Taiko no Tatsujin DS FAQ by Wing http://www.winglmui.com Contents 1 - Introduction and Copyright 2 - Gameplay Basics 3 - Note Types 4 - Results and Rewards 5 - Main Menu Translation 6 - Free Play Menu Translation 7 - Daily Challenge Dojo 8 - Mailbox and Unlockables 9 - Track List 10 - Notes on Tracks 11 - Rank Rewards 12 - Credits and Thanks ---------- 1 - Introduction and Copyright I wrote this FAQ in an after after realizing that there are almost no resources (in English) on this game on the Internet save for a very helpful, basic FAQ by Tuddy666 and the Wikipedia page. I've collected all the information I discovered myself while playing this game for the last couple months in hopes that, with menu translations, more people will import this wonderful game! This guide is copyrighted under the Creative Commons by license, which means that you are free to do whatever you want with this text as long as you attribute the original source to me. For more details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode ---------- 2 - Gameplay Basics On the bottom screen, you have a drum. The goal of the game is to hit the drum (or not, as you'll see later) at the right time to score points. You can play with one stylus, two stylii or even no stylii (you can use the DS buttons as well). When you play a real taiko, you can hit the drum in the middle to make a POM sound or on the wooden sides to get a more tappy sound. This is achieved by hitting the drum with your stylus and the area outside your drum with your stylus, respectively. You can accomplish the same thing by using any d-pad button or the ABXY buttons to hit the drum and the L/R buttons to hit the sides. It does not matter which set(s) of buttons you use or which stylus you use. The game is blind to how many hands (and which hand) you use. It also does not matter where you strike your stylus---as long as it hits the drum it is a hit, and the same applies to the area outside the drum. There are times when you want to hit very specific places to score more points, though. During gameplay, you want to look at the top screen. Notes appear on the right side of the screen and scroll left. You will need to hit the drum or its side right as the note passes the transparent circle on the left. If a red note appears, hit the drum. If a blue note appears, hit the side of the drum. That's it! Once you hit a note, some text will appear underneath it. You will either get an orange GOOD, a white OKAY or a blue NOT OKAY. GOOD is Taiko no Tatsujin's version of "perfect", and it scores you more points. If you forget to hit a note, hit the wrong part of the drum or just screw up, you get a NOT OKAY and it breaks your combos. During gameplay, if you get 10 or more consecutive notes, your little Taiko Avatar will start counting your combo count. Every so often it will squeak out "50 hit combo!" or whatever in Japanese, which is simutaneously encouraging and distracting, so be careful. There is a scale on the top right. The more notes you hit, the higher it goes. I am not sure what it does exactly and need to do a little more experimenting with it. Sometimes the transparent circle that indicates when you should hit notes expands in size and gets set on fire. I assume it means that you're in overdrive mode and you get more points. I have not figured out how to get it to do that yet. Under the notes there are some dancing characters. Like in games like Elite Beat Agents, the more dancing characters you have, the better. They seem to appear if you're not screwing up. ---------- 3 - Note Types There are surprisingly many types of notes: Red Notes When they pass under your circle, hit the drum. Blue Notes When they pass under your circle, hit the side of the drum. The higher the difficulty, the more blue notes there are and the more they weave themselves with the red. It does sound better with blue notes around, though, since they make a different sound. Big Red Note When they pass under your circle, hit the drum. The closer your hit is to the center of the circle, the more points you get! They correspond to louder thund sounds. If you're using the DS buttons, press two drum buttons at the same time. Big Blue Note When they pass under your circle, hit the side of the drum. The closer your hit is to the drum, the more points you score! Take care to not actually hit the drum proper, though! If you are using the DS buttons, press L and R simutaneously. Balloon Note Once they hit your circle, a number appears next to them telling you how many times you need to hit the drum to burst the balloon and score points. In the higher difficulty levels the number is insanely high, so keep drumming! Warning: the balloon notes often cover up an upcoming note, so be careful! Orange Note There are notes with long tails. As long as the note/tail is under your circle, smack away at the drum to score points! Spinning Hand Drum Note They look like little Japanese hand drums and