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About a month after its release, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime expressed disappointment that the sales of Elite Beat Agents weren't stronger. "I have to say I'm a little personally disappointed," Fils-Aime said, adding, "The sales are strong and good. [But] I personally thought it was going to be explosive." After Nintendo went out of its way to get developer iNiS to create a Westernized sequel to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! ("Go! Fight! Cheer Squad!"), such expectations are reasonable. While the original wasn't a big hit in Japan, overseas importers (thanks to the region-free DS!) got wind of the game's oddball premise and gobbled it up, in spite of its heavy use of Japanese text, culture and music. None of these importers ever believed their fervor would have encouraged a localization let alone full-blown sequel, yet Nintendo and iNiS delivered, providing what is one of the most addictive, energizing and uplifting games the DS has. visuals After the song list, artistic design goes a long way in selling any music game. Elite Beat Agents delivers its own distinct style and charm in spades. While the comic/anime-styled design of the characters is in the vein of iNiS's previous sleeper hit Gitaroo Man (PS2), they're more refined and imminently attractive than the inconsistent and abstract designs of Gitaroo. Compared to Ouendan!, EBA's artwork is nearly the same; the primary difference is the "cheerleaders" and their comrades are a stylistic mix of Blues Brothers, Men in Black, and the Village People. In Ouendan!, the male cheerleaders were more conservatively dressed in long, black trenchcoat-like garb with red hachimaki headbands, but in either title, the guys exude an inexplicable aura of toughness, which helps balance their outlandish, Fat Boy Slim-esque dancing. Each difficulty level in the game features a different lead Agent, and rest assured seeing the higher level dance leads is increasingly amusing and silly as they flail and shimmy. Each stage of EBA is a self-contained story concerning an everyday person's plight, be it small or-- more often-- big. These stories are set up in pseudo-animated comic book style, with each panel appearing one at a time, dialogue bubbles and names appearing shortly after. Characters and settings have a colorful, dark-outlined appearance and emotions of all kinds, both subtle and histrionic, are keenly illustrated. Once the character in peril lets out a scream for help in a stuttering horror movie flash, the Agents are deployed by their gruff commander, popping up in everything from a sleek '60s convertible to a blimp. At this point, the actual gameplay kicks in. The top screen of the DS displays 2D illustrated manic activity by the stage's rescuee, dynamically shifting from good to bad depending how well the player performs. On the lower screen the Agents are 3D polygonal dancers who dramatically swing their arms and throw their bodies, tripping up whenever a beat marker is missed. It's too bad the gameplay requires so much concentration of the player-- the visuals are so over-the-top and amusing they practically demand to be seen, but they must be ignored in order to finish the level. This is a typical trick of the music genre-- distract with imagery-- but EBA excels with its melodramatic stories. To really appreciate the humor and style, watching the instant replay of a completed song is recommended-- jokes and campiness abound, and some characters even cameo in others' stages. audio The DS's card medium continues to impress in EBA, which features 18 licensed tracks, in stereo, redone by cover artists. Some covers are better than others; how well the sound-alike succeeds will depend on the gamer's familiarity with the original recording and artist. In most cases, the tonal quality of the singer and the background instruments are close enough to get the job done, but they're not on par with the covers in Guitar Hero (PS2) or Karaoke Revolution. Regardless, when hammering out beats during a stressful stage, nitpicking a remake's quality is quickly sidelined in favor of completing the song. The actual song selection is sometimes incongruous with a given stage, at least text-wise. Yet the variety is great: EBA has everything from Hoobastank and Sum 41 to Rolling Stones and David Bowie. Further, while Avril Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi" is completely out of place textually, it's a good example of how most every song's "feeling" nicely complements the emotional thrust of each stage's storyline. A score of voice actors fill out the rest of the audio presentation. The cheerleaders let out butch "Heys!" as they pirouette and clap, and the storyline segments are accented here and there with exclamations, screams, and appropriate sound effects, occasionally accompanied by bold onomatopoeia reminiscent of '60s television