You Cannot Break a Torii — The Japan in Denshattack! Is Made of Checking

2026/09/11-20:30:00

Games and Culture

Games ; Denshattack! ; Undercoders ; Tee Lopes ; Game Music ; Depicting Japan

3286 words

You cannot break a torii.

Denshattack! is a game about pulling ollies and kickflips on a train. You leave the rails, run up walls, and smash whatever you hit. Built that way, it breaks a great deal. The torii gates stay standing. They are made so that they cannot be broken.

The developer is Undercoders of Barcelona, a studio with a core team of eleven¹. Game director David Jaumandreu mentions the rule while explaining that he had consultants familiar with Japan check the whole game: "For instance, you can't break a torii gate in the game. It would be disrespectful"¹.

A word about where I stand. I have not played this game. I have not heard its 80-track soundtrack. What I have are two interviews published on 8 September 2026, a July developer interview, the official FAQ and Steam announcements, the published track listing, and a hands-on review written by somebody else. So I will not write about how it sounds or how it handles as if I had felt it.

There is still something to say. The Japan in this game is built not from the volume of research or the depth of affection but from who was asked to check what. And how far that process reached, and where it stopped, can both be read from public material.

Read the track list from the top and it moves north from Kyushu

The soundtrack came out on 15 July 2026 through Kid Katana Records and Fireshine Games. Each track carries its artist's name, so the listing doubles as a division-of-labour chart².

Read it from the top and place names arrive in order.

Track 1 is "Beppu Ramen Express," track 6 "Passing Ariake Breeze." Track 12 is "Shimonoseki Storm," 19 "Abandoned Shimanami Road ~しまなみ廃道~," 22 "Mikan Kingdom ~みかん王国~," 30 "Sunshine in Seto Naikai," 32 "The Typhoon of Chugoku ～中国地方の台風～." Track 37 is "Gozan No Okuribi ~五山送り火~," track 43 "Nara is for the People!" Track 52 is "Beyond Fuji ~富士の彼方~." Tracks 60 and 63, "Giant Monsters Wangan Max Attack!" and "Aqualine Heroes," reach Tokyo Bay; track 67 is "Let's Go to Tohoku!" and track 73 "Nebuta Ransen! ~ねぶた乱戦！~"².

Oita to Yamaguchi, the Inland Sea, Kyoto, Nara, Shizuoka, Tokyo Bay, Tohoku, Aomori. Not a strict single line south to north — tracks 53 and 54, pointing at snowfields and alpine country, sit right after Fuji and ahead of the Kanto material. The broad movement holds anyway. Per the official FAQ the game has over 60 levels across 8 regions and 46 prefectures³. The track names read as though they were written from the route that crosses those prefectures.

This could be hindsight from someone who happens to know the place names. But two points can be checked against a third party with no stake in the studio's account. PC Gamer's hands-on review describes "freeing Nara's famous deer" as "a stage-long event" and "countering giant baseballs with aerial tricks," which line up with track 43, "Nara is for the People!", and track 17, "Knock It out of the Park"⁴. The titles point at what the stages contain.

A dune stage. In the foreground a graffiti-covered yellow train runs along the track; against the blue sky behind it a navy articulated train marked with an "M・D" logo is buried nose-first in a sand hill. The clouds are drawn in halftone dots

Image source: Undercoders official site, Denshattack! page (undercoders.com). Rights to the image remain with the developer and publisher.

This geographic coverage is partly a by-product of the pipeline. Producer and gameplay programmer Àngel Beltran says that to make this volume work at eleven people, the 3D assets are built from master textures shared across the whole game — a flat colour atlas, an outline texture, and a detail layer for cracks and rust⁵. The mass-production system came first; the dressing of each stage was left to hand. Level designers lay out the route through each prefecture, and environment artists place things so players recognise that prefecture's landmarks. A more automated approach would have been far faster, Beltran says, but "it was very important to us that every level felt like a journey through Japan"⁵.

The line between what is left to the machine and where people are stationed matches the judgement of where the thing has to look like Japan.

The word "wanman" is in a track title

Track 4 is "Wanman ☆ Clash ~ワンマン ☆ クラッシュ~"².

