Today's livestream one sure is one to go in the history books! Between the arcade-oriented news talk, console/overseas series apprieciation and the hosts' playaful banter with each other (Force-choking and Etou Beams very much included!), there's surely something for every Donder to enjoy.
See you after the jump!
First in business is the recap on next week's expected Nijiiro Version update, complete with the release date of the galaco/ZOLA contest-winning song ★Rakuen☆CASINO GALAXY!, slated to just eight days later. The song will also reach out Donderful/Rhythm Festival's Taiko Music Pass on the same day!
After that, it's game center/general venue talk! Up first is the latest Donder Station game centers being opened this Summer, at the namco Aeon Mall centers of the Kobe Minami Branch and Tsurumi Ryokuchi Store. Later on, a screen for the Real Ranking Dojo bout for the youngest Donders out there were also shown, these being stapped at the Bandai Namco Cross Store at the Koshigaya Lake Town.
There has also been some screentime for overseas Taiko-related venue, too! Down below are a few choice snaps at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development expo (TICAD for short), an event held in Yokohama inviting many African government officials for a cross-country summit. A drumming hobby that knows no geographical bounds, indeed!
Another venue-limited event taking place at Aeon Mall for the youngest also involved a fun side-activity for the youngest attenders: coloring and taking home your very own Taiko-avatar keychain after playing! Etou and Kimizu have also shown on stream some of their favourite keychain designs out of these peculiar Summer venues.
Up next is a really-short segment on the latest Banpresto crane game rewards starring the Wada drum siblings: a giant Don plushie and the first couple of plastic minifigures in the inhouse SOFVIMATES brand. Both shown off on stream too, of course!
In collaboration talk, this time around we got both a glance at the (soon-expiring) past and what the near future has in store. For the former camp, be wary for the Colorful Peach (arcade) and Hatsune Miku (Donderful/Rhythm Festival) nearing their ending for their respective time-limited perks!
On the future-gazing camp, on the other hand, we'll have the Taiko no Tatsujin series featured in two upcoming Fall-rooted events: the yearly Hakurei Shrine Autumn Reitaisai and the Amusement Expo. No preview news intel for either event, so for any early-bird new song releases we'll have a wait for a while...
...something that does NOT apply to the wildest of cards to be unveiled on livestreams in recent memory: a music game collaboration with Sega's maimai series!
On the Taiko end, it has been revealed that the songs Oshama Scramble! and Valsqotch will be ported over to both arcade and console (Taiko Music Pass) players later this month, with Nijiiro Version players getting first dibs on September 25th. No word for maimai's end of the bargain, as of yet.
Up next, we got the usual "draw from the box" Q&A with the Quesant-submitted inquiries about the ongoing arcade line.
This edition's highlight was a sneak peek at the sequel to the fabled "Etou Beam" chart pattern to be featured in the upcoming Ura Oni variant for Lightning Boys. Over the course of the stream, Kimizu Sure had his chances to fire up invisible beams at his co-host, complete with zoomin/zoomout camera action for achieving peak beam dramaticness!
And now, at long last, the Ranking Dojo 2025's conclusion talk! Each of the leftover pre-Tatsujin courses received an unveiling of their frst track, with the middle song and the newly-made Ura Oni at the end of each being kept a mystery. See you next week to learn more about those!
What's unprecedented, however, was the early reveal of what lies at the end of this year's Tatsujin main course: a brand-new Namco Originals from the MisoilePunch♪ duo!
Coupled with the reveal was also a brief song introduction from the duo's MisomyL (みそみぃる), first heard in Namco Original grounds about five years ago.
The setting is a boss-fight-like scenario pitting the player against VIGVANGS, a mysterious female duo self-professed as false heroes who are up to break havoc across the city. Apparently this is "not such a fast song", but surely making its debut in the Tatsujin rank is not something suspicious to do for the descriptor... right?
The battle leading (up to) the confrontation against VIGVANGS won't take long to occur either, as the final four Main Dojo courses for the year will launch next Saturday!
Also in the same day is set to occur the seasonal Rewards Shop song rotation, this time around lugging the newcoming boss song with a few console-exclusive tunes and the third SORA song. The whole series is now going to be fully-playable on the same arcade machine, at long last!
At the same time, the following four items from the Winter 2023 Rewards Shop lineup will be available by default, even for non-Banapassport players.
There's time for one last upper-echelon Donders event to announce, so have at it: a brand-new (online) tournament for Nijiiro Version players!
Dubbed as the Taiko no Tatsujin World Score Attack @ Online 2025, this event will record the highest scores on a set of (yet-to-be-revealed) songs on Donder Hiroba to see who can push beyond the rest of the competition! While nothing outside of the preliminary data from the slide below has been revealed, it was shown (and in part, listened-to) that the event will have its playable theme song in the same vein of Taik-oroll, under the name of YOU're your HERO. Etou on stream also revealed that song's same composer to be behind its making, so this will become the first Namco Original from steμ after his departure from Bandai Namco.
The same steμ has been very vocal about this fortuitous reveal on X, stating how it will take a while for the final song to be completed and that he's also going to release an extended version of the song (link), only on his own SNS video-sharing channels as opposed to the regular ones from Bandai Namco! In another tweet, steμ also listed siroa and haxchi as prominent vocalists, with chorus vocal backing from Ponchi♪ and a generic "Taiko Team Members" mention.
The very last reveal for this livestream run was anniversary-themed; one, however, not pertaining the Taiko no Tatsujin series per-se. In 2025, it's been ten years since the launch of the touchscreen-based music game Synchronica and while it has been discontinued a long time ago, its songs manage to reach the Taiko arcade shores at least once or twice per year.
Despite the Synchronica franchise being a relic of Bandai Namco's past, there's a will to pay homage to its passage ten years later, in form of a new song to be released on Taiko arcades at the next month's start! An apt reason for Sync Your World to be credited as a Synchronica song despite never making it to the actual Synchronica cabinets, wouldn't you say?
Once again, we owe the coming of this brand-new track to another ex-BNSI talent: the now-freelancer Yusuke "mifumei" Yamauchi (山内祐介), one of the former Synchronica sound directors.
In the aim to create a song to symbolize Synchronica and that is itself linked to its first "theme song" Synchronicity, Mifumei put the most effort to convey the concept of the rhythm game to its players. Past personal experience with the arcade game for each former player aside, it's a concrete possibility that people listening might not have idea what the game was like at all, so it was of upmost importance to figure out in music what is conveyed in the sentiment of "I want everyone in the world to receive a Synchronica", with the OG game being heave on cooperative multiplayer aspects and all.
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The livestream talk is done for the day, but there's something else I wanna show you: one slide that was purposedly held off by me from the overseas Taiko events portion near the broadcast's beginning.
One of the Real Ranking Dojo Summer event locations that were snapped photos for the starting livestream segment's collages was Kuala Lumpur's Molly Fantasy Lalaport, a game center attended for the event by a number of Donders that also linger around in the Discord server. On top of that, in the commemorative photo shown below, among everyone on camera, is also our very own blog's founder Aquabluu/pikaby,in quite the coming-full-circle kind of things on our side. Fifteen years ago, who of us would have thought to any of us getting the proverbial 15 seconds of fame in an official broadcast?!
This is part of why I personally have been engrossed with the Taiko no Tatsujin scene and its buildup acruss the years: no matter the time, the people behind the series' development show just as much care of its following as us fans having fun with it in any of its many forms. If anything, the official Western game localization and all the live events with the arcade staff across the globe carry this sentiment better than how I can pen out this very paragraph!
Until the next time, have a good one.