Batman. In favor of maintaining the comic presentation, most dialogue is presented in text instead of voice-acted. gameplay In a nutshell, EBA concerns tapping, drawing and swirling the stylus in time to the song playing. Numbered circles appear across the touch screen, and they're each surrounded by ever-shrinking concentric outlines. Once the outline overlaps the edge of the circle, the circle should be tapped, each being tapped in numerical order. Sometimes two circles connected by a path appear, and in this case the first circle must be tapped and then the stylus dragged down the path to the other circle at a speed indicated by a beach ball that rolls along the path. The final gameplay element is a screen-filling circle that must be rapidly "spun" by drawing a swirling loop over its surface until a corresponding on-screen meter is filled up. This may sound abstract, but in execution it's rather intuitive and very similar to a much less successful music game called Technic Beat on PS2. All the tapping and dragging is evaluated, at a higher level, by an ever draining "Elite-o-meter" that runs across the top of the touch screen. Consistent, good performance keeps the meter full and ensures a "happy" ending to each of the three or four chapters each stage is broken into. Poor tapping and timing results in the meter draining more rapidly, the stage's rescuee fumbling, and the game/song ending prematurely. Conceptually, the gameplay sounds simple, but it's only deceptively so. Well-graduated difficulty levels (each with a different lead Agent) smoothly ramp up the learning curve for the game's 15+ stages, and connecting the dots quickly becomes a task that's never seemed more difficult. The theatrical storylines and solutions to rescuees' problems keep things driving forward even in failure-- they often crash and burn in hysterical fashion, or they succeed with ridiculous, implausible means. Some of the stories are even touching, considering some of the heavier subject matter such as losing a parent. The primary single player mode features 15 levels/songs-- more than many other music games with comparable presentations have featured on consoles. Yet iNiS encourages replay with more unlockable songs, difficulty modes, and Agents. This is on top of in-game rewards of positive or negative endings to each chapter in a stage and bonus artwork that unlocks for above-average tapping. multiplayer Multiplayer could have been a cop-out in EBA: not included, requiring everyone owned the game, or regurgitating the single player mode exactly. Yet iNiS didn't sidestep an of those challenges: a hearty selection multiplayer modes is included. For single-cart download play, a host gamer can download a song s/he has unlocked in single player to up to three friends' DSs, allowing everyone to competitively play through a unique storyline drafted just for multiplayer. The song may exist (and be unlocked first) in single player mode, but the story assigned to it in multiplayer is completely different. Also, the Elite-o-meter is tossed in competitive multiplayer in favor of more generalized "who's doing better than whom" rankings. In the story, whichever character is assigned to the best-performing player will triumph over his or her competitors after each song chapter concludes, leading up to a final victor at the song's end. The only downsides of this mode is the lengthy download time and a smaller selection of songs is available unless everyone has a copy of the game. A cooperative, one-at-a-time mode is also available in multiplayer, provided everyone owns a copy of the game. This mode uses the single-player songs and storylines as participants take turns completing a song segment, all contributing to the maintenance of a single, shared Elite-o-meter. overall The most similar experience on the gaming market to Elite Beat Agents, aside from its predecessor, would be Dreamcast's Space Channel 5 series. That series' creator (Tetsuya Mizuguchi) hoped those games would make people feel good about humanity, but it's likely iNiS's Elite Beat Agents accomplishes that and then some. The title just has some sort of magic to it, in spite of its humor and deliberate cheesiness, that encourages good vibes, especially by the time the over-the-top finale is completed. Interestingly, Elite Beat Agents is touted as part of Nintendo's Touch Generation line, meaning Nintendo believes the game has cross-generational appeal to people like mom, dad and the grandparents. Getting such family into a music game like this may be more difficult than the cloying Nintendogs or sterile Brain Training, but if they give it a try, they're sure to fall in love with it as much as anyone else. The presentation is incredibly rich, the song list upbeat and varied, and the overall feeling the game leaves is one of hope and jubilation over the stumbles and victories of everyday life.
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