Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! (Xbox Series X)

The Taiko no Tatsujin series of drum-based rhythm games have almost always made sure to have an actual drum peripheral available for its style of play. Be it a special controller for the console or a built-in part of an arcade cabinet, it helped the series actually simulate the taiko drums its sound and play is based around. However, for its first excursion onto Xbox consoles, Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! forgoes these special controllers entirely, but since previous titles were still playable with standard controllers, it’s not a completely unprecedented way to play a game in the series.

 

One reason it’s not too unusual of an adjustment to playing only on a standard controller is the way you play along with the music. Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! has two types of notes, the red Don and the blue Ka. Don notes are more numerous, but since there are only two note types you need to worry about, the Xbox controller can just have buttons set for Don and Ka and you press whatever is appropriate as it appears on screen. The songs on offer will sometimes prove to be a bit demanding though, the higher difficulties and music with faster tempos starting to expect some incredibly rapid button presses as well as extremely quick swaps between Don and Ka notes to the point that the on screen symbols will overlap heavily. You can still make out what is coming but you need quick reflexes to keep up with the hardest of music, and here is perhaps the point where controller-only play is a bit strained. It’s much easier to do fast hits with drum sticks than it is to press down buttons, but there are options for making it feasible. Holding your controller in a less standard manner for these tougher songs can allow for faster button presses, but also both note types are assigned to different buttons and you can even adjust which buttons they’re set too. Instead of just mashing A for Don for example, you can mash A and B quickly with two different fingers, although you can also get shoulder buttons and directional pad buttons involved to find the optimal setup that suits your own needs. In some ways, you do end up drumming a controller after all, it just requires a bit more accommodation and customization if you really want to get in the deep end of the music and difficulties on offer.

 

Luckily, Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! has different difficulty levels for every music track so if you are not ready to dive into those rapid fire challenges you can find some safer rhythm game play. All songs are available in Easy, Normal, Hard, and Extreme formats, the individual difficulty of a song to play within that difficulty also indicated by a star rating. A soft and slow song on Extreme can end up having fewer stars than an Easy one for an energetic track, but the higher difficulties always expect you to hit far more notes in total and better adhere to the music track in terms of how those notes are placed. Even on Easy though you will still clearly be playing along with the song even if there are some gentle moments where it expects far less drumming than the song’s construction would seemingly demand, but as you go up the ladder those notes are filled in. Normal can still be a challenge and does start to dabble in overlapping rapid notes, but Hard and Extreme live up to their names where you will need to be quick in swapping between Don and Ka in rapid succession. The game will not force you to ever play on a higher difficulty than you desire though, even in the online mode you pick your difficulty range and competing against other players will use an appropriately scaled weight system to decide if people playing on different difficulties are playing better. Playing well in that difficulty will bump you up its own self-contained scale of judging your play, but if you are intimidated by the rapid notes or don’t want to spend time doing the calm Easy mode options than you can leap right into where you feel you can drum the best. Some songs even offer “secret” versions that involve you just pressing right once more after Extreme on the selection screen for an alternate version.

Don and Ka are nearly all you have to worry about in Taiko no Tasujin: The Drum Master!, but there are three special types of notes that will appear in the game. Normally, you’ll be viewing the notes coming in from the right side within a horizontal bar, the player needing to hit the notes when they enter a circle on the left to earn points. If you hit it spot-on you earn a Good, if you’re a bit off in timing you’ll get OK, and a miss will be a Bad that breaks your ongoing note combo. To clear a song requires filling up a spirit bar that is filled by hitting notes correctly and rewards better play with the bar filling faster and maintaining its energy, but even missing too many notes won’t end the song if you want to play it all the way through to the end. At certain points in the songs though, a yellow drum roll may appear, where you just hammer your buttons as fast as you can to try and get as many notes in while the drum roll line lasts. Party horns and party balls can also appear that require rapid button presses to clear, although only the Don buttons work here and they both have required amounts of notes to hit to be cleared to earn the points and spirit power. These aren’t difficult at all to deal with most of the time unless the number is fairly high in a fast song, but it is nice to have moments where you can let loose and hammer the buttons instead of paying such close attention to whether the face-shaped notes coming down the line are red or blue. The movement of the notes isn’t too ambitious most of the time though, a few songs like Megalovania including some interesting spacing on things like the party poppers while Onegai Muscle gets cute with making some dumbbell shaped drum rolls, but mostly it’s a straightforward challenge to hit the notes right with some tempo changes that may make different parts of the song at least feel distinct in how things are presented. There are songs though that can change how the notes are presented based on how well you perform, although this is more a shifting difficulty level rather than unlocking creative presentations.

