Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival | Review (2024)

Don-chan’s latest adventure has finally made its way to modern console platforms and PC—meet ‘Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival’, developer Bandai Namco Amusement Labs’ and publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment’s latest addition to their taiko-bashing rhythm game series found across arcades and home consoles worldwide. Rhythm Festival first popped up on the Nintendo Switch, giving the little red and light blue taiko drum Don-chan more game modes, more customisation, and a cute little slice-of-life story to unlock additional NAMCO Original songs. And more importantly, it finally adds a path for Xbox players to be able to use a Taiko drum for the first time!

In Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival, players hit their taiko drum to the rhythm of the beat. It’s as simple as that: as red or blue dons fly towards the rhythm marker on the lefthand side of the screen, you simply tap the associated button on your controller or the portion of the Taiko drum set (if you’ve gone out and bought one, which you should somewhat consider). Sometimes you’ll need to rapidly drum to break certain notes or tap two buttons of the same colour to hit the larger notes that fly your way. Taiko’s gameplay has always been about its simplicity, and I think it’s no different here; the game’s difficulty comes in the form of higher song ranks, hitting a new all-time score, and note density plus speed of the song. Expect to shred up your controller, so I highly suggest using an old con or even buying the drum set from HORI and the like.

Songs vary in variety, but there’s a lot of categories to choose from. You’ve got pop, anime, VOCALOID, classical, game, variety, and NAMCO original music. Nearly all of the game’s songs are rooted in Japanese pop and entertainment culture, so don’t go buying Rhythm Festival expecting the Top 40 or something—Billie Eilish’s “bad guys” is on the game’s base list and it sticks out like a bruised toe (read: it sounds awful). What you can expect to hear are the likes of RADWIMPS “Zenzenzense”, Mariya Takeuchi’s “PLASTIC LOVE”, “Mixed nuts” from SPY X FAMILY’s first cour, William Tell Overture, and so on and so forth.

Odd songs to be played off a Taiko drum, you might think, but the rhythm flows quite well, and the songs are quite enjoyable. The track list for these games has always been odd but that’s not stopped me from pounding a theoretical drum set. I will say, however, that I am mildly disappointed in the game’s base track list. Songs you might have seen in the The Drum Master’s base game haven’t made their way to Rhythm Festival (like Bandai’s own Tekken 7 track…).

You can buy a Music Pass this time around, however, which grants you access to an additional 700 or so tracks to play for a measly ten bucks every three months. On top of that, Bandai plans on adding songs to this list every month which is quite nice. Though mind, this pass wasn’t live during most of my review period, only going live a few hours before the game’s launch last night. I bought the pass but so far, none of the songs have popped up. I’ll give it a bit before I start complaining to someone.

Now Rhythm Festival has more game modes than ever, so if you get tired of beating the drums alone, you can take up the task with a friend in local play or even go online. You can play Party Modes that allow up to four players to play along or duke it out. Don-chan can dress up as basically anything and everything and there is a revolving store that fills up with more clothing as you level up and unlock costumes and story events. You can take these customisations online and show the world just how Hatsune Miku you are.

All though here’s a problem that rears its ugly head: this game has a lot of loading screens, and it’ll take time just getting to the start menu much less looking around the main menu. As you play the game, your level “increases” but it isn’t finalised til you return to the menu and activate the level-ups, which is unskippable. Heck, when you unlock multiple cosmetics in a row, they all pop up one at a time. I’m not a fan of this style of user experience and, to add to all this, Rhythm Master more-or-less expects a network connection at all times. If you go offline, your Music Pass won’t work and some DLC tracks might not even launch as apparently, they require downloads, too.

But other than that, it’s another fun Taiko game. Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival keeps to its core tenants by offering a simple yet fun rhythm game for all to enjoy. This is the ultimate package, so to speak, and I can easily recommend it to just about everyone. ∎

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