Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master!

Last year, I played a version of Taiko no Tatsujin in my local arcade. It's a rhythm game that you play on a single large drum, with 2 sticks. The drum has two areas where it responds to hits. You can hit the drum in the centre, or on the circumference.

When there is a red note, you hit the centre, and when there is a blue note, you hit the circumference. There's sections where you perform a drum roll, and a balloon where you need to pound a certain amount of times to pop it.

You don't have to alternate your hands, but it does make it easier for sequences of notes. There's also some notes which are larger, which you would assume involves using both sticks, but it doesn't seem required.

As you'd expect, you get more points for better timing on the notes, and your combo count is tracked. The game is quite forgiving if you add extra notes in there, but if it is too close to another note, then it will register as a missed hit.

Just like Donkey Konga, most songs feel like you are drumming to vocal melody, or some other key instrument, rather than the percussion. Some slow songs end up being frantic and they didn't feel right, whereas other songs were incredibly fun.

Now, what about this specific version? There doesn't seem to be a drum controller available for the Xbox Series S/X but since it was a digital download, I knew I wasn't getting a drum without an extra purchase anyway.

Part of the fun is using the drum, so the Xbox version is lacking here. I do like rhythm games in general, so if you are happy to play with a controller, then there's plenty of fun to be had. There's 4 difficulty modes, but playing the hardest difficulty level is probably impossible with a controller (unless you have mad skills) but having a drum controller will still see you banging frantically.

There's plenty of tracks, and obviously you will replay them many times across the difficulty modes. There's other tracks to purchase with your in-game coins, plus the expected and numerous DLC with real money. As the name implies, it is very Japanese and the track selection reflects this. There's lots of J-Pop, songs from game soundtracks of Capcom games, anime tracks, and classical pieces.

I really appreciated that you can filter and order the track list by quite a few parameters. So you can order by difficulty and filter out tracks you have perfected.

The main character is a drum with a happy face, and the screen will have all kinds of cute characters dancing about as you play.

I had a lot of fun with the game, but I couldn’t help but want to play with a drum controller.