Ouendan! Takae! Osu!

• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Published by: Nintendo
• Developed by: iNiS
• Release Date: TBA
• Genre: Other
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: No

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Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Preview

-- September 23, 2005 by: Chris Remo

I just imported a couple Japanese games for the first time. Importing is something that's never had much appeal to me, since my knowledge of any aspect of the Japanese language is utterly nonexistent and I'm usually content to wait until the games I want make it stateside. Then I found some videos of iNiS' Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! for Nintendo DS, and I started to suspect that it's not the type of game North American publishers would be scrambling to get their hands on. However, it is the type of game I would scramble to get my hands on. Ouendan, as it seems to be known in the interest of brevity, is by the same team that crafted Gitaroo-Man for PS2, so unsurprisingly it too is a rhythm game.

The rhythm game genre is not one with which I am intimately familiar. I played a demo of Parappa the Rapper on PS1 when it came out, and like many others I have humiliated myself by way of DDR arcade machines, but that's about it. Gitaroo-Man, though, really grabbed me when I recently obtained it. The gameplay felt developed and thought through, and as a musician I appreciated that the analog stick motions and button presses I executed actually affected the existence and duration of the notes being played.

The point here is that when I found out that iNiS made a DS game, I wanted it. So, language barrier worries cast to the wind, I went ahead and ordered the game. While I was at it, I picked up Electroplankton (DS); more on that later. As far as I can tell without being able to speak or read Japanese, the premise of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is that there is some kind of elite male cheer squad which helps people out by motivating them in an extreme fashion. When people have problems, whether weighty or mundane, they can yell "Ouendan!" and three intensely-dancing, black trenchcoat-wearing, 3D-rendered guys appear on the scene to galvanize the person in question into action. In fact, one of the funniest parts of the game is how the squad is often simply sitting in the background of the scene, partaking in whatever activity is going on. For example, when a pottery maker's apparent sexual frustration leads him to summon the Ouendan crew, the three guys are already in his shop spinning their own pottery.

The gameplay starts off fairly simply. Using the DS' stylus, you must tap sequentially-numbered discs in time to the well-recorded pop-rock soundtrack. Concentric circles close in on the numbers, and when they converge indicates the precise moment you must tap the touch screen. Hitting the discs creates either a cymbal crash, a whistle, or a bass drum strike (or, often, some combination of the three) that accentuates key beats of the song. As you hit many consecutive beats correctly, you will build up a running combo that raises your score. At first, the strikes occur in fairly obvious places, on key downbeats and upbeats, but as the game progresses, the rhythms become more complex and syncopated, and more gameplay elements are introduced. There is a rolling ball that must be traced across the screen, first in straight lines and eventually in more curvaceous ones, as well as a turntable that must periodically be spun around as fast as possible.

The first stage is very simple, but after a few levels, just about all of the gameplay elements will have been introduced. Further increases in difficulty are achieved by ramping up the tempo and complexity of the rhythms you must perform. One thing iNiS seems to really understand is how to extract key beats from the song in such a way that the the player is both matching and adding to the rhythmic structure in place. This is one of the best parts of Gitaroo-Man, but even with Ouendan's comparatively stripped-down gameplay it is still a quality that very much shines through. In gameplay terms, this means that once you get a handle on how each song is set up, it becomes possible sometimes to almost anticipate what you are going to have to do next, even if you haven't played that level before. I often surprised myself when stumbling upon this phenomenon. Of course, to actually be able to get through the harder songs well (or at all) may take a few run-throughs, even after achieving near-prescience.

Ouendan is structured in a linear fashion, although you can roughly choose the order of levels. In between songs, the game presents a map of the town featuring small animations of the various troubled souls in need of assistance, any of whom you can bestow with the benefits of intense cheer. Your interactions include helping a kid study hard enough to pass a test, inciting a salaryman to transform into a twenty-story-tall version of himself and do battle with a giant threat, and traveling back in time to help an Egyptian phaeress exhort her laborers into efficiently constructing the great pyramids (after which for some reason she herself loses quite a bit of weight). As in Gitaroo-Man, there are also a few scenes that achieve a certain level of poignancy--at least, as much as is possible given the game's context. Oh, and lest we forget this is a video game, suffice to say I'm not spoiling much by revealing that you do in fact end up saving the world.

