Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

"Initially great beat rhythm game but partly spoiled by a few silly design flaws"

What does Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan mean? This is a rhythm game whose title can be loosely translated as "Go! Fight! Cheerleaders". As the name says, you act as a Japanese male cheerleader in the team. What you do is to help people who encountered problems. You dance to cheer them up to solve their own problems faced in their lives.

For those who played another game called "Elite Beat Agent", it's actually the Americanized version of "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" produced by the same company after the success of this rhythm game.

Instructions/Help
Splendid! There is an animated tutorial to welcome and teach you how to play this rhythm game. Thanks to the illustration with visual graphs and animations, you can still understand it without reading the Japanese. You will be asked to have a practice after the tutorial. The tutorial helps to let you get into the rhythm game quickly.


Control/Navigation
Acceptable but not well thought out. This game is stylus-controlled. You use stylus to do all sorts of action in the game. You solely use your stylus to play the rhythm game. You use the stylus to navigate and select menus. The buttons and D-pad are left unused nearly all the time. While it isn't a problem to use stylus to do all the things, it will be more convenient and user-friendly if you allow buttons and D-pad too.

The in-game controls in some areas are less than desired. Each mission is a story of someone's life. You, as a cheerleader, are to change their lives by dancing and cheering. The game let you skip the introductory scene and the bad ending scene. However it's weird that it doesn't let you skip checkpoint scenes and the good ending scene. This is a rhythm game. You are going to play the same song a lot of times to perfect your performance. It's interesting to watch the scenes at first but they grow dull quickly after you see the same scene over and over again. The unskippable scenes really break the flow of the game (you play for several ten seconds -> wait for several ten seconds -> repeat the cycle). A thumb-down!

Another serious design flaw is it doesn't display the highest score (the best record) in the game menu. I have to go all way long to go back to the main menu, select the misc menu, select the "best records" menu, wait for the screen to scroll down gradually ONLY TO SEE the highest score of a particular song. It's so inconvenient. The developers are so guilty not to display such a useful piece of information in the game menu! It discourages players from scoring higher in some extents.

What about a message just telling me I have broken a new record? The game doesn't bother to tell you either. The fun of striving to score better is badly spoilt by those careless design flaws.

The best record only saves the highest score and the rank. It omits other useful information like "Great / Good / Okay hits", "Combo", "Miss" etc. Even better, I would like the game to save more than just the best score, let's say Best 3 or Best 5. It's good especially if this game is played by your family and all that.


Gameplay
Simple and addicting for those who like the concept. Let me explain the gameplay briefly. Basically your goal is to beat at the right time to score/rank the best. The play mechanics involve performing one of three actions with the stylus in various combinations:
* Circles: tap numbered circles at the right sequence and timing to score the best. You get 300, 100, 50 points or a miss depending on the timing of your tapping.
* Balls: tap the numbered circle to turn it into a ball, hold the stylus on a ball, and follow it along a path.
* Spinners - Spin the stylus around the on-screen disc as fast as possible within a limited time.

The gameplay makes good use of the Nintendo DS to provide unique experience. You either like or hate it. To me I didn't quite like this gameplay much initially. I preferred another rhythm game called Taiko. I once quit playing for a while. I started to see the fun of this game after I gave this game a few more goes. Your mileage may vary. You need to judge by yourself whether this game is for you or not.


Difficulty
This game can be easy or very challenging. You start with two cheerleaders to choose from. One is easy; another is normal. Complete the first mission. It will unlock a few more. Complete them to unlock one or several more. You unlock hard after you complete normal. You unlock insane after you complete hard.

The design of difficulty of each mission isn't progressive in nature. I will take the normal mode as an example. Although the pattern of the first stage is simple, you may still find it hard to tap at the right time. The meter will empty pretty fast after a few misses. I find it more difficult than the later stages. The difficulty doesn't progressively increase per stage. It seems to keep fluctuating until late in the game. To illustrate better, it looks something like this: 3->1-1-1->4-5-3->3-2->4-3->5->7-7->9 (high number means more difficult).

The difficulty system is user-friendly to the novices/average players but not to the seasoned. The good side is the easy mode is easy enough for people who haven't played rhythm games before. But the normal mode is fairly challenging for the average players. The bad side is the seasoned players (or players who have played other series of this game a lot) may want to skip the normal mode. However they are forced to finish one by one to proceed to the hard mode. Repeat this process to reach the insane mode. This unnecessary process can be pretty frustrating and boring to them.

Take another game Taiko (Japanese Drum Master) as an example. The developers are caring enough to cater to different people. There is a free mode which let players to choose from different songs/music, instead of forcing players to unlock the songs one by one. Completing songs in easy mode will unlock some bonuses. However it's far too easy for the seasoned. This causes pain for those who want to collect all bonuses. The developers are smart enough to offer "turbo speed mode" to solve this problem.

I hope "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" can implement similar features like the above.


