New Year, New... News! 2025 Look-Back, OpenTaiko Chapter VII, Classical Arrangements, Character Pack #2

Happy New Year!

    We're now in the year 2026! I'm not late I swear!!!!!!!!

    Last year, we reached OpenTaiko's 4th anniversary, which means we'll eventually be hitting 5 years since the project first began. Even then, so much has already happened in 2025 alone.

Flashback Time!

    We started January with the first release of songs for OpenTaiko Chapter V, including a remix of Chapter I's "Katharsis" and many new artists joining our list of contributors. February saw the launch of our official wiki, with the kind support of the folks at wiki.gg.

    April began with the announcement of our totally real and definitely upcoming OpenTaiko Karting, with a playable soundtrack included in OpenTaiko, as well as the release of several new playable characters from the Open-Universe project!

 

 

    During the month of May, OpenTaiko collaborated with the mobile rhythm game "Project Pentjet", bringing over 5 songs from their game to ours, and vice versa! You can play these songs and more on Project Pentjet, by downloading their app on Android and iOS (TestFlight).

 

    OpenTaiko Chapter V concluded towards the end of June, with an unusual song marking the end of this chapter. Hey, are those new graphics...?

             

    ...Yes, they are new! The new Open-World Memories skin, titled "Gleaming Sky" was released during July, alongside a mind-boggling 16 new songs for our brand new OpenTaiko Chapter VI, marking the start of a new era for OpenTaiko. Open-World Memories has come a long way. Be sure to thank SimpleStyle for acting as the base for this grand project!

 

    August 8th, aka "888. Day", returned once again, this time with two sets of trails. Time-Trip in particular is very challenging, which require you to play many songs back-to-back in these endurance gaidens, as you travel through time. Perhaps if you persisted long enough through one of these time trips, you might find a peculiar moment in time to witness.

    August also saw the announcement of our brand new blog, the one you're reading right now! With so little text to fit on our socials, and much info locked behind our Discord server, we've started to expand to other platforms to make our news and resources more accessible. Part of this initiative includes the creation of this blog, where we can share more news with the community, without the restrictions of needing an account with a verified phone number to access our Discord.

    October through December was relatively quiet in comparison to all the chaos of this year. But that doesn't mean there's no Christmas gifts to share with everybody. This Christmas Eve saw the release of another surprise collaboration between OpenTaiko and Project Pentjet, this time featuring a song that can be played on both games right now! Check out this song if you're an OpenTaiko and/or Project Pentjet player!

The Future 

    As the year began to draw to a close, we put our heads down to focus more on 0.6.1, which will bring an overhaul to skinning, which you can read more about here. That being said, because of how much work there is to do, we won't be hitting our early 2026 deadline like we hoped. However, we are still aiming for this year. We'll share more as we near the finish line.

    We've also got some cool things planned year, but I can't quite share what those are yet. What I can share, however, is that we're developing our Open-Universe characters more! We swear, there is lore, you WILL get that lore soon.

OpenTaiko Chapter VII Begins

     Hey, did you know there's over 300 songs you can play right now? Did you know that we're still adding more? We started off 2026 with the release of OpenTaiko Chapter VII, with 14 songs available to play right now as of writing!

    You can play these new songs and more by using OpenTaiko Hub, our installer and updater for the base game, songs, skins, characters, and more!

Classical Arrangements Begins

    A new folder has been added to our collection of songs! We now have a dedicated folder for arrangements of classical songs, permanently open to taking submissions! Check out the first song in this folder, 4elise by Makotora!

  

    Are you interested in submitting your arrangement, or submitting songs in general? Our song submission form is always open! Send us your music here, or tell your composer friends to consider submitting songs for OpenTaiko!

Character Pack #2 - Reflections & Imaginations

    A brand new set of characters are available on OpenTaiko Hub right now! This update adds four new characters to play as, including original characters and members of our OpenTaiko Team. You can now play as Shadow Dancer, Mai, Bol, and Ryuto Setsujin!

 

Thank You!

    Thank you for your support throughout 2025! We have a lot to be thankful for, and we hope to share more of our work throughout 2026 as our thanks to you. See you again soon!