The promised pre-Finals livestream is here at last! After the jump is our skinny of what has transpired from it, alongside a small appetizer of that's to expect on Nijiiro shores in the near future.
Nijiiro talk, in fact, was the first topic to tackle... more specifically, Ranking Dojo! First and foremost, one complete look at the songs available in the current lineup, up to 10-Dan.
After the quick reminder, we also got full data analytics on the 2023 edition's course clear analytics, complete with Gold clears and even full DFC performances. Chances are most of those 24 valiant Tatsujin Gold clearers will be heading to that big Taiko Finals bout of sorts...
We also got a short round of Real Ranking Dojo announcements, revealing in which Japanese arcades there will be held the real-certification-awarding operation that has been going strong since 2022. The course clear certificates should be looking just like the original edition's, too!
And at last, the Finals tournament talk. We've got one last look at where the 32 contenders are coming from via this familiar-looking slide, with the slight addition on the bottom at how the event will be also broadcasted live via YouTube. Everyone's invited to the fun!
In a nutshell, the Finals will follow the same structure as the previous arcade tournament's rendition from 8 years back, which boils down to three distinct phases: Group Elimination (only the best player out of 8 separate groups will advance), Group Winners' Elimination (only the best 4 scorers advance) and the Semi/Grand Finals to decide who's gonna be the next Taiko arcade champion.
For the Group Elimination phase, players are divided in eight different groups and will play in couples with 2 songs. At the end of all players' shot at this performance, whoever has scored the most points of all players in their group gets to advance to the next phase.
Group Winners Elimination will run in the same way, only with two fixed songs that were chosen by the tournament staff beforehand. Four matches are played, and the 4 best scorers get to advance.
Finally, the remaining four players will be matched according to Group Winners ending score (1st vs 4th, 2nd vs 3rd) and will dispute the Semifinals with one fixed song match, which is also how the Final match will play out like.
Down here is the list of the 32 highly-skilled people we're going to see in less than a couple of weeks from now. Huge shoutout to the four individuals from outside Japan who managed to break the mold from the international-grounds bouts!
As advertised, there will be a handful of tournament-flavored Petit Charas for everyone to try nabbing, after the really-hard-to-fetch Tetsuo and Cat&Ladle red cheerleaders (again, they handed out only 20 of those!). The blue variants of each will be easier to nab, with one of the two's retrival method being revealed on the livestream.
Indeed, having a chance to claim the blue Cat&Ladle cheerleaders will be quite easy by comparison, as by retweeting one specific Twxtter post about the tournament will make you eligible to enter a raffle for one of 80.000 petit charas combo!
Throughout the retweet campaign announcement, Etou and Kimizu have had the lenghtiest portion of the stream just to introduce each and every Finals player (which -for non-cluttery times' sake- won't be reposting here) and have a live selection of their respective grouping for the Finals' beginning!
All 32 group slots were put inside the familiar box that is usually brought up to read arcade-related questions from Donders in regular Taiko livestreams and after each player introduction, all of these were slotted in the group their respective box ticket draw has inscribed on. Below is how the final standings were decided!
Concurrently, livestream watchers also had some engging stuff to take part on, as a poll was issued on which song of the four shown below would be a more suitable fixed pick for the Group Winners Elimination round. Suffice to say, Jun Kuroda's Namco Original ran laps around the competition, in the end!
Once again, the Finals will go live on July 14th - 1pm (Japan time), with the accompaning YT stream link to be released in a few days from now. This announcement was also followed by a short trailer for the event, but we'll get to that a little bit later.
In fact, we got one last bit of news for everyone versed on Nijiiro talk! This upcoming Saturday, the second of 2024's song ports from the long-dead Synchronica music game will be hitting game centers everywhere.
Kimizu/No.11, once again, was up to the task of playing the song while the camera was focused on his hits on a profile view only, but not before unveiling the song's star ratings (3/4/6/8) and the fact it also comes with a 10-star Ura Oni, just like Genesis Ray from last week did!
After the performance, once again, we got additional intel in form of overall notecounts and extra hits, indicating the presence of special note markers for both tunes. And surely, at least we could see an off-screen 8* Oni cle-
...a'ight, I'll keep my trap shut. At least we now know that regular Oni bears 523 notes and the Ura variant has 897 in total instead.
We've come to the end of our coverage for today and, as anticipated, we leave you with the trailer for the Taiko no Tatsujin World Championship 2024 Finals, right below these lines. See you in two Sundays for that!