The overall presentation of the game adds quite a bit to its enjoyment, with a wide variety of often-hilarious situations and branching situations. Each song is broken up into several segments, and while you are actually playing the game there are hand-drawn scenes on the top screen showing the effect your efforts are having. If you do well during a given segment--that is, if you hit most of the notes in the correct rhythm--you are rewarded with a scene showing your charge succeeding in whatever he or she is trying to achieve. Likewise, if you miss too many notes, you will be presented with a scene of failure. You can still complete the song even with a failures or two, and you may even find yourself choosing to deliberately play poorly in order to see all the possible outcomes.

Despite not really being a graphics-focused game, every does look very nice. The hand-drawn art is very clean and frequently very funny, and the cutscenes are told in a semi-animated comic book style. I can't read any of what's being said, of course, but the situations tend to be pretty self-explanatory. That, and sometimes they're just so ridiculous that you get the feeling a translation might not actually help very much. The actual cheer squad is rendered in 3D, and thanks to some really great animation is also a pleasure to watch. The cheerleaders' movements may very well be motion-captured. For the most part, their cheering consists of synchronized martial arts moves performed in time to the music. For all I know, that's what cheerleading is always like in Japan. I don't really follow that scene.

The soundtrack is better than I expected, and though it's generally rock-oriented there's some diversity of styles. Fortunately for me, it wasn't the straight J-pop soundtrack I was bracing for. Songs span varying dynamic ranges, and there are contributions ranging from funk to classic rock attempts. One of my favorites is a fairly straightforward rock song which is improved due to the chorus largely consisting of the singer repeated "Baby" a lot. A note I need to stress is that this game really shouldn't be played using the stock DS speakers. Play it with headphones or route it through an external speaker system. Since it's got a standard headphone jack, you can just run it straight into any set of stereo computer speakers with a 1/8" line cable. I have my DS running into my entertainment center with a $0.99 1/8" to RCA adapter. Trust me, it's worth it. You're going to spend the whole game listening to these songs, so you might as well have them sound good. It's surprising what an enormous difference it makes.

I wanted to check out the game's multiplayer mode, but after a lot of blind language-blocked attempts I realize that unlike just about all other wireless-enabled DS games it requires each player to have a game cartridge. My assumption is that this is due to the naturally large size of the game's soundtrack, which is much longer and higher-quality than most DS soundtracks. Internet research has determined, however, that the game supports up to four players in a multiplayer game, and is actually quite fun. With one cartridge it is possible to send the game's training level over to another DS, but if you have another DS owner in your vicinity who is interested in the game, you might as well just physically show off some of the game's more insane and attractive stages.

By this point, you should have a pretty good idea if it's worth your money to import iNiS' Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! If you rhythm games, or if you simply enjoy crazy games, you might want to consider picking it up. Again, the language barrier is not too much of a hurdle to overcome unless you really feel the need to know exactly what the characters are shouting or why, precisely, that salaryman has turned into a twenty-story-tall version of himself. Then again, some things are better left unknown, am I right? The game is an example of a game that is ideally suited to the DS' unique abilities, and with both 2D and 3D graphics, integral touch screen usage, competent dual-screen usage, and wireless multiplayer, the only current DS feature left untouched is the microphone. And, frankly, in a game featuring rock music, male cheerleaders, and enthusiastic race horses, I think we can all agree that's for the best.

Given the almost entirely Japanese lyrics in all the music and the rather odd premise overall, it seems unlikely that Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! will see release outside of Japan, especially given the poor performance of iNiS' Gitaroo-Man. However, games like Katamari Damacy have shown that crazy Japanese games with Japanese soundtracks can succeed overseas these days, so there may very well be hope yet. Just don't count on it. If you want to play this game, go ahead and import.

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