Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival – PS5
I must admit to being a casual, mostly Guitar Hero rhythm game player, but for some reason I thoroughly enjoy Taiko no Tatsujin. Am I particularly fond of the music? No, not really. Do I enjoy the unashamedly vibrant Japanese presentation, somewhat! Am I determined to break my controller? Yes.
It’s extremely hard to grab captures of Taiko no Tatsujin while playing the game, and menu screens are boring… so here, have a random plot beat. I don’t know what’s happening either!
As a sort-of musician (ha) this style of game has both a deep appeal and an inescapable dissonance tugging me in different directions. On one hand, once I get into the groove of a song I find myself thoroughly enjoying the sheer mindfulness of it. Tapping along to a rhythm requires focus and concentration and a connection to the music that feels deeply rewarding when you get into The Zone. But on the other hand, I find the constant weaving of “beats” between actual percussion, accompanying instruments and the cadence of vocals disorientating. I liked Guitar Hero for that, you knew what you were getting- play the buttons and you’ll feel like you’re playing a guitar.
Taiko no Tatsujin is inexorably tied to what I will very tentatively call a “genre” of music that doesn’t necessarily have a consistent and interesting throughline of percussion. My enjoyment of, and success with, any particular song often seems to strongly correlate with how percussion-heavy it is, and this makes for an experience that wavers between dispassionate obligation and genuine musical thrills. There is not, I think, a single song in the setlists of Taiko no Tatsujin that I would listen to outside of the confines of the game, but there are many that I genuinely enjoy tapping along to, and I keep coming back for more.
And that’s the great thing about Taiko no Tatsujin, at its core it’s a simple, straightforward rhythm game that plays incredibly well and really lets you vibe with the music. As your eyes defocus the obnoxious, busy backgrounds of dancing animals become a blur of colourful activity, and the notes seem to slow down as you tap out carefully practised button combos and mentally count the next procession of notes. Unfortunately this satisfying gameplay loop is trapped within a byzantine maze of bad UI, incessant loading screens (seriously, a whole 3D game seems to transition from scene to scene better than this) and all the other superfluous nonsense that games seem to pack in these days. Remember the story beats from Guitar Hero? No you don’t. There weren’t any. (If there were, my point is just proven furthr!) My problem isn’t that these things exist, but that the game incessantly forces you to engage with them. Collected too many magic stupid drum points? You’ll get nagged until you go back to the menu screen, go to the map, and watch your character unlock a bunch of stuff. You’ll hit a story beat, the story will drop you into another song for Plot Reasons and you’ll absolutely rinse it because there’s no difficulty scaling and this ain’t your first rhythm rodeo.
The game adds insult to injury with its Improvement Support mode. Apart from being named like something HR dreamt up to sugar coat the fact you haven’t met quarterly targets, this mode is at best annoying and at worst useless. The conceit is simple- play a section (or adjacent sections) from a song over and over again to practise and perfect your tapping (or drumming if you’re fancy and have a drum controller). Unfortunately the execution is so thoroughly terrible that I have to wonder if anyone involved in its creation actually used it. I suspect this is the sort of thing that happens when game developers become so adept at their own game that they don’t need help. It’s unfortunate. Ostensibly you can slow a song down for a better chance at practising it, but the music doesn’t play making this option frustratingly pointless. Yes, you read that correctly, practising the music in this music game involves sitting in silence and listening to the goddamn frustrating Don and Ka sound effects that you’ve already taken pains to turn down as low as possible.
Your best bet is to play through a whole song in “Spartan Mode” which instantly fails and resets if you make a single mistake. This is basically just an inflexible and irritating alternative to just playing the song in normal mode and hitting Start, then selecting Restart either when you reach the end of the song, or whenever you feel like you’ve made enough mistakes that you deserve to start again. Yes you get the benefit of starting a little later in the song, but the sections you can choose from are so rigid and so poorly correlated to the ebb and flow of the song and thus the change in pace and difficulty of sections that you will almost never be able to practise just the section you’re struggling on.
Fundamentally Improvement Support mode doesn’t need to exist, and features like playback speed (which also double as an accessibility aid) should be core to the main gameplay loop. And play the flippin’ music, dear lord. Rather than fixed sections you should be able to seek to any point in a track you want to play from, and select any length you want to loop, and select any failure conditions you can conceive. It feels like Taiko no Tatsujin’s greatest weakness is in its incessant need to be a cutesy, fun, simplistic – dare I say, Arcade? – romp which cannot fundamentally do anything complex.
And understand that I’m complaining about these things not because I dislike Taiko no Tatsujin, but because I like it. The silly characters, the absurd plot, the costumes, the bright colours, the vibrancy and the fun of the game are all things I would never change. But I believe it’s possible for serious practise and playback – read: accessibility – features to exist within this framework and they absolutely should. If not, what does this game really have to offer over Drum ‘n’ Fun… other than removing some of my favourite songs!?
The TLDR? If you have even the slightest interest in rhythm games and you want something vibrant, fun, and challenging- play it. But make sure you pick up a drum, I can hear my controller screaming from the other room and the claw grip you’ll need to ace the harder songs will probably not do you any good!