You won't find much in the way of familiar American pop hits here, save for a Japanese version of Let it Go or Moana's theme song the tracklist has been brought over straight from Japan with little in the way of alterations. No matter what input you choose, though, you'll be playing one of many songs from the variety-filled tracklist. Joy-Con input is probably the most fun in that it comes closest to the feel of drumming, but at more difficult song levels it tends to be plagued with inaccurate input readings, so it's not recommended for tracks with rapid notes. Controller button input is very accurate but doesn't really deliver the experience of drumming, and touch-screen input results in a chunk of the screen being taken up by a virtual drum.
There's no Move support, either.)Īll of these control schemes have their ups and downs. (For Drum Session on PS4, your options are considerably more limited you either press the controller buttons or spend an arm and a leg importing a drum controller. There's a custom drum controller that can be used with the game that recreates the arcade controls somewhat, but since it's not available outside of Asia as of this writing (even though the North American game supports it), you'll need to make do with either pressing controller buttons for drum hits, tapping an on-screen drum using the Switch's touch functionality, or using the motion control function of the Switch Joy-Cons to simulate using drumsticks on a virtual drum. Of course, the home versions are missing something from that above description-the drum.
It's a ton of fun once you get the knack of it, and seeing a party of cute little yokai and personified taiko spirits emerge in a cheering frenzy when you've got a massive combo going is always satisfying. Having just a single instrument with simple inputs might make the game seem easy at first, but once you move on to some of the harder difficulties, you'll be challenged with rapid-fire sound switches, incredibly fast beats, and gimmicks that challenge you to whack that drum as fast and as hard as you can. Beats will roll along the top of the screen, and you need to hit the drum in certain ways in order to produce different sounds hit the center for a deep boom, the rim for a lighter clack, and use both drumsticks at once on either the center or the rim for a stronger overall noise.