I spent a week playing Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan on both ends of my commute, and that was enough practice to complete the hard mode on Friday. I had somehow managed to replay the entire normal mode the week before last and, after a marathon session that Saturday, actually complete the game on normal difficulty.
While there is the particular sad stage that I'm not surprised made me cry, I admit that the last stage made me cry too. Even when I was playing it again, on hard. Even today when I played it on hard again, to focus my mind into writing this. I have spoken about the game on this site several times, but now, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic:
Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is the best, most important, most emotionally involving video game I have played in at least two years.
I would think it strange that a game could make me cry, but if any game could, it's a music game. Often simply listening to particular music (for which I've made up particular stories in my head) will make me tear up. Ouendan features not only powerful music, but marries it to iconic images in a sharp, energetic manga style. It doesn't hurt that, being an import title, it's all in Japanese. With a persistent rhythm and bright still pictures, it can grab me right at the brain stem at a prevocal, utterly emotional level that an animated game in English might not manage.
It's not the first music game, of course. I never appreciated actual dancing games to the extent some of my Pump It Up-obsessed friends did. Those same friends broke out Bust A Groove one day and I had no inclination to play. I have Dai Gassou! Band Brothers, and it's a fun game, though I haven't found myself playing the Request Selection expansion pack much yet. I've played a little Amplitude on the PS2, but I didn't obsess over it. While DJ Max (an online multiplayer Beatmania clone) is fun, it's still missing some certain something (besides being a bit beyond my skill level currently).
The thing these games have in common is they are abstract music games: time your button presses with the beat and watch the pretty flashing lights. With Ouendan, while it's also an actuate-the-tokens-to-the-beat game, the strong integration of the story provides meaning the other rhythm games don't have. It's the classic definition of story, and the difference between Vib Ribbon and PaRappa the Rapper: are there characters you meet and see grow through the conflict? These other music games don't--they're puzzle games--while you might say Ouendan is a music-based action game.
Ouendan strikes another chord in me with its implicit ideology. The other weekend, a week after seeing Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney's film about Joseph McCarthy's personal fight with television newsman Edward R. Murrow and CBS, I listened to a C-SPAN audio stream of a Liberty Film Festival panel, "Was Communism A Threat to Hollywood?" In it, libertarian filmmakers discussed the influence of communists in film of the McCarthy/blacklist era. Their least controversial statement was that filmmakers with communist sympathies knew better than to put overtly pro-Soviet messages into films, but rather, when they were able, use pro-communist ideological messages in apolitical films. Later I read an essay going around, What's wrong with libertarianism, that calls the common, extreme, Randian libertarianism "the un-Communism." With all this on my mind, a thought crystallized about Ouendan.
At its greatest, Ouendan is about the triumph of personal responsibility. This is not the communist ideal that "the people" as a group hold true power, or Ayn Rand's notion that when freed to do so, some individual humans can be freed from the dead weight of the common people, but the (I suppose) classic liberal idea that common individuals, empowered and working together, can do great things. The entire game is a series of single victories for individual people, climaxing in a cataclysmic threat that they can only overcome by working together. (And they do, when you win the game.)
In Ouendan there is no conventional single hero. In each stage, you play a particular group of people--the cheer squad--who empower the individual heroes of their stories to win conflicts. You aren't actively engaged in any particular conflict: you put on your routine to the upbeat Japanese pop-rock and motivate the hero of that story. You enable. It's individual, so it's not communist; it's egalitarian, so it's not Randian. It seems to me the most effective expression of the most American ideal of personal freedom that I've seen in many a day.
Because it's an import game, I have to wonder how the idea of collective empowerment connects with Japanese culture. It seems related, but very different to, the kind of collective self-deprecating social entwinglement that I identify as Japanese. However, I'm not qualified to really theorize about Japanese culture, so I'll leave it at that. (For more thoughts on Japanese culture and gaming, see The Escapist issue 18.)
Ouendan is a game all about firing people up to resolve their personal crises. By marrying music to gaming, it's the first game in a long time to actually fire me up.
You know what I thought of when I read that article? Space Channel 5. It's another music game with a moving storyline. Especially the climax. You play a reporter who saves people from aliens by dancing. When a giant robot takes out her sound system, she's effectively left helpless with nothing to dance to.
Then you hear a faint voice. Then another. And another.
One by one, the people you saved join in with the music you need to beat the last boss until it sounds like the whole world is cheering you on. Just awesome.
Get it on Dreamcast, get it on PS2, hell, get it on GBA if you have to. Part 2's not bad either.
Posted by: CPFace | 14 November 2005 at 07:37 PM
I just bought this game last week and totally fell in love with it. Like you I don't like the usual dance game, but after playing a demo of Elite Beat Agents I decided to give it a try. I'm slowly working my way through and am very impressed. Last night I played the level that you said made you cry. You didn't describe it at all but I know exactly which one you are talking about. I played it over and over again. It's simply amazing. It reminds me of the opening of the Lion King which also is very moving to me but with Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan I feel like I'm somehow involved in the struggle. Anyway, I really identified with your post and I look forward to Elite Beat Agents, the sequal to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. I bet nintendo does something cool for the WII as well.
Posted by: kn | 26 October 2006 at 11:19 AM
I got this on my R4 the other day but to be honest I wouldn't begrudge paying the (normally ridiculous) £30 or whatnot for it. It truly is an awesome game, very well thought out, and I absolutely cannot wait for the sequel. The American version EBA is ok, and the songs are obviously a bit more recognisable, but it's just not got that same... experience!
Posted by: Tommo | 11 April 2007 at 10:20 AM