I think you can only choose that word if you know it appears on the display inside the carriage rather than in a tourist brochure. Wanman — one-man operation on a rural line. Not the Shinkansen, not Tokyo.

Jaumandreu's account explains exactly where that vocabulary comes from. His first trip to Japan was in 1998, and he has gone back almost every year since; he also spent three months as a university intern near Jinbocho in Tokyo, at the audio brand Aiwa¹.

The first thing I came to know was the Shinkansen. Spain had no high-speed rail in the '90s, so it made a strong impression, like something out of the future. After that I became interested in the small local lines too, where you meet beautiful scenery, regional culture, local food and local people, and I started learning a little Japanese¹.

Backpacking south to north on a Japan Rail Pass, seeing everything along the way. "Denshattack!'s theme comes out of travelling from south to north, the local lines, and visiting all those places"¹. He is especially fond of Shikoku, and names the castles at Uwajima, Matsuyama, Marugame and Kochi. The food in Kochi is excellent, he adds¹.

The origin of the project is also a physical object. Flipping over a Plarail toy train he had played with as a child led to the idea of a game¹. He skated, too, so the gesture of turning a toy train upside down and launching it came first.

Up to here it reads like an ordinary story about enthusiasm. What makes this game interesting is the part where that enthusiasm was sent off to be checked.

Native speakers looked at the wording

The order of the studio's verification is explicit.

First they use material gathered on past trips; Jaumandreu has personally been to most of the locations that appear in the game. They propose the stages, the elements, the names. Then they bring in consultants familiar with Japan¹.

Whether there were problems, whether anything sounded unnatural, whether anything was written incorrectly, whether we were touching on delicate subject matter¹.

The examples he gives are street-culture depictions: bosozoku, kogal, rockabilly. The reason for the check was to make sure the portrayals stayed respectful even though they are fictional and exaggerated in an anime register. Shrines fall under the same heading. Several people then played the game and told them things like "this sign looks a little odd," "this is written incorrectly, please fix it"¹.

A night city stage. In the foreground a yellow train throws off sparks with a heavy black-outlined onomatopoeia laid over it. A red neon sign on the building behind reads 新発売 vertically; a giant robot-like character statue stands at the end of the street, with cherry trees and a guardrail along the roadside

Image source: Undercoders official site, Denshattack! page (undercoders.com). Rights to the image remain with the developer and publisher.

What this process guarantees is the absence of errors, the absence of obvious offence, and signage whose Japanese reads as Japanese. That is not a small thing. In foreign-made works that claim a Japan, the writing is usually the first thing to collapse.

There are things it does not guarantee.

The unbreakable torii is a declaration of respect. It is also a list — of what may be smashed and what may not — drawn up by the people making the game. As a consequence of where the line fell, what sits inside it, the bosozoku and kogal iconography for instance, is filed on the breakable side, the playable side. How much veto power the consultants held is not something the interview reveals. Their number is given only as "a few," and neither names nor scope of involvement have been published¹.

All of this, too, was said in the publisher's own promotional setting. "We wanted to check that the portrayals were respectful" is not evidence that respect landed on screen.

In the argument over the ending of the Chiikawa film, domestic audiences demanded norms of the author. This is the reverse: foreign makers going out to fetch the norms themselves. In both cases what actually reached the screen has to be verified separately from the demand or the procedure.

The composer at the centre of the music has never been to Japan

The lead composer is Tee Lopes, who wrote for Sonic Mania and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge and has worked with Sega for close to ten years⁶. He contributed to 25 of the 80 tracks as counted by the soundtrack, with Andrew One on 17 and Sean Bialo on 15, the rest split among other artists. Lopes also scored roughly half the cutscene music, which brings his total to around 35 pieces⁶.

Lopes has never been to Japan.

I still haven't had the chance to visit Japan, but I've been interested in the culture for such a long time that bringing those traditional elements into the music felt natural to me⁶.

The sources he names are game music, anime, Super Sentai, Japanese film, and the Japanese fusion and city pop he dug up once the internet made it findable. He used taiko, shakuhachi, koto and shamisen⁶. What Jaumandreu gathered on foot, Lopes absorbed through media. Two kinds of Japan sit inside the same game.

