Feature: 2025 - The Year in Hindsight

We've popped our fireworks, cheered with our dearest ones in the wait of the first days in the year to come, effectively putting the Third Millennium's first quarter behind our backs. It's final year in Taiko no Tatsujin grounds is surely a tricky one to assess, sure, but like that has ever stopped us from trying!

Thus, once again, I welcome you to a lookback on the major happenings for the franchise in 2025 as a nice stop-gap for things to come, coupled with a few opinionated interjections by yours truly! Grab your favorite Tatacon and Bachi drumsticks and let's go ahead and dive in.

Feature: 2024 - The Year in Hindsight

Once again, the whole world is about to close the book on a year's tellings and onto the next one. The proverbial baton-pass from 2024 to 2025, however, is not one to be made without our usual proper preparations for it! For the last time in 2024, here are the notable peak points of the latest Year of the Dragon for all Taiko no Tatsujin-pertinient endeavors, with some choice Lokamp-shaped impressions as the tellings for each trimester go by!

For this being a "year of the dragon", there sure are many-a-ways to describe a yearly Taiko journey to the likes of your average RPG plot development...

Feature: Character Relation Chart Remastered

 

(full view to read all the glorious details!)

 Longtime readers of the blog will remember an obscure piece of Taiko lore that is the character relation chart, which features bits of backstory of how Don-chan and Kat-chan came to be and all the characters they come into contact with in and out of festivals. The chart seems to be made around 2008 (or earlier) so it's by no means anywhere near an exhaustive list of characters that show up in Taiko today, but everything in this chart are still mainstay characters.

However, sometime in the past few years, Namco has retired the whole domain (making a more modern site for Taiko as a whole), bringing down every single piece of material with it. Not a great situation for our blog, which has direct links to the official site for many of their images and documents, desktop wallpapers and other things. Even the original translated chart I made is gone due to it being hosted on a now-inactive Photobucket account! It was on a very low resolution anyway and not very readable.

Thanks to a few readers and the Internet Wayback Machine, a few things could be recovered from the old website, including the character relation chart PDF. I have set about to re-translate everything in it and host the high-quality image on the blog itself, as you see now above you on this post, to ensure it sticks around this time for the foreseeable future. Some additional details have been added that wasn't in the original translation too.

The original pdf file can be downloaded here.

On a later date, some cleanup and recovery work will be done where the materials from the old site are involved, including our now very decrepit-looking Downloads page. Stay tuned for it!

Donder World Championship 2024: Retrospective

Yes I know, the world championships isn't actually over yet (final round in Tokyo, Japan this July) but for the vast majority of the playerbase, myself included, it's the end of the line, so I feel comfortable to make this post. This also makes my first personally-written blog post on Taiko Time in...what feels like years actually! Have been moving on in life and in my career so I've mostly left it up to the rest of the team. Huge thanks to Tetsu and Lokamp for picking up the slack when I could not.

Feature: 2023 - The Year in Hindsight

Just like we've done for the past few years, it's time for a quick look-back at what has changed in the Taiko no Tatsujin landscape last year, coupled with some choice impressions from yours truly on each of the preceeding four trimesters, whether positive or negative. The twist this year, as you can see from the posting date, is that we're holding this feature later than usual, almost a full month after at that! Completely unrelated to the ever-dwindling spare time at my disposal, mind you...

The time for stalling is over, at last! Let's indulge ourselves in the 2023 that was...

Feature: Tips and Tricks for a Rhythm Connect Headstart

It's been a while since we've had blog features beyond yearly Taiko content recaps, but this one might come in handy for several people enjoying the latest Taiko foray!

The official launch of Rhythm Connect, the latest mobile Taiko no Tatsujin game, was met with some general concerns about the adopted AD-based model, something that has been addressed by the developing team several times over the mobile Twitter account as a necessary factor to keep the game operating the way it is, both during the early access and now that the game that is officially out for about a week. Given the many factors in play with the game's unique structure on top of the gargantuan song list it currently bolsters, it might become difficult for the average user to discern what kind of content to prioritize in order to have a swift progression with ingame unlocks/the rankup system and whatnot, ingame AD system withstanding or not. This is where today's feature butts in!

Based on personal gameplay experience from both the prerelease window and the official launch version (as well as an unfortunate guest account wiping on Lokamp's part at this month's start), we'll go over a few pointers to have a general progression idea for the game. As you will see beforehand, this will prove out to be more useful for fresher installs, but even other Rhythm Connect pioneers might find somehing useful out of this read!

