|
Thursday 11 January, 2007
The DS is my favorite new system, due to the sheer number of good games that have been released for it. Of those games Ouendan is my number one favorite DS game of all time! I bought it shortly after if came out from a shady importing site on the internet, because at that time it was a Japanese exclusive. It was developed by iNiS, who made Gitaroo Man which is also pretty high on my list of favorite games!
The premise of the game is as follows: a band of male cheerleaders goes around dancing. People call upon the cheer squad when they find themselves in dire situations. It is a rhythm game where you use the DS' touch screen to touch little circles that appear in time with the music. The game has 4 difficulty modes and 15 songs, each with a fair amount of replay value. Depending on your timing when you touch the circle, you will get 300, 100, 50, or 0 points (if you miss). You have a sort of a life gauge at the top of the bottom screen that fills up as you get points, and drops as you miss beats, and on harder difficulties, it drops even if you hit the beat but get only 50 or 100 points for it. When it reaches the bottom you lose and have to restart the stage. Between the circle touching sequences are little cut-scenes where depending on your performance so far, you will see how you have either helped them, or failed to help them. If your cheer gauge falls below a certain point when a cut-scene starts, you will fail that cut-scene but continue the stage. At the end of the stage it will show you which cut-scenes you passed and which ones you failed, as well as give you your number score, and a letter grade for how well you comboed the beats. For example getting a bunch of 300's in a row would net you an A rank, or even an S rank, whereas getting a jumble of 100's and 50's would get you a C or a D rank.
The quirky art style and the bizarre premise along with the excellent game play and catchy soundtrack makes this my favorite "pick up and play" game. I beat it on the hardest difficulty a while ago, but still play it every now and then since I have not S ranked every stage on expert difficulty! It is a difficult game to recommend to others because it is a pretty niche title, and since it is only available in Japan, importing it costs around 50 dollars. I would recommend the recently released American counterpart Elite Beat Agents except that game sucks. However if you are some kind of earless person and don’t care that it has the worst soundtrack in any video game ever, then go for it! Both games have identical game play, and even the same artists drawing the cut-scenes. The main differences are the soundtrack and the style. I did not like either the soundtrack or the style of Elite Beat Agents and I can promise anyone that liked that game that Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is about a million times better.
|