The difference shows most clearly in track 37, "Gozan No Okuribi ~五山送り火~." Lopes researched Kyoto's Gozan no Okuribi and combined rhythmic and sonic elements drawn from the festival with traditional instruments. Then the Japanese rapper he had planned to collaborate with became unavailable.

So even though I don't speak Japanese, I took on the challenge of learning the pronunciation and rapping it myself. It took a lot of nerve, but Nagamatsu-san helped me, and that made me far more comfortable with it⁶.

Ryo Nagamatsu wrote for Mario Kart and Splatoon. He helped with the Japanese lyrics and sang on "Unstoppable" — the first time he had sung on a game theme⁶.

The guest roster also includes Shoji Meguro with Lotus Juice, Richard Jacques of Jet Set Radio, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi of Daytona USA, Kohta Takahashi of Ace Combat 2, Capcom's Harumi Fujita, and 2 Mello of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk⁷. The Sega Dreamcast era the game points at is not merely referenced; the people themselves were invited in.

The image Lopes gives for the core of the soundtrack was making music "as if turning a train station into sound." Grimy stone and brick, rusted rails, smoky air, noise, graffiti, crowds. From there he pushed it radical, urban and rough⁶.

How that actually sounds is beyond this piece. I have not heard it. What can be confirmed here is the record of intent and division of labour.

Built on rhythm, they say; unplayable, one reviewer says

Jaumandreu does not discuss the music and the level design separately.

When designing levels we put a lot of weight on rhythm. How you move your fingers, how you move with the music that pushes you forward — that thinking comes from rhythm games¹.

The references he names are beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution. From Jet Set Radio he says he took not only the cel-shaded style but the themes of "self-expression, rebellion, showing who you are, and placing enormous importance on music"¹. Beltran, for his part, lists conveying the weight of a 50-tonne train through wheel friction sound and landing effects, and tuning colour palettes and visual signalling so things stay readable at speed, as central design work⁵.

Weight, legibility, self-expression. The studio says it built all three deliberately.

The PC Gamer review published on launch day records the opposite observation on all three. Reviewer Kerry Brunskill scored it 63⁴.

On weight: "There's no inertia, no weight pulling me back on steep slopes, no assistance from gravity on the way down a ramp." Technically the player is driving a train, and yet the metal box never behaves like one. "It could be anything. A person. A dirt bike. Shadow the Hedgehog"⁴.

On legibility: "long strings of orange lanterns hanging right beside orange grind rails, lines of yellow lights near yellow track, green air currents set against a sea green background." A red warning "!" can mean anything from an obstacle on the line to a giant shadow monster rising out of the sea, with half a second at most to react⁴.

On self-expression: "Personal creativity is constantly pushed to the side." No strategising, no building combos on one's own terms. Wall runs work on this stretch and not that one; crashing is an instant fail unless the game decides crashing is fine here — which, the review argues, leaves no way to improve⁴.

Care is needed here. This is one reviewer's judgement, not a consensus. The same game holds a 98% positive rating on Steam, a figure Jaumandreu cites himself¹. Treating 63 as the true picture would mean promoting a convenient single voice to the status of representative.

Even so, this review sits somewhere that cannot be ignored. On exactly the three items the studio named as things it built, it records the opposite observation head-on. An account of intent and whether that intent arrived have to be verified separately.

What the process guarantees, and what it does not

Laid out, it comes to this.

Photographs taken on site, trips almost every year since 1998, checks on wording and subject matter by native speakers, collaboration with more than a dozen musicians, a rap learned phonetically and vetted by a Japanese composer. These steps built the surface precision — place names, wording, festivals, landscape — to a genuinely high standard. High enough to put wanman in a track title.

The same steps do not run down into the play. Whether a train behaves like a train, whether the screen is readable at speed, whether a player can build their own approach. Consultants cannot underwrite any of that. It needs different tests, different observers, different repetition.

A smaller version of the same problem shows up in the numbers. The official FAQ answers "Do you use AI in your game?" with "No we do not"³, and the eleven-person team spent its money on routing work through outside consultants and musicians — on asking people rather than generating more. And still: the launch-day Steam announcement says 81 tracks, the announcement six days earlier says 80, and the product that shipped has 80². Stack up all the human checking you like and the count still slips by one.

