Wednesday 13 Dec 2006

Elite Beat Agents is the spiritual successor to one of my favourite Nintendo DS games – the Japanese only Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! – and in the transition to English and the West it has lost none of the charm or fun of that game. The premise of the game is fantastically ludicrous, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. The titular Elite Beat Agents are a group of guys sitting somewhere in there secret lab looking out for people in need of help, and when they pick up a distress call they must go and help out in the only way they know how – by dancing for them of course! This is where you come in: how you play affects the performance of the Agents and thus impacts on the troubled person (or animal) for better or worse. The situations that arise in the stories associated with each song in the game are all quite absurd, and are well illustrated in a cartoon style that has a lot of character. The two screens are put to good use with the story continuing on the top screen while you tap, drag and spin on the touch screen.

Tap Drag and Spin

The game play is really quite simple – you must tap the circles that appear on the screen at the correct time. Each of the circles are numbered so you know what order to hit them in, and a large circle appears around them, shrinking until it hits the rim of the circle itself, indicating the exact moment you are required to tap the circle with your stylus. The combination of position and timing offer a large amount of options to the developers and they take full use of them, especially on the more difficult levels. Another type of mechanic requires you to follow a circle moving on a track by dragging your stylus in time. These two combine to create rhythms that are very well synchronized to the song itself. Just to mix things up there is also a spinning mechanism that is usually used at the end of the song where you must spin a disc with the stylus as fast as you can. This is to make sure you will replace your DS in due course, after you’ve scratched your screen to bits. Actually, no, the screen is very resilient, as long as you don’t push too hard. If you’re worried, a screen protector will serve you well.

The game rates each hit as 300, 100 or 50 points depending on your accuracy, and too many misses or 50 point hits and you will fail the song before it’s even over. Fortunately there are interludes that give you a chance to shake your stylus hand, and afford the time to extend the “plot” of the song, such as it is. These interludes are sometimes cute, sometimes insane, but ever entertaining. If your Elite-o-meter is below roughly half way when an interlude kicks in you will see something bad (and funny) happen to the protagonist. If you’re doing well, something good (and funny) will happen, and passing at all checkpoints in the song earns you a star for that song. The ending is different depending on how well you did, and you’re also graded on that ubiquitous C, B, A, S grading system. You get a score as well, which is very heavily dependant on never missing a note, as missing just one note in the middle of the song (and thus breaking your combo) will just about halve your score. The multiple scoring and grading systems offer great replay value as you try to improve on them or try to get all the different endings and events during the song.

A Few More Tweaks to Improve on Perfection

There are a few small changes that iNis have made to the way Ouendan worked, all of which are for the better. The big one is the ability to skip the song introduction. In Ouendan you could skip the scene-setting story but you had to wait through the song introduction to start playing, which got tiring in songs with long introductions and high difficulty like Ready Steady Go. In Elite Beat Agents you can skip directly to where the Agents start their 3, 2, 1 countdown, which is great. In addition, after you fail to complete a song you can review the section just before you failed so you can pick up what you did wrong. Other than that, the format hasn’t been altered very much, which is a very good thing, as Ouendan was near perfect. There is the addition of a bonus score for perfect phrases (every note in a section being a 300 pointer), and a star grading for each song as well to indicate its difficulty level. The quality of the story sequences seems just as good as before, with the added benefit this time of being able to understand what the story is actually about instead of making up your own ideas about the pictures. I should add that all the songs and stories are completely brand new, so if you find you like this game you should really check out its forebear for some more of the same, only with Japanese pop and rock in the place of American pop and rock.

There are a total of 19 songs in the game, all cover versions of course, and the song selection is great, with a nice amount of variation in genres and a fair number of songs you will know. They’re chosen more for their interesting rhythm and phrasing than their music quality I think, and the level design (for want of a better description) matches perfectly with the music, especially on the harder difficulty settings. I cannot stress it enough – it just feels fantastic when you hit all the notes correctly, so perfect is the concept, design and execution. The difficulty ramps from very easy, where there are only a few circles to hit and there is a very lenient policy on misses through to almost impossible, where a miss (or even a 50) just about dooms you to failure, the circles to hit are smaller and they appear just before you’re required to hit them so memorizing the layout is important. Because of this you are guaranteed to find a difficulty level that is fun and challenging at the same time.

For those with a friend and a spare DS, or a friend with a DS, or a nearby stranger who happens to have a DS handy, wireless download play is available. It only has a selection of 5 songs, but they do have completely new stories with a more competitive bent to them, and you are basically competing for the higher score. By being the one who owns the game you’re at a significant advantage, but it’s a great inclusion nevertheless. If you have friends that have a DS and a copy of Elite Beat Agents you can also play co-operatively, but, alas, I am not in that fortunate situation and I cannot comment on how well that would go down.

Multiplayer is a nice touch, but this game is perfect just by itself. It’s a game that is completely unique among rhythm games, oozes charm and polish, and is so well implemented and thought out that it cannot be faulted. Put some headphones on and prepare to smile.

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Contributor:	Peter

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