Always knew I would love this but importing the drum was intimidating.

Finally bit the bullet and ordered the thing, and have spent the last two weeks since absolutely obsessed with Taiko no Tatsujin; As of now, I have cleared every song on Hard, started working through the Extreme difficulty. I even made it into the top 500 players in the Hard difficulty online ranked league.

I missed having a good plastic instrument game, and this offers a great tactile percussion feel while taking up significantly less space than a Rock Band drumset or even a Guitar Hero controller.

This is a rabbit hole I see myself falling down for a good while. Already looking at sensitivity mods for the Hori drum kit.

This game is just great all around! It's your typical rhythm game where you press the buttons along with the beat and the corresponding cues on screen. The visuals are really colorful and super cute! The hard and extreme modes are actually pretty difficult, but it's nice that you can choose to play the game calmly and casually or challenge yourself and test your sanity. The song selection is pretty good too and so are the available songs that you can purchase from the eshop. The multiplayer minigames are really fun as well and keep you engaged whether you play alone vs CPU or with friends.

GOTY 2018 - NUMBER SIX
Video version

The Nintendo Switch is a fantastic platform for so many reasons, but one aspect has been a thrilling surprise for me. The audience it has cultivated is very much in line with my tastes. Switch owners tend to be people who have been playing games for decades, who hold older games in high esteem and are particularly responsive to unique, charming games. Publishers have noticed, and here’s the wonderful result of all of this – Taiko no Tatsujin has been released in Europe.

Now, you may know, I am a really big fan of Taiko no Tatsujin. It’s a big part of the reason why I have a Japanese PS2. It’s a cute, simple rhythm game with tracklists cultivated and contributed to by some of the musicians who worked on Katamari Damacy. About half of the Namco Original tracks in each game sound like they could have appeared on a Katamari soundtrack, and there’s nothing that draws me quite to a rhythm game quite like that.

Drum ‘n’ Fun is a really great entry-level Taiko no Tatsujin. You get a few big Nintendo songs, a load of big anime theme tunes, some weird arrangements of publicly licensed nursery rhymes and classical music, and a load of J-pop stuff you’d likely never heard of. Mind you, a couple of them are songs you might recognise from Ouendan, and if you’re into Japan-focused rhythm games, you really ought to be familiar with Ouendan.

Crucially, the difficulty range is maybe the widest it’s ever been in the series, and the control options are similarly diverse. You can have young kids play, shaking the joycon with a ton of assist options on, or if you’re a real rhythm game elite, you may opt to invest in a Tatacon and try everything on the hardest settings. Domestically available Tatacon. I never thought I’d live to see the day. You can also play with traditional buttons or use the touchscreen if you’re playing portably. You can enjoy the game how you like.

There’s also DLC, which is a bit of a novelty for me, since I’ve only really stuck with the PS2 games before. There’s new tracks every few weeks, and with the game selling so well in Japan, I don’t see it slowing down any time soon. I have to mention that the PS2 experimental breakbeat techno screaming classic, Saitama 2000 is available for purchase on western eShops and comes with a heavy recommendation from me. I’d almost go as far as to say I’d consider it to be Taiko no Tatsujin’s theme tune, and my only disappointment is that it wasn’t included from the start.

There’s party games too, and while they’re generally fun, with some really great highlights amongst them, I’ve only really included them in the video to make it look a little more visually interesting. The real draw for me is the core rhythm gameplay and the bizarre tracklist.

Taiko no Tatsujin is a firm favourite for me, and I’m so glad to have such easy access to it. Not only in the sense that I could go into my local GAME and ask for a copy, but it’s on the Switch. I can load the game up whenever and wherever I want, and try perfecting Odoru Pompokorin yet again. I could always go make sure the Japanese PS2’s connected, set up a Tatacon, browse through for a certain disc and play Taiko no Tatsujin until I decide to put it away again, but now I can turn it on and off on a whim. And I often have those whims. Taiko no Tatsujin’s an arcade classic because it’s really great in short sessions, and now that experience is accessible to the home audience. Brilliant. I’ve got to applaud it for that.