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Reviews » Elite Beat Agents [DS]

Elite Beat Agents, like – it seems – nearly everything I review, is another one of those games with a history behind it. Luckily for you, it isn’t a very long one. Last summer, when developers were still just barely figuring out what to do with the Nintendo DS, iNiS released a little game in Japan called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Ouendan wasn’t a normal game. It was a quirky rhythm game about an all-male cheer squad roaming Japan and helping people in need with music. On paper it sounds awful, but once you got past that it was fun, different, and INCREDIBLY catchy.

Despite less than stellar sales in Japan, it became a breakout import hit in North America (and the rest of the world) thanks to word of mouth and the undeniable power of the internets. Many online import shops reported it being their #1 seller in DS games. It almost seemed made for importing. Gameplay was simplistic, and despite being completely Japanese, it was very easy to understand what was going on and thereby enjoy the game. But there were some basic problems that prevented it from being easy to bring stateside, mainly that all the music was J-pop / J-rock / J-. . . unclassifiable stuff, and that’d mean all kinds of licensing hell. Plus it’s not exactly easy to sell such music to non-nerds. Add to that the fact that a lot of the game just wouldn’t make sense in other markets, due to the scenarios being heavily dependent on Japanese cultural references.

But it was still an awesome game. And it would be a shame for such a great game to be confined to such a small market. But how could they bring it here? It just wouldn’t work. Nintendo and iNiS were being very quiet about any plans they had, but all that changed at E3 2006, when Elite Beat Agents was announced.

The basic premise of the game is that people in the world need help. Not with, you know, actual problems, because that would make a horrible game, but with trivial but still troubling things. Like a cabbie driving a pregnant woman to a hospital, or an overworked director trying to complete a film, or a lost dog trying to find his way home. Conveniently there’s a semi-secret government agency designed to monitor the world for strife and help these people whenever possible. When a suitable case has been located by the agency’s leader Commander Kahn, he dispatches three of the titular Elite Beat Agents to resolve the situation by cheering on the downtrodden subject.

Yes this sounds incredibly goofy - that’s because it is. Please get over it. Seriously. The sooner you get over how ridiculous the premise of the game is, the sooner you can start enjoying it. After you get over it please take the time to embrace the goofiness completely. Love the goofiness, because EBA is full of it. Some of the levels go beyond the call of duty when it comes to being hilariously weird, like one where a nut salesman (yes, nuts) has to save humanity from a zombie horde (yes, zombies) with nuts. I am not making this up.

Ok, but it isn’t straight up comedy, you shouldn’t be playing it for the comedy. The comedy is one of the many wonderful kinds of icing EBA has on it. The place the game really shines is the ridiculously addictive gameplay. As you start each of the 19 levels, you’re presented with a little manga-esque slightly animated intro piece which sets up the scenario for the level. These can be somewhat long, but they’re skippable. After that, the music starts and after a quick countdown you’re dropped into the actual gameplay. Numbered circles appear on the touchscreen, which each have shrinking concentric circles around them. When the outline circle reaches the solid part, you tap that circle. Depending on your timing, you’ll get a score of 50, 100 or 300. Targets come in sets of similar colors, completing a run gets you an extra bonus point. Targets can show up anywhere on the screen, but there’s a set pattern to learn for each song.

There are two other types of targets in addition to normal circles to tap. The first you’ll encounter (and the second most common) is a line. These start with a normal circle target, but then stretch off creating a line. Rather than just tapping them, you have to drag your stylus to trace the line. They can be straight, curved, shapes like a star, and can have any number of bumpers at either end, causing you to trace back and forth. The last type of target is the spinner, which is a full-screen wheel which you have to rapidly drag in circles to pass.

