last collaboration-related endeavor to boot! Straight outta the YouTube-spawn digital idol unit PolaPoriPosuPo, a couple of their more popular songs will come to arcades across the globe on Christmas Day! Look forward to the newly-unveiled playable ports of Richt and Neon Sign, if it happens you're nearby a game center during the festive day.
There's also a brief reminder section for the upcoming December 13th update, the main topic of the latest Namco Taiko blog entry. We've already talked about it as well, so let's move on.
Also have some snap collages of the first Y4 Real Ranking Dojo outings!
The 2024 re-edition of the arcade tourney that was famously cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic will roughly have the very same structure as the first intended iteration, down to the composition of the Finals player pool: 29 players out the general-admission Store Elimination/Area Elimination phases, the first 2 players for this arcade tournament's Elementary-And-Under division. The winner of 2021's Taiko Nintendo Switch Version tournament still has his own seat locked for the Finals!
Running from February to March next year, the Store Elimination phase will see people competing on a set of 4 songs on couples; the best scorer on a single play of a randomly-chosen song of the pool will go on. Like the succeeding Area Elimination phase, three among the contest winners from the first Faith Creation contest will be in the pool, alongside one of the latest contest's victors.
Area Elimination is expected to run between April 6th-21st, 2024 and will see couples of players competing for best scoring on two out of the 4-songs pool. If ties happen, players will play a tie-breaker song across a selection of another trio of songs. The unreleased contest-winning tune from Halv will be the 4th song for this one phase, too!
The same format of the Area Elimination phase will also be used for the Finals, with the pool of songs to be revealed as the event itself will happen sometime in July 2024. The same also applies to the Elementary-And-Under selection event, which will run alongside the aforementioned Area Elimination phase's matches.
Of course, further details as the tournament's beginning draws by will be gradually available on the Taiko no Tatsujin arcade's website, in its dedicated sub-section shown in this here slide.
With that out of the way, time to draw random Donder inquiries in the "What's in the Box?" segment!
Two topics in particular have risen to enough attention to warrant dedicated visuals, the first of which being an inquiry to show off some upcoming Ranking Dojo Gaiden-related titles, with variants according to how well such trials are cleared by players. Ask and ye shall receive!
The latter more-weighted-upon question is whether will the upcoming
Nijiiro tournament will have its fair share of merch or not... Just take
a glance at arcade operations director Kimizu's apparel!
On top of the tourney-flavored shirt/pins combo above and the hand-banner (on display below), there's also a handy Banapassport card holder among the items to be soon in sale across official Namco-endorsed storefronts.
We have to post about the pins in their own presentation slide once more, as it appears that the full set does also contain a 4th pin, with a design not blurry enough to let people guess what kind of standing wonder lies on it...
For those that can't physically reach out one of these stores, let it be known that these items can also be purchased off Bandai Namco's official online store! All these items will go on sale for a limited time this month, from today (December 11th) to the 22nd.
One last merch-related news comes in form of new collectible gachapon gadgets from Banpresto! The final waves of items for 2023 include new designs of medium-sized Don-Chan plushies (already out), a few round keychains and phonestraps with iconic Taiko drum apparels and portions of a notechart being played on the side.
Check out the stream for yourself, in order to see how all these items scale out!
The other (and may I say, more compelling) reason you want to watch the broadcast's very end for is a really brief audio clip out of t+pazolite's fabled !!!Chaos Time!!! sequel! Still no official name nor a release date for it, but here's a little something to chew on, in the meantime.
