Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack

Genre: Compilation / Music-Rhythm

Players: 1

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Review:

Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack includes two family-friendly Taiko No Tatsujin Music-Rhythm games released at the same time for Nintendo Switch in 2020, Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 1 and Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 2. Both games are very similar in many ways, but feature different track lists, as well as some differences in each game’s Story Mode.

Here is what I thought of each of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Grade
Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 1	Music-Rhythm	1	C
tl;dr Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 1 is a Music-Rhythm game that takes the core gameplay of the prior game in the series, Drum ‘N’ Fun!, and strips away some of that game’s best features in favor of an awful new RPG-style Story Mode. The gameplay is still terrible unless you’re using the taiko drum accessory of the handheld mode’s touchscreen, and while the gameplay is still fun and the 53 song setlist is a decent value for the price, there’s little reason to get this game when Drum ‘N’ Fun! is far superior.
Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 2	Music-Rhythm	1	C
tl;dr Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure 2 is a Music-Rhythm game that takes the core gameplay of the prior game in the series, Drum ‘N’ Fun!, and strips away some of that game’s best features in favor of an awful new RPG-style Story Mode. The gameplay is still terrible unless you’re using the taiko drum accessory of the handheld mode’s touchscreen, and while the gameplay is still fun and the 66 song setlist is a good value for the price, there’s still little reason to get this game when Drum ‘N’ Fun! is far superior.

Okay, so those two reviews will undoubtedly look pretty similar, and that is because both of these games are unsurprisingly also very similar. Both of them have absolutely atrocious motion controls, boring gamepad controls, and surprisingly good (but oddly hidden away) touchscreen controls. Both games feature the same extremely cutesy, Japanesey presentation, and both games have traded the wonderful multiplayer and Party Game features of the earlier game, Drum ‘N’ Fun! for a new RPG-style Story Mode (slightly different in both games), that is absolutely terrible.

So here’s the catch – each of those games individually sells for $30, while the clearly-superior Drum ‘N’ Fun! sells for $50. But Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack bundles both of the Rhythmic Adventure games together for $50. So are two disappointing games better than one good one?

It might seem like a silly, obvious question, but there’s some argument to be made here – these two games combined feature 119 songs, which is well beyond Drum ‘N’ Fun!’s 80. In terms of pure content for the core game mode, this package is the better of the two. However… that argument ignores all the quality content removed from the games in this package, and how important they were in balancing out the weaknesses in the gameplay.

It was easier to ignore the terrible motion controls and gamepad controls in Drum ‘N’ Fun! because players could still use the excellent touchscreen controls to play multiplayer games online in handheld mode, or use the Party Games to enjoy some fun Music-Rhythm gameplay alone or with friends while the Nintendo Switch was docked. Without either of these features, you’re limited to playing by yourself, and you’re limited to either buying the taiko drum accessory or playing using the touchscreen in handheld mode… at least, if you want the game to actually be fun to control.

However, there’s another element at work here that makes this package lacking. Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack presents itself as a single icon on the Nintendo Switch, even if you buy it digitally. However, both of the included games are still very much separate. While this makes sense for the Story Modes, which are different (albeit similar), it doesn’t make any sense to keep the song lists of the two games separate when they’re both bought together as a package. And this odd choice is made even more infuriating because players wanting to swap between the song lists of the two games need to back out through multiple menu screens to do so, with a few of those menu screens having annoying unskippable animations with those high-pitched characters.

Separating the content in this game makes it feel like these games have fewer songs than they actually do, but the extreme inconvenience of forcing players to jump through all these hoops to get to those songs is outright inexplicable. And while this might have been understandable if this was a compilation of games that had been released a few years apart, these two games were released simultaneously. There is no good reason for them to be segmented the way they are.

I suppose, if you feel you need to collect every game in this series, Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is still a good value compared to its separate components, saving you $10 over the individual prices of those games. However, despite a much larger tracklist, this game is still far inferior to Taiko No Tatsujin: Drum ‘N’ Fun!, with the included games here cutting out many of Drum ‘N Fun’s best features and replacing them with terrible RPG modes. So unless you’re one of those die-hard fans of the series, just skip this game and get Drum ‘N’ Fun! instead.

tl;dr – Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack is a family-friendly Compilation of Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythmic Adventure Pack 1 and 2, and while this package’s combined 119 songs make it enticing, this value is tarnished by the way these games remove multiple great features from Drum ‘N’ Fun! and replace them with terrible RPG modes, and the way the content is segregated between the two games and forces players to jump through multiple annoying menus to get to them. Unless you’re a huge fan of this series, just get Drum ‘N’ Fun! instead.

Grade: C

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