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  • Adaptational Displacement: Not many people know that the fan-favorite "Natsu Matsuri" by Whiteberry is actually a remix of the song of the same name by Jitterin’ Jinn. In fact, the original version was only playable years after the remix was introduced in the game!
  • Awesome Music:
    • To start with, "Nijiiro Yumeiro Taikoiro" by Yoko Takahashi, the opening theme song for the third numbered first-gen arcade and the first console release on PS2. Unlike most Namco Original musics and songs, it is one of the few that has the full length version.
    • Tobikkiri! Anime Special for PS2 has the anisong-ish "Hibike! Taiko no Tatsujin" as the main theme song and is performed by Hironobu Kageyama, Ichiro Mizuki and Mitsuko Horie. Like "Nijiiro Yumeiro Taikoiro", it also has the full length version.
    • Do-Don to Nidaime! for Wii has "LaLaLa☆Happiness" as its main theme song, and is performed by Miki Narahashi (voice actress of Don and Katsu) and Akane Ueda (voice actress of Alumi)!
    • "Sacred Ruin", an original song from Don and Katsu's Time and Space Adventure, is the second song to be crossed over to other rhythm games like CHUNITHM, maimai, SoundVoltex and Groove Coaster after "Kita Saitama 2000". And unlike "Kita Saitama 2000", it's a legitimate and epic song.
    • Drum Session's main theme song "Tsunagare! Hinogare! Uchiagare!" by MANA is one catchy song.
    • One of Drum 'n' Fun's Namco Original deserves special mention: "void setup". This song is not in any natural language. Instead, it is Processing code read, sung and rapped along.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • Taiko 0 for 2011 release of Taiko no Tatsujin.
    • "Kechadon 2000" was called "Gatling 2000" by fans due to it being very fast by the standard of that time.
  • Goddamned Bats: Large notes can become this on harder charts on console versions when they come in packs and/or in high speed since players will need to hit them with both hands to get full points (you still need to hit with both hands even with a drum controller, whereas you just have to hit the drum with a little more force on arcade). Their presence can also make it harder to read the chart than if they're small notes. Some charts like the Ura Oni chart of Dangan Notes are especially tricky with these notes.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The Ura Oni chart for "Cirno's Perfect Math Class 9th Anniversary Edition'' has a few parts with overspeed notes and/or notes of different speed that resemble "!!!Chaos Time!!!”; In late 2023, a song called "!!!Cirno's Perfect Math Time!!!", that is a mash up of "Cirno's Perfect Math Class" and "!!!Chaos Time!!!", with all the latter's craziness, would be released.
  • Moe: Once you reach the apex of a song, your little drum character starts dancing "The Monkey"... and it's absolutely adorable!
  • Most Wonderful Sound: On many versions, when you finish a song with a full combo, Don-chan will yell "Full Combo!" ecstatically. In some versions when you finish a song with all "Good" ratings, he'll instead say "Donderful Combo!".
  • Nightmare Fuel: Joubutsu2000. The lyrics itself are about a man giving up and gaining peace before his death. Hear a woman speaking 'Trois', 'Sept', 'Cinq', 'Six', 'Quatr'? "3,7,5,6,4" in Japanese sounds like 皆殺し, which means "kill everyone". There is also a very faint voice saying "I'm hungry" in Chinese that is very unnerving. That crackling noise near the end? It's the sound of an incinerator, like those you see in a mortuary. And the final notes of the chart on Oni difficulty? A sequence of 3 reds-blue-7 reds-blue-5 reds-blue-6 reds-blue-4 reds-4 blues.
    • Some other songs in the 2000 series are also unsettling, although not quite to the extent of "Joubutsu 2000": for example, "Taberuna 2000" is about a man dying after eating nonstop for three hours, and the "song" consists of noises like chewing food, heartbeats that eventually stop, and even worse, someone screaming in the background.
    • "Hataraku 2000" is about overstressed workers arguing. At some parts of the song, it suddenly becomes very loud, with people screaming.
    • "Suuhaa 2000" is about a man hallucinating after taking drugs while going to a restaurant after breaking up with his girlfriend, with a voice of an angry man being louder and clearer especially near the end as if he is escaping the song to reach you.
    • "Waraeru 2000" is consist entirely of weird laughters and mocking voices. During one part of it there's a morse code saying "Self-responsibility? Escape to survive!", so it can easily be interpreted as someone going insane from their overwhelming responsibility and/or the hostility from other people.
  • Nintendo Hard: Easy and Normal tend to be fairly easy, and Hard is challenging yet not insane. Oni/Extreme, however...hoo boy. (To be fair, most Oni charts under 8 stars are still fair, but the things after that will be much harder, until some of the 10* charts that send out notes like a gatling gun) There's also the matter of having to learn how to hold the sticks properly, as an improper technique can make charts harder than they're supposed to be and blister your fingers.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • The game has a sorely limited speed modifier setting compared to other music games. Whereas many other games have granular speed multiplier settings that you can adjust until you find one with the ideal mix of note readability and time to react to the note, this game only has four settings that are pretty far apart from each other: x1, x2, x3, and x4. It can happen very often that a chart on x1 is a cluttered mess, but is an eyesore to track at x2 and impossible to read at x3 and x4. This was averted in the 2020 Arcade version, which had more specific hi-speed settings.
    • At launch, the Rhythmic Adventure games didn't support the official Hori Taiko Drum controller during the Story Modes, forcing you to use a regular controller instead. It can still be used in its intended way during the normal Taiko Mode, but the fact that it's unusable for the main selling point is awful. A later update lets you use the controller for gameplay, but you still need to use the regular controller for the overworld. The touch drum for the handheld mode is also not usable at all in this mode.