As you tap along to the music on the bottom screen, how well you’re doing is reflected first in a power meter that runs across the top of the bottom screen, and also in the scene occurring on the top screen. Since it wouldn’t exactly be fair to make you tap the screen several hundred times constantly, there are several breaks put into each level, usually at logical times for the song. When you go into one of the breaks, the bottom screen fades to black, and arrows direct you to the top screen where another short animated scene plays out. If you kept your power meter out of the danger zone, it’ll turn out well, and you’ll get a pass for that segment. If you screwed up repeatedly, things will go horribly awry on the top screen, and you’ll have to turn it around when you get back to playing.

This might seem somewhat simplistic, because it is, but when you it all together, and make the patterns fast and complex, and have you transitioning between rapid sequences of targets and lines, followed by spinners, followed by even more rapid sequences of targets and lines, well, it becomes very challenging very quickly.

Since this is a music game, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t talk a bit about the songs involved. Unfortunately, it isn’t good. It’s a bizarre mix of mainstream Skater Pop-Punk (Good Charlotte, Avril Lavigne, Sum 41), Normal Pop (Madonna, Ashlee Simpson), Classic Rock (Queen, Deep Purple, Chicago, The Rolling Stones), and comedy-option gay anthems (Cher – “Believe” and Village People – “YMCA”). They’re all covers, but they’re mostly good covers. But here’s the thing: despite the awful track list, full of things I would never listen to on their own (unlike, say, the track lists for both Guitar Hero games), the game is still very enjoyable. Much like the goofiness of the game’s scenarios, the track list is one of those things you just have to get over. If you’re going to be a music snob, then sorry, you don’t get to enjoy one of the best music games ever.

So, is that it? It’s just a simple music game? What’s the lasting appeal? Challenge. For starters, there are four difficulty levels. Breezin’ (Easy), Cruzin’ (Normal), Sweatin’ (Hard) and Hard Rock! (OH NO WHERE ARE ALL THESE TARGETS COMING FROM WHY DID IT SPAWN BEHIND MY HAND ARHRGGHFRMGG.FF). Despite having a special training mode, Easy is both slow and has cues built into it to show you where and when to tap. Normal is still pretty slow, and not incredibly complex, but has no cues to guide you through. Hard is, well, hard. It’s fast, it has complex patterns different from how they were in Normal, and is unrelenting when it comes to throwing beats at you. And Hard Rock is . . uh . . very hard. The patterns are more or less just how they were on hard mode, but the lead time for targets is shorter, the targets themselves are smaller, and it feels even faster than before.

The base game comes with 16 songs, but as you progress through ranks (based on your cumulative score through all levels of all difficulties), you unlock 3 more levels bringing the total to 19. All told, you have 76 levels to complete. And just passing the levels shouldn’t be enough, since each level hands you a letter grade at the end, you can spend months trying to perfect it all. Plus once you’ve gotten good at the game, you can challenge up to four friends with the multiplayer mode.

So is it good? Very much so, but I may be biased due to having already enjoyed Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, but Nintendo feels strongly enough about this game’s broad appeal that they’ve put the Touch Generations label on it, indicating that this is a game for everyone, and it’s well deserved. You don’t have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy it, and if you are you can still enjoy it. The only problems I can foresee is if you can’t get over how goofy the scenarios can be, and if you can’t get over the lame soundtrack. I could, so I loved it. If you can’t, then you might want to stick to manly-man games like Madden and Halo.

Elite Beat Agents - DS

Presentation

It’s bright, vivid, slick, and incredibly polished.

Gameplay

If you haven’t played Ouendan!, then it’ll be like nothing you’ve played before, but still amazing. If you have, then it’s more of the same, but all the little annoyances have been cleaned up.

Replayability

If you’re into perfecting games, you’ll be in for the long haul with Elite Beat Agents, 76 songs to S-Rank, which is a big challenge, but a doable one. Even if you aren’t, there’s multiplayer to mess with.

Value

It’s selling for the standard retail DS price of $35, but there is a lot of game in there to enjoy. Plus, stores have been known to do special deals relating to Touch Generations games, which can lead to some juicy discounts.

Overall

If you can embrace the goofiness, and see past the lame track list, EBA is an amazing game that shouldn’t be missed.