Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack Review – Explore To Your Own Beat

Rhythm games have been a fun and creative way for players to enjoy their favorite songs for a long time. Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack, developed and published by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment for the Nintendo Switch, ties a classic arcade rhythm style game to an RPG story in an interesting mixture of adventure and catchy J-pop songs from popular anime. However, the game falls just short of amazing thanks to repetitive music and difficult controls.

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack offers two modes to play with each of the two adventure packs included in the game. The first is ‘Taiko Mode,’ which is basically an arcade mode in which players can select any of the over 130 catchy J-pop songs included in the game. Taiko Mode allows players to explore four different difficulty levels, but the jump from ‘normal’ to ‘difficult’ is unfairly large. When normal becomes boring and players want to go up to the next bar, they may find themselves overwhelmed as a result.

Playing songs in Taiko Mode will allow players to unlock decorations for their avatar, Don the sentient taiko drum, but not much else. ‘Story Mode’ in each game allows players to explore two fetch quest-style RPG stories. The stories themselves lack narrative cohesion and focus on missing items that the player must find using the power of music to restore balance to the world.

In both Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack stories, players advance by battling using the rhythm mini-game as a fighting system. Players wander through a map as Don the taiko drum, and when they encounter an enemy or engage in combat, their performance in the rhythm mini-game determines the damage their opponent takes.  The struggle however, is that often a map only contains four songs for the copious random enemy encounters the player will face trying to get from one objective to the next. This quickly becomes grating, especially because Taiko Mode allows players to sample the ample interesting soundtracks available, but they are trapped with the least enjoyable tunes to battle through over and over again in the RPG story. The issues with the normal-to-hard difficulty jump from Taiko Mode also impacts the RPG stories, with ‘normal’ being too easy, and ‘hard’ being almost impossible.

Another rough area in Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is the motion controls for the Joy-Cons. The game can be played three different ways: Buttons, Joy-Cons, or a taiko drum pad that can be bought separately for between 50-100 USD. However, for those who don’t want to eat the expense on the drum pad, buttons are really the only way to play. The Joy-Con motion controls are incredibly bad, and unless the player swings their Joy-Cons at just the right angle, the motions don’t register on the Nintendo Switch. To beat out certain notes on Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack, players swing the controls up and down, or from the sides inward. It’s not intuitive and becomes extremely frustrating after a few failed songs. This leaves the player to use the button controls, which for a game designed to mimic slamming out awesome beats on a drum, just feels lackluster.

The other spot that Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack curiously stumbles at is a complete lack of multiplayer functions. In a game that is so similar to past titles like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, the general lack of of multiplayer, even in the Taiko Mode arcade, seems like a huge oversight. This was included in the past Nintendo Switch Taiko no Tatsujin game, so why it wasn’t included in either of the adventure pack games is baffling. The lack of multiplayer competition quickly renders Taiko Mode boring, as players are left to simply challenge their own old high scores.

All of that being said, Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is fun, if easy to become bored with, and a solid way to enjoy good J-pop music. The soundtracks included a range from classical music to favorite anime opening themes from shows like Pokémon and Demon Slayer. While the frustrating controls and lack of multiplayer leave much to be desired, the game is bright and colorful, and has a charm to it that helps make up for its more minor shortcomings. Ultimately, Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is a good adventure, and if players can get past the repetitive use of the simpler songs, the gameplay does give an interesting take on how to tie music into an RPG style fighting system.

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is available now on the Nintendo Switch. A Nintendo Switch code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.

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