Feature: 2022 - The Year in Hindsight

Here we are again, the day to trash another set of calendars across your home in order to welcome a new one... while thinking backl on what we've just witnessed! The latest Year of the Tiger is about draw back its figurative claws, but what sorts of markings have they left for Taiko no Tatsujin as a series in 2022? Well, that's where I step in with our returning recap feature series, complete with some personal impressions along the way.

Here's the story thus far...

Feature: 2021 - The Year in Hindsight

 

Here we are- another year, another yearly final day's worth of Taiko memories! The soon-ending second Year of the Cow of the 21st Century has left behind quite the hefty trail of drumming memories to pick up once more, grouped up in a trimester-based recap format to gawk at. Have some impressions of mine of what has transpired as well, while we're at it!

It all started about 364 days ago from now...

Feature: 2020 - The Year in Hindsight

 

You've seen thie header picture before and you've checked the calendar: the time is now. 2020 is set to become a thing of the past, while another year is already donning its pants up; as per tradition, in today's feature we're taking a glance of what the ending year had in storm for the Taiko no Tatsujin series, divided in trimesters and topped with the general impressions of our I hope I'm not making a typo on my own nickname again Lokamp.

Let's see what led us to this very day, shall we?

Feature: 2019 - The Year in Hindsight

It's the last day of the year, which means it's the prime time to have our usual talk on how the Taiko no Tatsujin franchise has fared in the latest 365-ish-days venue! Once again, we'll be picking up the end-2018 Feature format and review the biggest steps into 3-months intervals, with Lokamp chiming in for his personal ups and down on the series' whereabouts.

Bruise up your shoes, as it's time for a memory-lane stroll once more...

Feature: 2018 - The Year in Hindsight

We've made it through another year, which for the Taiko franchise as a whole has meant quite a lot through a collection of different scenario-changing situation. For that reason, our yearly recap post for this year will be structured in a slightly different way from our former standard.

The ever-increasing number of periods of the year filled with (mostly) minor collaboration events, combined with something that has happened earlier in the year that has made us harder to display imagery from the official blog, has led us to switch to make our recap action more compact, covering three-months periods of time in a single section rather than having one for each month like usual. To make up for this feature-slimmering action, each trimester recap will be followed by Lokamp's personal selection of Taiko-related highlights, covering both the positive and negative extremes of his own preference.

It's time to take you back...

Feature: Super Namco Bros. Special/Ultimate!

This closing week has seen the release of the latest entry in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. fighting game series. Just like with the former 3DS and Wii U entries, Bandai Namco has heavily contributed in the creation of this installment, resulting in some of its artists making new remixes/arrangements for the featured music game franchises!

Following up the work we've done for the 3DS and Wii U games' launch back then, what's inside this post is a selection of the Taiko-renowned artists's newcoming contributions for the freshly-launched Nintendo Switch entry, alongside some hats-off to other music gaming-related composers we found along the way. As the 3DS/Wii U arranges are also available once more, after the jump we'll supply you links to our formerly-released blog posts about the respective games' Namco share.

It goes without saying, but SPOILER ALERT! Some of the music featured here is coming from either boss battles or other late-content tracks from the World of Light adventure mode. Can't say we didn't warn ya~

Feature: Combo Scoring Visualized

We are returning to the basics with Feature posts like this, for our newer audience hailing from the glorious return of Taiko no Tatsujin to the western circles. If you want us to go deeper on certain aspects that we took the knowledge for granted, let us know!

Recently there is a surgence of social media posts in which newer players question "why does the other player have a higher score, when I have a better Good/OK/Bad ratio and drumroll counts", especially with PS4 Session de Dodon ga Don/Drum Session where ranked battles are a signature mode.

To me who has been with Taiko no Tatsujin for over 8 years, the concept of Combo Scoring may be the obvious answer, but not to a lot of the said new players. While you can definitely read up on our Beginners Guide (in desperate need for update, even though) for the information, what better way is there to visualize the concepts with the power of graphs? MATHS!

Feature: Taiko Sales Figures Comeback - The Digital Share

This is a sequel feature to our first overall look at the general sales figures in Taiko no Tatsujin games, where we took a look at the accountable physical software sales from every Taiko no Tatsujin title that has been made, up to the Ps Vita trilogy.