 

Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master!’s music list certainly shows favoritism towards its country of origin, many of its songs featuring untranslated Japanese lyrics and no subtitles for them either, not that you could really read them with how your attention will be locked on the note bar. However, there is some attention given to what the global audience might actually recognize in terms of quite a few picks. Many highly popular anime theme songs can be played, things like the A Cruel Angel’s Thesis from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cha-La Head Cha-La from Dragon Ball Z, and tracks featured in movies like Spirited Away or shows like One Piece, Naruto, Attack on Titan, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya are present as well. There’s a good mix of classic anime picks and more modern shows even if it doesn’t always label where the opening might be from, but some songs like Onegai Muscle have a catchy rhythm to them even if you don’t have any context on where it’s from or what it’s about. Video game music can be found in good numbers as well, the excellent tracks Megalovania and Hopes and Dreams from Undertale as well as Katamary Damacy’s unforgettably catchy Katamari on the Rocks some strong picks that make up for some more specific pulls that might not excite as much. Music from The Ninja Warriors and Darius seem here because Taito was agreeable rather than them being good picks, some medleys of old game music aren’t that cohesive, and it’s hard to believe a Scarlet Nexus song would be included for any reason beyond Bandai Namco cross-promoting its games.

 

Many songs in the track list do feel like they’re here more because they’re recognizable or enjoyable on their own rather than being good fits for taiko drum-alongs, although they are least mapped well to how you play so that you are trying to follow the track’s main melody instead of providing background drumming that might not be as exciting. However, there are more music types in play, including some original tracks made just for previous Taiko no Tatsujin titles that can be a bit more involved in how your drumming truly matches the song. The artificial voice program Vocaloid has a few songs thrown in too that feature Hatsune Miku, and there’s an oddly small Variety section that seems to mostly be there for two Touhou fan songs in Bad Apple!! and Cirno’s Perfect Math Class so it’s more video game adjacent music. The last two categories of music in the available song list though are ones that feel like they’re trying to appeal to broader tastes than Japanese cultural exports. Pop still features some Japanese tunes, but Last Christmas and the Jackson Five’s I Want You Back are present with English lyrics, and the Classical section includes many incredibly recognizable songs like the Carmen Prelude and Overture from “Orpheus in the Underworld”. Some like Toccata and Fugue were spiced up with a rock remix while other classical music ends up in a medley, but it was probably wise not to double down fully on only the Japanese-sourced songs. While many players who would pick up a Taiko no Tatsujin title are probably fans of the mostly Japanese series and expect such tracks, Xbox is an American brand and this game was released on Xbox Game Pass, making it a likely first entry for people who wouldn’t check it out otherwise. Many other songs are available as DLC though, often in packs sorted by their similar anime, classical, or video game origin, but looking beyond its market concerns, there are still a lot of quality songs mapped well to the game’s play style even if most of these specific title drops have meant nothing to you.

In the base game not every song will be immediately available, an in-game shop of rotating goods allowing you to purchase a few more to a total of over 70 tracks. Coins are earned by playing songs, although the difficulty level and your performance will determine how many are earned. Simply completing a song with the spirit meter full enough to not fail will earn you a few, but if you can hit every note you can earn a Full Combo for extra coins and if you can pull off the impressive feat of getting Good on every note you get even more. You also earn crowns shown on the song list for your best performance plus a high score you can try to beat, but the coin payouts are higher if you can earn the higher grade crowns for Full Combos or all Goods so there is incentive to not only try to perfect a song, but to play it on every difficulty for those high payouts. Online play also lets you earn coins although not as quick as you might expect since it would be a good incentive to ensure the multiplayer stays active, although you can always play along with another player on your system with local multiplayer too. There is no interference with the other player in multiplayer competition, just a contest to see who does better with their version of the same song that will be randomly picked online but is selectable with in-person play. Comparing yourself to another player is somewhat interesting, but rarely will you get moments that make the competition feel more memorable than playing on your own.