Content/Features
There are 15 missions in total for the whole game. It's not too short or too long. Some rhythm games have more than 30-40 missions.

Some great/useful features (available in Elite Beat Agent) are missing, like replay saving, failed performance review, "VS ghosts" mode (using replays as ghosts).

Some rhythm games include offer an "auto mode" or "demo mode". It's a mode which the computer will demonstrate the performance once. You can try to imitate, understanding the placement of all marks, get a feeling of this song etc. It misses this feature. Actually one can just play the song, do nothing and let it play to the end as a workaround. Unfortunately the play stops right off the bat once you fail (ie the spirit meter is empty). It isn't the game fault though.

There are only story mode and multiplayer mode in the game. It would be better if a free mode is available which let you play from a list of songs at start too.

The developers don't do a good job to motivate or reward players while playing. The unlockables are only two higher difficulty modes as far as I know. There are rhythm games which do much better jobs in this aspect. They provide different kinds of challenges and rewards to suck you in. It makes completing the game very rewarding. This game lacks. However, if you are someone who can create challenges yourself and keep challenging yourself, it isn't a big problem to you.

Scoring
Scoring is important in a rhythm game since it's an assessment of your performance. Bad scoring system may spoil some of your fun away. The scoring system is not imbalanced in my opinion. It biased towards people who can twist their hands fast.

You get a whole lot of 1,000 points per turn. If you can twist 10 turns you get 10,000 points while 10 beats give you 500- 3,000 points only depending on the timing of each beat. Coupled with combo bonuses, it's possible that you get much more points from one spinner (marker) only. You may see some strange results like a Rank C with about 300,000 points erasing the record of a Rank A with about 200,000 points (Note: Rank is solely based on the accuracy and timing of your beats). It's possible a weaker human player defeats a stronger human player simply because it can twist its hand really fast.

I believe this is a game to challenge your beat/timing/rhythm skills rather than your hand twisting skills. We shouldn't get so many points just from 1 spinner.


Story and graphics
Stories are good and interesting in general but could be better. Each mission contains a short story of each person (client?) life. It uses comics as a way to tell you the story so even non-Japanese know roughly about it. The expression of the story tends to be exaggerated and humorous in nature.

However I have a few minor complaints. A few storyline are cliches / old-fashioned. A duel to win the female heart or marriage?! Come on! What century are we in now? The endings are expected and far too predictable. I mean you can add more spice to the ending (eg truth revealed in the end, a surprising result, some funny conversations etc.) This will make us feel more rewarding especially after a long hard battle (tapping).

Graphics and character design are splendid! The main characters (cheerleaders) are endearing. The graphics are colorful and sharp.


Sound
Satisfactory but choices are limited to one kind. Songs are an important element of this game. There are 15 songs (missions) in total. It isn't many comparing to some other games which have 30-40 songs/music. It's limited to Japanese songs only. If you like Japanese songs, it's okay. More variety will be better to suit a wider range of audience.

Speaking myself only, songs are satisfactory in general but I find a few songs don't match the backgrounds of the scenes much. Some songs are catchy and pleasant; some are only okay.


Summary

Pros
+ Simple yet addicting formula
+ Animated tutorial to get you into the game quickly
+ The difficulty system is user-friendly to the novices and the average players
+ Generally good and amusing story (comic), but it would be better if there are more surprises in the stories
+ Endearing characters, colorful and sharp graphics
+ Songs are pleasant and catchy in general
+ Very long play hours for those who like to challenge themselves to the extreme
+ Fun to fight against friends in multiplayer mode

Cons
- A few unforgivable (sometimes careless) design flaws exist in the game
- Most in-game (checkpoint and good-ending) scenes are unskippable. It's annoying to watch the same scene repeatedly in the same song (mission).
- The unskippable scenes break the flow of the game (Play -> Wait -> Play -> Wait...)
- Checking the highest scores of each song is very clumsy and inconvenient. You need return to the main menu and go to another place just to check the scores.
- It doesn't tell if you have broken the best record in the result. What a surprise!
- The difficulty system isn't user-friendly to the seasoned. They need to play all the way up to unlock difficulty which is suitable to them.
- Flawed scoring system: placing too much emphasis on spinning rather than beating/rhythm which is supposed to be the core of this game.

Room for improvement
* Only story mode. An addition of a free play mode is welcome.
* Except hard and insane mode, it lacks other unlockables or bonuses.
* Acceptable play hours for the casual players. The game lacks rewards to keep the casual players coming back (eg rewards for breaking records or getting a number of Rank S).
* The variety of songs is limited to Japanese songs only. More variety can cater to more players.
* 15 songs only. Some other rhythm games have 30-40 or more songs/music.

Conclusion
The concept of this game is great. It could be a potentially excellent game. However I find some problems and flaws in the game, of which a few are unforgivable. Fortunately they are not too serious to affect the core of the gameplay, but it does take parts of the fun away. The problems I mention in the "Cons" section can be solved easily.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/06/08

Game Release: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (JP, 07/28/05)