One big hindrance to our former researching efforts was the incapability to supply a consistent look at the overall sales of the more recent games in the series, as digital downloads have become a sizable feature for modern Taiko gaming and many sales figures usually don't incorporate the digital sales with the physical versions. As the interest for digital sales data has increased in the past few years and more platforms over the Internet have risen up to account the newborne share of the gaming market, we've come back to update the overall figure sales of the more recent Taiko titles, starting with the first games with accounted digital versions (the 3DS trilogy) and ending up with the PS4 Taiko addition as an overall newcomer to our research.

Together with the sources credited by us on our first sales research feature, we want to give a shoutout to the Game Data Library, a website which has gathered both digital and physical sales data for the Japanese market's videogame sales, with the digital figures being based on Famitsu's Digital Top 30 and the PlayStation Store Estimates.

Feature: 2017 - The Year in Hindsight

Another year has come to an end, leading us to the usual tradition of looking back what the Taiko no Tatsujin franchise has granted to its fans in its latest 12 months of activity. The year 2017 has been one of those really eventful ones for the series in recent memory (for better or worse), so join our last chronicle-based efforts of English-spread news casting about the franchise!

As usual, see you after the jump.

Feature: Hiding the Staff, a Sympho-Neighbours Story

While yes, we are fully aware of our nature on this corner of the Internet of being a Taiko no Tatsujin-oriented news blog, we've been subjected to a particular episode earlier this week that is gradually turning out to be one of the many jigsaw pieces in a particular frame, picturing quite the worry-some scenario for Bemani series fans and music game players in general.

With this situation coming out fresh on many fronts and (almost) nothing but a sea of undocumented/unverifiable facts surrounding the problems of artist mentions' disappearance, this blend between our usual Taiko-centric trivia sources and the Sympho-Neighbours family of features is here to have a look at how is the stage being set for this peculiar situation. Take this as a 'starting point' look for the events that are unfolding during these very days, as we won't make of this a step-by-step episodic series to follow up...

For the user-input piece of media you're about to see, we'd like to thank the people contributing to the "Konami/Bemani and Artist conflicts." forum board on rhythm game website Zenius -i- vanisher, as well as Twitter users @p6p, @MILI216, @acTroopers and the plurk thread that gave us the picture on the top of this page, among others.

Feature: God Collection and the Shinto Culture Behind Them, Part 3

Building up from our previous two-parter feature, we take a look back to Shinto Culture as it's being told by the continuation of the Namco Original-based God Collection series.

As this peculiar song trope is branching out to Western religions, we might or might not be having a look at those outlets, too!

Feature: The Wear and Tear for Taiko no Tatsujin

Please, just don't.

Source: Twitter (original tweet deleted, mirrored from here)

That Taiko no Tatsujin as a franchise stood in the gaming market (mostly in Japan) for over 15 years is evident that Don-chan can take some serious wear and tear through time. But when the game ask you to literally hit on a drum, the physical equipment can and eventually will suffer from deterioration even when everyone takes very good care of it. Worse is that not everyone will necessarily be as nice to the drum as possible, especially towards an arcade cabinet drum.

We have previously talked about how much of a bad shape the cabinet-included drumsticks can be. In continuation to that, here is an overview of what the drums might do when one is out of maintenance.

Feature: 2016 - The Year in Hindsight

Coming to the end of yet another year, it's crucial for anything in life to look back at what has come in order to be set on to take what's next; that is still very true to the Taiko no Tatsujin series progression for us, so here we are again with another recap post about the 366-days cycle that has come and gone.

Join our written flashback about Taiko gaming for 2016 after the jump!

Feature: General Sales Figures in the Taiko no Tatsujin series

Here on this blog we've had multiple occasions to see the launch week figures for many Taiko no Tatsujin games that have been released during this humble blog's existence; however, have you ever wondered how most of these releases have fared on the later years in the sales spectrum?

In this feature, we're taking a look at the current situation of the software sales figures for the Taiko no Tatsujin series as a whole, by dividing the game releases to the many console families and listing both the 1st-week sales and the Life-to-Date (or LTD) figures for each boxed release.

Among the many sources that have been browsed for the data you're about to see, give our shoutouts to Media Create, VGChartz and NeoGAF user Chris1964 for the Media Create/Famitsu historical database, available at this link.