 

Coins can also be used in the shop to buy aesthetic things like dressing up the drum Don-chan who makes noises while you play and dances above the note line. You can purchase different sounds for your drumming so it can sound like a different instruments or even strange sounds like a girl shouting or old video game beeps. The coins are a solid enough motivator to check out more of your content and songs are picked to provide a daily bonus each day to give you a reason to come back besides playing songs you like. There are a few settings you can alter to try and better improve your performance too, Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! letting you enable things like automatic restarts without opening the start menu. You can set it to restart on the first miss if you want to go for a Full Combo for example, but you can also set it for a restart on the first OK or even just have the song auto play perfectly if you want to see what you’re getting into first.

 

However, one area that could have used a bit more effort and attention is the visuals while you play. Below the note line, Taiko no Tatsujin characters will appear in some festival atmosphere or other space inspired by Japanese culture or myth. These characters are often linked to such things as well either in how they’re dressed or what they are, and while it’s a friendly cartoon aesthetic and many of them are cute and friendly, they also aren’t really tailored towards the song being played. If you fill up your spirit meter you will at least see a few characters dressed to match the current genre header pop up and join in the fun, but this ties back to earlier where there are few moments where the note presentation never feels too unique. Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! could have had some characters or visuals tied specifically to certain songs or even just song groups that made the visuals feel more like they’re tailored to the music rather than a set of broadly applicable dancers, but it doesn’t impede the solid rhythm game action. However, with many of the songs being from previous games in the series and no drum controller on top of the presentation relying on interchangeable dance groups, it does feel like this is more a safe attempt to step into a potential new console market rather than one with unique ideas to draw in long time fans.

THE VERDICT: While it lacks a drum controller and it presents much of its music alongside the same broad Japanese festival aesthetic, Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! is still a quality rhythm game that maps its simple but challenging two-note system to its selection of songs fairly well. The coin earnings being separate for different difficulty levels of the same song encourage replaying them and leaving your comfort zone without outright requiring it, and there is plenty of range in the track list’s level of energy and challenge. It leans on Japanese music primarily but usually it’s recognizable outside of its home country or at least good enough to justify their presence despite a possible lack of familiarity, but most importantly, the note spacing manages to provide some involved play that matches the song’s rhythm well no matter what settings you use.

 

And so, I give Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! for Xbox Series X…

A GOOD rating. The core play is where Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! succeeds, the two note system pushed enough with its spacing and adherence to tempo that playing along is a challenge of matching the beat and keeping yourself limber enough to hit the more rapid fire note pile-ups. It is certainly a bit simple on Easy and Extreme requires some learning on how to even use your controller to tackle its note clusters, but there’s likely a spot in the difficulties where you can be challenged and entertained in equal measure. Less complex songs can help you acclimate to the different difficulties but even lower difficulties can pack a punch on songs with high tempos and high star ratings. Coins and the associated unlockables give you reason to return once you’ve played all the songs on a preferred difficulty, although the online probably should have been more generous if it wanted to stay lively. At the same time multiplayer is just a comparative sort where your results are the only thing that matters rather than there being any way to interact with the other player, but it’s not bad to just see how you stack up either. It is very much a rhythm game about hitting the right notes more than anything else, even the special note types mostly simple variations on pressing buttons fast so you can focus and achieve perfect runs or high scores just by getting very good at managing the two notes you need to hit. Making that it’s only focus means it doesn’t have too many motivators outside of the coin shop though, no structure or special modes to play making your time spent with this rhythm title feel too distinct.

 

Mostly, Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! doesn’t really come up short in its design, but it does raise some questions about what the game was trying to achieve. A lot of its visuals and even music come from previous games in the series, and while a lot of the Japanese music does have a good chance to be recognized by someone who would describe themselves as a fan of anime or video games, it doesn’t feel like it’s reaching out to new players with some big draw or attempting anything new for the series despite its new platform choice. Making it controller-only and releasing on Game Pass seems to imply it’s courting an audience that might not have any experience with Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master! but it also doesn’t change itself much to try and draw in these new fans. That does mean it provides a pretty clear picture of its true identity though and that identity is an enjoyable and adorable drum-based rhythm game.