For a couple of days, we failed to mention on this blog the release of the latest Taiko no Tatsujin spinoff for i-devices, which also indirectly influenced our choice for yesterday's Song of the Week feature.
Let's recover the time lost with the game's first PV and some infos about the rules and other small nods to the main games!
Released last Friday by Namco Bandai and Criware, Taiko no Tatsujin RPG Da-Don! (太鼓の達人 RPGだドン！) is a puzzle-strategy game where our Don-Chan has to traverse a series of hallways with a party of five-six members and fight hostile creatures by launching attacks from the lower part of the screen. Wait, where have I heard that one before...?
Jokes aside, while the style of gameplay feels very reminiscent of GungHo's mobile hit game Puzzle & Dragons, the main gimmick of this game for launching attacks is totally different, relying more on a luck-based factor rather than color/orb-matching skills. On each turn, the player has to touch the side of the lower screen in order to fling on the upper board all the small Chibi-Dons which are closer to the zone pressed, in order to both reach the caracters on the lower half of the screen for the basic attack and trigger the Strike mechanic by hitting each of the special orbs on the grid: Green Skill (which release sparks who can charge the party members' skills), Red Heart (which spawns hearts for life replenish) and Blue Attack (which casts additional Chibi Meka-Dons for extra damage and more chances of hitting the remaining orbs).
By triggering the Strike mechanic on consecutive turns, more special orbs appear on the board and other special events like the Slot Machine and the Golden Chibi-Don can power up the team both with luck-based event or simple note patterns to hit correctly (like on Taiko Plus).
Aside for the in-game play mechanic, everything else of the iOs Taiko RPG follows the general scheme of Puzzle & Dragons: the game requires an online connection in order to play, every dungeon requires to spend certain amounts of stamina points (with 1 point replenishing every 10 minutes), monsters can grow stronger by feeding them other monsters or using specific evolution material for new forms and magic stones are used as in-game currency in order to either replenish stamina, expand the monster box, continuing after a Game Over or use the in-game gacha for a chance of getting rare monsters, often unavailable in regular dungeons.
Story-wise, the game follows Don-Chan's journey through several locations in order to stop five legendary musicians, whose music can control other living beings and used as personal minions. The five musicians are all named after famous music composers and are symbolized by one of the game's five elements: Fire for Beethoven, Water for Mozart, Wood for Liszt, Light for Schubert and Dark for Dvorak.
Even if some original tracks are being made for the game's Menu screen and generic standard/boss fights inside the dungeons, some tracks from the main Taiko games' tradition appear in the game as well. For example, the Software Update screen loops the three Angel Dream songs until the update is completed, and the music being played for the boss fights against the five musicians is one of the tracks/remixes from the real composers' most famous works which made into Taiko games at some point. In the order suggested above, the Classic songs being featured are cuts from Symphony No. 5 "Fate", Toccata and Fugue and Rock, La Campanella, Die Forelle and From the New World.
As this game can't be considered as part of the main Taiko game series in means of rhythm gaming, we're not going to delve so much into this game's content, unless dedicated fan-made strategy web sites about the game are being made for all of the game's features, in which case we'll simply redirect there.. Of course, if this game will be tied with other games in some sort of collaboration events, we'll let you know!
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As a side note of this RPG-related entry, we have updated one of the previous Song of the Week feature with the Oni gameplay video of RPG (the Sekai no Owari song). Don't miss it!