    • Most games' scoring is based greatly on combo, which means a single miss is enough to warrant a restart if you are trying to get a high score, and it also creates an environment where a cluster of misses at the beginning or end is relatively inconsequential, whereas you lose so much potential score if you make just one miss in the middle of the song. Thankfully, the newer games have scoring formulas based solely on note accuracy, originally requiring a cheat code but later becoming a visible option and then becoming the standard entirely.
  • Shocking Moments: "Aleph-0" by LeaF getting added to the game (as well as to CHUNITHM, another commercial rhythm game) shocked many rhythm game fans due to the song being previously only allowed to be used in non-profit games like Phigros and Orzmic. LeaF explained on Twitter that she felt that "BMS and non-profit games only" was now an outdated stance for her.
  • That One Attack:
    • In general, 32nd notes. Notes that go by so fast one after another that there is an entire technique just to hit those (and get the most rolls in the roll notes, among other things). If there is this instance of this trope in play, expect it to be because of these quick notes.
    • "Rotter Tarmination"'s Ura Oni Chart. That particular part scrolls at 400, then a whopping 800 BPM. Before finally ending with an impossible balloon note (You'll need 766 rolls for that)
    • "Suuhaa 2000" can catch any first-timers off guard. The song itself starts off pretty calm, although if you look at the speed either Don or Katsu (Depends on which drum you play as; Left for Don and vice versa) is "dancing", you'll see how fast this song actually is. Up to the 301st note, it's pretty easy (well, besides some overspeed red notes a while after the song begins, and they're return later but they're not the hardest thing in this song). The madness after that will prove that this ain't easy shit. The latter half of the notes left is crammed into a period of 30 seconds or so.
  • That One Boss: In Dokodon! Mystery Adventure, Deborah is the Pre-Final Boss of the game, using Ryuumyaku King's power to become younger and betrays her comrades to take over the world, before the king shows up and fights the heroes itself. However, her battle is much harder: First of all, her song, "Crazy Beauty" is more difficult than "Ryuumyaku no Ou". Her ability is to disable the entirety of your bar and throw notes right into your circle from up to three different directions, making it almost impossible to read the chart while she's attacking. Compare this to Ryuumyaku King, who slams your bar into the lower 3DS screen (this is replaced by cracking it and put each half of the bar on the side of your screen on the Switch Updated Re Release, but is nowhere as insane as Deborah's note barrage) or flip it.
  • That One Level:
    • The songs in the "2000 series" in general are very difficult and many of them were the hardest song in their debut game, but "Donkama 2000" takes the cake for being the hardest of them all. There are notes that represent the metronome playing in the background, alongside others that represent other sounds in the song. The problem is that the metronome notes and the “everything else” notes move at different speeds. Even without the different speeds, there are a lot of notes you need to hit in quick succession (i.e. the aforementioned 32nd notes) that will drain your stamina quickly if you don't know what you're doing. Its difficulty is so infamous that not a single person was able to get a full combo during the first day of launch, and the rate of people who were able to clear it at all was a measly 6.87%note .
    • "Yuugen no Ran" is also one of the hardest. After the brief intro, notes begin scrolling at an insane speed (the BPM of this part is a whopping 300), and there are a lot of them. Even on Easy, this song is comparable to Natsu Matsuri's Extreme difficulty, containing a lot of 8th notes. On Extreme, there are so many notes that you'll be hitting 10.5 notes per second on average. You'll need to be really good at hitting notes quickly for a long time as well as memorizing the patterns well to stand a chance against this song.
    • "Dairokuten Maou" or "Demon King of the Sixth Heaven", like its name, is absolute hell on all difficulties. Like "Yuugen no Ran", it's extremely fast (also having a BPM of 300) and dense (the density is only shy of "Yuugen no Ran" and "Infinite Rebellion", which, along with this song, are generally agreed to be the hardest songs of the entire series).
    • "Yuugen no Ran" also has a remix, "Infinite Rebellion", that is only harder and even more dense.
    • LeaF, the composer of "Mopemope" and "Calamity Fortune", composed "Ka" (彁) for the game for 2021's April Fool's Day. It's already difficult on Oni due to the weirdness of the notes, but in 2022, this song gets an Ura Oni chart. To simply put, it's a successor of Donkama 2000: notes of different speeds, including really fast and dense ones, appear at the same time for most part of the song.
      • It's actually not the first song after Donkama 2000 to do so; "!!!Chaos Time!!!" is, but at least the rhythm of that one is clean, while this and Donkama 2000 has a lot of off-beat and random stuffs.
    • "11:54PM, Prelude for The Journey of Sunlight" sounds like some song being sped up to an insane speed. With its hard-to-understand rhythm, high speed and the large number of mixed 12th and 16th notes, the Ura Oni chart easily sets itself apart from the other two songs in the Niijiro 2023 Tatsujin test and becomes one of the hardest charts in the entire game. The regular Oni chart isn't much easier, either.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Rhythm Festival forgoing a traditional DLC model in favor of a subscription service (the aptly named "Taiko Music Pass"). This has been met with mixed to negative reception, especially when the game was first announced. While this was softened somewhat by the reasonable monthly fee ($5 per month), along with the 600+ song library it provides (a historic number for the series), it is still seen as a sour spot on the game's reputation. Songs downloaded from the Music Pass don't have a use limit, but become locked and unable to be played once the player's pass expires, rendering a good chunk of their library inaccessible until the pass is renewed. Another point of contention, though more rarely brought up, is the Pass' song selection itself, which contains a lot of new songs but also many tracks that are either standalone DLC or base-game tracks in the game's predecessor Drum 'n' Fun, making the Pass less appealing as a whole. While a few song packs are available as traditional DLC, most of the new songs remain exclusive to the Music Pass for the forseeable future.

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