Original Song of the Week link
Game centers all around the world are used to have one or more machines where the name of the game is to... win more games via timely-slotted token inside a machine in order to grab more falling tokens, or even exchangeable rewards via print-out tickets or the same awards falling down from the dame machines with tokens alike! These are more colloquially-known as 'Medal Games', for which genre Namco has released a couple of Taiko-themed machines under their belt: the Medal no Tatsujin games. Both games have had their own dedicated pages added to this blog since a very long time (here and here, for quick reference) but as you can see, every single image link in both pages was taken down with their respective websites' shutdowns. Even worse, not even our usual quickfix via WayBackMachine browsing back-in-time hleped us into recovering the visuals (not even WBMing into the same pages we penned!), so the only surviving written bit we got on our hand was inside a massive lake of dead corpses (=images). That is, until people started coming out of the woodwork and got to film some of these machines in action!
The general gist of both Medal no Tatsujin games is to travel across Japan's major cities by slotting coins into one of the machines' 5 player seats, so that it might land into one of the machine's dedicated "dice slots" and make Don-chan move of that set amount of spaces, getting all sorts of events and extra medal dropout chances in the process. Plus, as you can see from the timestamped-embed above, the Medal games also have room for regular music-pounding Taiko action!... kinda. By collecting the Participation Fan while traveling the medal game's board, a random 5-player game between 'Tatsujin Game' and 'Tatsujin Race' will be selected, each allowing players from all 5 seats to gain extra tokens according to their respective performance. If 'Tatsujin Game' is chosen, a song is selected at random from the Medal arcade game of choice's song pool (40 for the first game, 43 for Medal 2) and players are called again to perform their best at medal-flinging in order to be the most accurate on "Medal no Tatsujin-friendly" versions of Kantan-mode charts. Think it's hard to do already? Oh boy, you didn't even hear the beginning of how hard (and expensive) it can be...
First of all, playing a song between Medal coinops' Tatsujin Game means that every registered dice-hit slot (with up to 7 medal dice roll stored per player at a time) accounts for a hit, no matter the type of face note/color on screen. In addition to that, hitting Don/Kat/6-White dice notes doesn't require specifically-timed inputs of sorts, meaning that as long as your input is registered before the note comes across the player-hit marker, you're not going to miss the beat. If you think that's too good to be true, that's because it is! As shown in the footage above, the five dice-rolling medal slots don't actually extend really far in height, so that the falling-down medal motion might lead those to leap beyond the dice counters and -in more case than one- not netting you the dice-faced hit for the game, meaning that even trying to score a Full Combo on your seat is hard to do even with token wealth at your side. Full accuracy on any song in the Tatsujin Game, for the same reason, is nigh-impossible to achieve, as the perfect-accuracy Gold hits are only registered if the 'active dice' slot for the player seat exactly matches the one of the incoming dice note to hit; any other registered dice result (even same-color but different-number cases) will be counted as a Silver hit, meaning that the player's dice queue storage to play the game might even come at a detriment due to unneeded note results being stored! More than any other game in the series thus far, perfecting a Taiko song at any given difficulty is a rich test of luck, rather than a test of skill...
Feel free to skim over the rest of the video in order to see more of the second Medal no Tatsujin in action! Together with the board-hopping on display, there's also more Tatsujin game in here to enjoy- not only the TV Asahi's Abarenbo Shogun main theme from past SotW screentime is on display, but also another song that might be a future guest around these lines in the future. Sadly, no video footage on any of the two Medal no Tatsujin-exclusive tunes -the Sky Kid and Valkyrie no Densetsu tracks- is found online thus far and given how the Tatsujin Game music is chosen at random each and every time, it might take another long while before we may hear of those. If ever...