are hard to miss even if you have no idea what they are. Once they hit, hit the drum, then its side, then the drum, then its side, etc. until a tornado appears and your Taiko Avatar blasts off in a rainbow. Seriously. Note that only the red and blue notes (small and big) count towards (and against) combos. This means that even if you hit the drum 10 times during an orange note they will not count towards the combo. Similarly, if you failed at bursting a balloon or a hand drum note it will not break your combo. ---------- 4 - Results and Rewards After you play a song, there seems to be three types of rewards: Gold Crown - In order to get this you need to hit every single note. Silver Crown - I have missed about 10 notes and still gotten a silver crown. I am not sure what the requirements for this one are. Medal - This is independent of the crowns and I think is a score achievement. I got it once with only 33% of the notes hit, so I'm not sure if it's even an achievement... If you cleared a song, your Taiko Avatar will say something in Japanese with the English word CLEAR in the middle which translates to about "song CLEAR successful!". If you failed, it will say "song CLEAR failure", and a cloud will rain on the poor thing. Sometimes, after you finish a song, you will get a new mail. Press Y to read it (or press A to skip and read it later). Sometimes these mails include gifts that you can use to decorate your Avatar. Others I've made out are challenges and new, unlocked songs. More details later. ---------- 5 - Main Menu Translation When you start your DS, you'll see a "don't hit the screen hard" warning... When the title screen appears, tap or press a buttom to continue. Choose a savegame. You'll be prompted for a name if it's a new game. There are 5 buttons in the main menu, from top to bottom: Performance Mode (Yellow Button) This is the freeplay mode. More on this later. Daily Challenge Dojo Mode (Orange Button) You can challenge the dojo master once a day. More on this later. Wireless Battle (Green Button) This is the obvious multiplayer feature. I have never played it because I do not know anyone else with this game. =( Once you are in there, though, the top button creates a game and the bottom one looks for a game to join. House (Light Blue Button) This takes you to your house where you can custiomize your Avatar (tap the wardrobe), read mail (tap the mailbox), view the tutorial (the yellow guy in the corner) and to play with your Avatar (click on it and it will do something cute). It also displays how many gold and silver crowns you have. Options (Purple Button) There are three options here. The first lets you choose from three button control schemes, the second changes your name and the third deletes all your data. Don't use the third one. =) ---------- 6 - Free Play Menu Translation Free Play, or Performance Mode, is the bulk of the game. How many gold crowns can you get? Once in the menu, you have a list of songs that you can choose from in the bottom screen. The songs take the shape of vertical blocks. Scroll left and right using the arrows on the side or with the left/right D-pad buttons. The blocks are colored differently according to genre. See the track list for more details. If a song is highlighted, the right side of the top screen tells you your highest score / best record on the song. From the top right, going down, is your best score, your best hit-rate, the numbers of GOODs, OKAYs and NOT OKAYs you have and your highest combo count. The left side of the top screen tells you your name and your rank. You can only increase your rank via the Daily Challenge Dojo. The middle of the top screen tells you the name of the song, where it's from (if applicable) and the difficulty of the song. The more stars, the more difficult it is, although the color of the stars matter too! More below... At the very bottom of the bottom screen are two tabs. The middle tab lets you select the difficulty of the game. The left icon is easy, the middle one is normal and the right one is hard. A one-star song in hard is harder than a three-star song in easy! You can see what difficulty you're in by looking at the colors of the stars: red is easy, green is medium and blue is hard. This is useful to know in the Dojo. The bottom right tab gives you two weird options. The top option lets you choose the sound that your drum makes. You can even make it make baseball sounds (where hitting the side of the drum makes an umpire yell OUT!) once you unlock it. =D The bottom option dictates the speed the notes move. I have no idea if it affects your score. ---------- 7 - Daily Challenge Dojo Once you tap on the Dojo button, a bald Taiko Master will greet you with a challenge. The challenge will be the song that takes up a third of the bottom screen. It's hard to miss. He'll start with really easy ones and then move to harder ones as you increase your rank. Note that the only way to see what difficulty the