Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

"The game Elite Beat Agents tries to be"

This game is definitely not for everyone. I personally have a love-hate relationship with it because of its extremely unforgiving nature at times (see the game play section).

Game Play: 9/10
The game is made up of fifteen different levels, each with their own theme and song to accompany the game play. If you've played Elite Beat Agents, this game plays exactly the same. For those of you who haven't, the game play is basically a test to see if you have any rhythm. You're given beat bubbles, each of which have rings that shrink around the bubbles to indicate when you need to burst the beat bubble with your DS stylus. There's some variation to the beat bubbles (such as following the path the bubble goes), but for the most part the game almost always revolves around the bubbles. When not bursting beat bubbles, you're to spin a circle as fast as you can clockwise using your DS stylus. The majority of the beat bubbles are dead on, so you shouldn't have trouble figuring out why you're bursting them (unlike the American counterpart, Elite Beat Agents); however, there are rare occasions that force you to burst at odd intervals. Other than those minor problems, the game play is extremely solid and truly revolves around skill

The majority of how the game plays is dependent upon your skill. If you aren't good at it, you won't pass the stages. At the same time, in order to gain skill, you'll need to replay a lot of the levels and memorize where each beat or activity appears on the touch screen. This can become extremely annoying later on, especially since the game forces you to watch the introductions to each song no matter what (though you can skip the story boards without ever watching them).

The game play becomes ridiculously unforgiving as you progress to more difficulty levels, so much so that it can easily rub people the wrong way. For instance, the last level on "Hard" mode is so ridiculous that even doing well can make you lose. You'll have to be almost perfect on the last stage to even hope to beat it, and missing the beat for an instance can cost you the entire game (even if you're in the last 5 seconds of the final stage). To make matters worse, you'll have to sit through a minute intro of the song and story boards each time you fail, so you can't keep reattempting the level.

Overall, the Game Play is solid and great.

Sound: 9/10
The music is great for the most part. Most of the songs match the theme of the stages' stories, but not all of the songs are winners. There are some very bad songs mixed in, but overall the music is enjoyable. Of course, whether you like the music or not completely relies on your taste in music.

As for the sound (the playable characters saying their names and shouting things like "3, 2, 1" and other game-related things), it is enjoyable. Each story board finishes with the people in need of help crying out "Ouendan!" Other than that, the beat noises and such usually go with the song so it's fine.

Story: ???
I know limited Japanese, and can't read enough Kanji (Chinese characters adapted for the Japanese language) to comprehend what's going on in the game for the most part. The art is usually good enough for you to figure out what's going on, so for that reason I choose not to really grade it (the story's silly as it is so there's no reason to include it in the score).

Rent or Buy?- BUY
Good luck finding places that rent import games, let alone DS import games. Buy it if you're a fan of Elite Beat Agents, borrow it if you can to see if you like it.

Conclusion: 9/10
I am thoroughly impressed with this game. If you want an enjoyable game in the spirit of Guitar Hero or Taiko Drum Master, this is the game for you. If you're not into those kinds of games or get frustrated at difficult games easily, approach this game with caution.

It still baffles me why Nintendo would choose to make an inferior version of this game in the hopes of reaching an American market (Elite Beat Agents) when there's a huge Anime/Japanese-loving fanbase in America. If Nintendo simply released Ouendan! in America fully translated, it would've done tremendously and sales would probably be better than those of Elite Beat Agents. Several video game review web sites and magazines praised Elite Beat Agents, despite it being an inferior copy of Ouendan!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/09/07