Set beside Mixtape, built from licensed songs and adolescent memory, the direction the music carries things is reversed. There, songs that already existed brought back the writer's own memories. Here, 80 commissioned tracks point at land that is not the writer's. That earlier piece took the "light on gameplay" criticism and folded it back in as the essence of the design; doing that here would mean translating the studio's account straight into a verdict. So the two are left in collision.

What this piece read was a track listing and some interviews, not a game. The route to checking it is printed in the official FAQ, which lists the review-key request portal and the press contact³. The studio expects people to come and check.

So this article stops partway. A track listing can be read as somebody's itinerary, but an itinerary is not a journey.

References

AUTOMATON, published 8 September 2026. Interview with Undercoders game director David Jaumandreu (interview and text: Genki; translation: Motoharu Ono; editing: Aki Nogishi). Quotations here are translated from the Japanese edition. The studio's 2006 founding, the eleven-person core team with all music outsourced, the first visit in 1998 and near-annual returns, the Aiwa internship near Jinbocho, the Shikoku castles, the checks on wording and subject matter by consultants familiar with Japan, the unbreakable torii, the rhythm-game basis for level design, and the figures of 150,000 units, 300,000 players and 98% positive on Steam all come from this article and are as of its publication. Note that 80 Level's July piece gives the team size as "around 12," a difference of timing or counting. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴
Kid Katana Records' Bandcamp page and the Steam soundtrack DLC. As of 11 September 2026 both list tracks numbered 1 to 80 with no gaps, so the shipping product is 80 tracks; the titles and numbers cited above come from that listing. The launch-day Steam announcement "Denshattack! Soundtrack - Out Now!" says "81 tracks," while the announcement six days before launch says "80 tracks in total." Where the one-track difference arose is unverified. Whether the track order matches the in-game stage order is also unverified, and no official mapping exists. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Official FAQ posted to the Steam Community, dated 13 July 2026, by Fireshine Games. The 8 regions and 46 prefectures, over 60 levels and more than 30 trains, the supported languages including Japanese voice and subtitles, the explicit statement that no generative AI is used, and the review-key portal and press contact all come from this page. It gives the launch time as 4PM BST on 15 July, which is midnight on 16 July in Japan; the Steam store's own release timestamp is 23:51 on 15 July Japan time, so the displayed date is 15 July. On demos the FAQ mentions only the Nintendo Switch 2 version; whether one is currently offered on Steam is not verified here. ↩ ↩² ↩³
PC Gamer, published 15 July 2026. Reviewer Kerry Brunskill, scored 63. The absent inertia and weight, the wall runs and collision rules that switch between stretches, the orange lanterns beside orange grind rails, the thin room for self-expression, and the descriptions of "freeing Nara's famous deer" as a stage-long event and countering giant baseballs with aerial tricks all come from this review. It is used here not as a majority view but as one record of the opposite observation on the items the studio named. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
80 Level, published 15 July 2026. Interview with David Jaumandreu and Àngel Beltran. The shared master textures (flat colour atlas, outline, detail layer), the per-prefecture routing with hand dressing, conveying 50 tonnes through friction sound and landing effects, and the colour tuning for legibility at speed come from this article. ↩ ↩² ↩³
AUTOMATON, published 8 September 2026. Interview with composer Tee Lopes, by the same team. Quotations here are translated from the Japanese edition. Never having visited Japan, the Gozan no Okuribi research and the phonetically learned rap, Ryo Nagamatsu's help with the Japanese lyrics and his vocal on "Unstoppable," the 25 of 80 tracks and the roughly 35 pieces including cutscene music, and the "turning a train station into sound" image all come from this article. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Worthplaying, 27 February 2026, reporting the publisher's announcement of guest composers and performers. The list includes Shoji Meguro, Ryo Nagamatsu, Richard Jacques, Kohta Takahashi, Harumi Fujita, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, 2 Mello, The Noble Demon, Toni Leys, Lotus Juice and MIYACHI. ↩