song is in is by looking at the color of the stars. Once you tap on the song, you will have two options: Challenge and Practice. You can tap the blue button and practice the song as much as you want, but you can only do the Challenge once a day. If you fail, you'll have to wait until the next day. If you succeed, he will present you with tomorrow's challenge and you can practice that one, but not play the actual Challenge until tomorrow. Every time you win a challenge, you move up a rank. If you get a gold crown (100%) on a challenge, you move up two ranks at once! Every few ranks you will unlock something. I have not gotten to the highest rank yet, so I don't know what is in store for me. Sorry. Note: Sometimes he will challenge you with songs that you have not unlocked yet! Practice! ---------- 8 - Mailbox and Unlockables Sometimes after you increase in rank or finish a song you'll get a mail. It may contain information (which is useless unless you can read it...), an accessory, a new sound effect, a new song or a challenge. If a mail has a gift icon next to its name, it's got stuff in it! Duh. If a mail has a circlar icon with a character in it next to its name, it's a challenge. Accessories: If you open a gift mail and see some kind of item on the bottom left, congradulations, you've just unlocked it! You can now use it to make your Avatar all pretty! Sound Effect: If you open a gift and see an icon that has a single blue eighth note in it, you've unlocked a sound effect and can make your drum make that noise by going to the bottom right tab on the Free Play menu. Song: The holy grail of unlockables! You'll get these if there are two red eighth notes in your mail. Challenge: Once you open a challenge mail, you'll see a fish with its arms crossed. (This game is very silly.) There will be three lines in orange. The top is the difficulty, the middle the song and the bottom the goal. If you play that song in that difficulty and meet the goal, the fish will send you something good! So far the goals I've had have been score goals and combo goals (you need a 20 hit combo minimum, say). Note that in Japanese large-ish numbers are counted in ten-thousands. So if you see a "5" chances are you need 50,000 points. My guess is that you get challenges based on how many gold crowns you get. I seem to get about a challenge per 5 gold crowns or so. ---------- 9 - Track List From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiko_no_Tatsujin_DS J-pop 縺輔￥繧峨ｓ縺ｼ (Sakuranbo) 豌怜?荳翫???竊 (Kibun Joujou竊鯛?) 螟冗･ｭ繧 (Natsu Matsuri) 豎ｺ諢上?譛昴↓ (Ketsui no Asa ni) WON'T BE LONG! 繝槭ち繧｢繧､繝槭す繝ｧ繧ｦ (Mata Aimashou) DANCE2 feat.繧ｽ繧､繧ｽ繝ｼ繧ｹ (Pocky Chocolate Commercial Song - DANCE2 feat.Soysauce) Anime Touch Together (Pokﾃｩmon: Diamond and Pearl series Japanese Opening) Jﾅｫken Sentai Gekiranger Yes! PreCure 5 Smile GoGo! Doraemon no Uta Detective Conan Main Theme Anpanman Classical Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven) William Tell Overture (Rossini) Orpheus in the Underworld (Offenbach) (aka the can-can song) Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov) Classic medley (Wedding compilation) Fantaisie-Impromptu (Chopin) (Unlockable) Video game music Super Mario Bros. medley "Go my way" (The Idolm@ster) Namco medley, including music from Mappy and Battle City Namco original 繧ｭ繝溘↓繧ｿ繝?メ? 繧ゅ§縺ｴ縺｣縺溘ｓ繝｡繝峨Ξ繝ｼ KAGEKIYO 鬚ｨ髮ｲ?√ヰ繝√♀蜈育函 鮟定飴譚･闊ｪ (unlockable) 螟ｪ鮠謎ｹｱ闊槭??轤弱?蜊ｷ (unlockable) 螟ｪ鮠謎ｹｱ闊槭??鬚ｨ縺ｮ蜊ｷ (unlockable) 螟ｪ鮠謎ｹｱ闊槭??豌ｴ縺ｮ蜊ｷ (unlockable) 縺ｦ繧薙△縺擾ｼ抵ｼ撰ｼ撰ｼ (unlockable) Variety 縺溘ｉ縺薙?縺溘ｉ縺薙?縺溘ｉ縺 (Tarako Tarako Tarako) Traditional 繧ゅｊ縺ｮ縺上∪縺輔ｓ (Mori no O-Kumasan) (A Bear in the Forest) 縺?〓縺ｮ縺翫∪繧上ｊ縺輔ｓ (Inu no O-mawarisan) (Dog Policeman) ---------- 10 - Notes on Selected Tracks Super Mario Bros. Medley: Watch out for the tempo change when Mario goes underground! It becomes much faster all of a sudden! 螟ｪ鮠謎ｹｱ闊? There are three versions of this track and I believe they are all unlocked in the Dojo. They're much more Taiko-related than most other songs. =) ---------- 11 - Ranks and Rewards You start at "Beginner", and you keep going up... Every two ranks gives you a reward. Beginner Ninth Level - Sound Effect (Taiko 2) Eigth Level Seventh Level - Song (鮟定飴譚･闊ｪ) Sixth Level Fifth Level - Sound Effect (Baseball) Fourth Level Third Level - Sound Effect (?) Second Level First Level - 螟ｪ鮠謎ｹｱ闊槭??轤弱?蜊ｷ First Dan Second Dan - Sound Effect (?) I haven't gotten and further yet. =) ---------- 12 - Credit and Thanks Wikipedia for the Song List Tuddy666 for inspiration Otter Creek Brewery for awesome beer (yay Vermont!) If you have any contributions and corrections (I still don't know how some longs are unlocked. I unlocked all but two songs but have no idea how I unlocked two of them!) send them my way! I'm at games@winglmui.com. I won't promise that I will reply to everything, though, since last time I put up an FAQ I got almost 300 replies about it... Thanks! And you can find my web site at http://www.winglmui.com