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Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

One of the great things about Nintendo’s handheld systems (along with Sony’s PSP) is that they’ve always been region-free. This means that no matter where in the world you buy a game for the system, it’ll work on it just as if you bought it at the store down the street. No mod chips, no cheats, no tricks. You just plug in the game, and you’re set to go. As you might imagine, this is a dream come true for importers.

This is very fortunate, as a few of the best DS games have only been released in Japan, and are likely to stay there. Budding musicians may want to spring for Band Bros. (which was announced for US release but looks like it’s been long forgotten by NOA), and fans of Shonen Jump should consider the Smash Bros.-esque Jump Superstars a must-have. However, if you only ever import one game on the DS, you should make it a title by the name of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!

Loosely translated, the title means “Go! Fight! Cheer Squad”, which is actually a pretty accurate description of the game. The basic premise of the game follows a team of oddball (but super-serious) guy cheerleaders in trench coats as they roam the city. Whenever they are needed, a citizen need only scream out “Oooooouendaaaaaan!”, and they’ll be there, where they’ll proceed to… cheer on the person that needs their help.

It’s an absolutely wacky and ridiculous plot, and it only gets stranger when you see some of your goals, ranging from helping a sculptor find inspiration for his latest pottery project, to helping a violinist overcome a nasty stomach virus, to cheering on a racehorse as he chases down a burglar. Non-Japanese speakers needn’t worry – while the game is almost entirely in Japanese, well-animated comic panels throughout the game illustrate the story so well you don’t need to be able to read Japanese to get the gist of what’s going on.

In fact, while the menu screens might make you want to consult GameFAQs here and there, the basic controls and gameplay of the game are so user-friendly that even someone with absolutely no Japanese skills can pick it up.

The game takes the form of a music-rhythm title with three types of control in the game, and all use the touchscreen. Hits are dots with a concentric circle contracting around it – simply tap the dot when the circle is the same size of the dot. Tracks work sort of the same way, but instead of tapping, you drag your stylus along a path at the same speed as a rolling ball, with some paths using arrows to indicate they require you to trace back and forth over the track multiple times. Finally, spinners take up the whole screen at certain points of a level, and you need to circle the stylus around the center to “spin” a wheel as many times as you can before you run out of time.

It’s all extremely easy to pick up, and the game even throws you little helpful indicators, like a dotted line from one hit to the next in a series. You’ll have the hang of it in a matter of minutes, and when you do it’s ridiculously addictive (but what else would you expect from iNiS, the developers of Koei’s underappreciated PS2 music-rhythm masterpiece Gitaroo-Man?).

Still, be warned, as simple and easy as the game seems at first, the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly, and even on the game’s easy mode, you’ll undoubtedly get your rear end handed back to you countless times. In harder modes, the game can get outright vicious. This is in part because the “energy bar”, that quickly drains whenever you’ve made a mistake, is always depleting anyways, requiring you to constantly get stuff right to refill it. Otherwise, you can easily fail the song within the first five or ten seconds.

The game’s graphics, as said before, center around well-animated and whimsical anime-style comics that are displayed mostly on the top screen. Meanwhile, the bottom screen features the gameplay, as well as the Ouendan guys, rendered in full 3D and surprisingly well-detailed and wonderfully animated, moving in time with your actions. These combine for an overall look that’s bright and colorful and hilarious, and it works perfectly for the theme of the game.

And, naturally, any music-rhythm worth a damn needs a good soundtrack, and Ouendan does not disappoint. The game has fifteen high-energy J-Pop songs by some of the more renowned artists in Japan, like Hitomi Yaida and L’Arc-En-Ciel. There’s not a stinker in the entire soundtrack, and some of the songs are outright incredible. And while the songs here are all covers, they’re all extremely good covers, and they’re arguably made even better by the game’s great sound effects, with your actions causing drum beats, cymbals and whistle blows like you’d expect from a high school marching band, and your team shouting enthusiastically, all to the beat of the music. It may sound silly, but trust me: it works very well.

The game has a multiplayer option for up to four players, although it requires multiple copies of the game so I was sadly unable to test it. At the very least, a friend with a DS can download the tutorial level of the game to try and get the hang of it the mechanics, although this hardly seems necessary. Still, it’s nice that the option is there.

If the wackiness above hasn’t already scared you away, you probably have an open mind, so let me say this – this is one of the best games on the DS. It’s extremely fun, very challenging, has a spectacularly good presentation, and is one of the funniest games I’ve had the chance to play in a while. Nintendo may not think the game is worth bringing to the United States (and in all fairness, it would be hard to sell to gamers often too timid to try anything so bizarre), but that doesn’t have to stop you from getting this game. And you should. Go to Lik-Sang or one of the other various import shops and get a copy. And when you do, make sure to shout “Oooooooooouuueeeendaaaaaaaaaan!” so loud that your neighbors can hear it. Hey, they need to know about this game too.

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Posted by Jake McNeill on Feb 9th, 2006 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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