I'll break radio silence to inform you that Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 is available as this week's weekly special at Play Asia. It could make a great late holiday present for someone with a new DS who likes rhythm games.
Merry holiday!
As Pink Godzilla has been counting down, Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 is now shipping. As I wait for my copy to arrive (I didn't spring for speedy shipping, oops), I recalled that one of the best things I did for Ouendan was listen the hell out of the real songs. In that spirit, why not check out what's available on the iTunes Store?
I have personal qualms with buying music from the iTunes Store (the DRM situation, which they're improving), but I don't know anywhere else to get Japanese music a la carte. There was an excellent article in Slate about the iTunes Store in Japan called "jTunes: The insanely great songs Apple won't let you hear." Paul Collins discusses some of the great music that doesn't make it to my side of the Pacific, but notes that with a little work you can fake around Apple's country restriction:
While iTunes Japan pegs foreign undesirables from their credit card numbers, it can't screen fake Japanese addresses provided by prepaid iTunes Card users. There's a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online.
One of those open sellers is J-List, whom I first heard of way back in the day when I was first hearing about things like anime and Pocky. I bought a ¥3000 card and, following their directions, set up an iTunes Store account.
One result is this iMix, comprising all the songs in the iTunes Store I could find from Wikipedia's track list. (That was before several additional tracks were added to the list, but I can't find those tracks in the iTunes Store anyway.)
Sadly it's only six songs, so at ¥1200 it'll almost use half of a ¥3000 iTunes card. Several of the songs are listed on the iTunes Store, but are really "orgel" versions. I doubt these will help your game performance, so I didn't include them. Personally I prefer my covers bluegrass, anyway.
If you have any suggestions or corrections for this iMix, let me know.
While they've had it available for early orderers for a while, Play-Asia sent out a reminder that you can preorder Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2, complete with the cover art:
The big news you've probably already heard (thanks to the success of Elite Beat Agents) is that Inis is developing the even more colorfully named Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 (something like "Burn! Hot Rhythm Soul Go Fight Cheersquad 2," says the internet) for release to the Japanese market this year. Some specific news was announced this week at the Game Developers Conference, where Keiichi Yano of Inis had a session about the development of Ouendan and the localization of EBA:
Keiichi Yano mentioned that Nintendo will reveal more details on the sequel, later this week, but he gave us a glimpse of the new game and characters on the overhead projector. He also revealed that the original cast of Ouendan characters will return with a slight, ever so subtle edgier art style.
twilightx over at nintendo_ds also shared this magazine scan of some first screenshots of the new game. (Meanwhile there are also some first screens of Super Paper Mario—another title I anxiously await—as well as video from GDC on Gamevideos.com.)
After a long drought of few interesting games for the DS, I find myself with copies of Contact, Phoenix Wright 2, and Elite Beat Agents—and I never even got that far in Megaman ZX yet. While I put off starting Contact until I finished a book, and haven't cracked the law books with Contact in play, I couldn't help but try out Elite Beat Agents as soon as I got it.
If you liked Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, it's definitely worth playing. The music selections, while not what I would have chosen, are good: pop-punk like "Sk8er Boi," "Makes No Difference," and "The Anthem" are definitely the right mood. While I wouldn't actively listen to "YMCA," I admit it's great for rhythm gaming.
The Game|Life article teases at the ending, and having played through it on ☆☆ Cruisin' (the "Normal" difficulty, though I feel Ouendan and EBA on "Hard" are the real Ouendan and EBA), I can say it's a great ending for this game. There are interesting narrative differences in how the last challenges are presented in EBA compared to Ouendan; I don't want to spoil the ending, though, so I hope it suffices to say EBA doesn't play quite as strongly to my argument about the role of personal responsibility as in Ouendan's story, though the very end serves up just as much kandou.
My biggest disappointment so far has nothing to do with the game itself. Recently I swore off the iTunes Music Store, due to boring technorighteous reasons I won't bother explaining here, and switched to Emusic. Playing on the train this morning, I decided I wanted to build a playlist of the EBA songs, since listening to the Ouendan soundtrack helped improve my game so much. Unfortunately, not even the first song I searched for—Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat"—is in Emusic. In fact, searching for all of the tracks, I find Emusic only has live versions of Highway Star; tons of covers and/or karaoke versions of YMCA, Material Girl, and You're The Inspiration; and Rock This Town (which is also in the awesome Guitar Hero 2). I guess I should stick to the indie podcasts to find things to buy on Emusic.
Disappointment aside, there are a couple interesting changes in the mechanics of EBA. The most superficial is that, instead of a flat map, you select levels by spinning a section of 3D world with the stylus. More usefully, one friend who played Ouendan a bit was annoyed that you can't skip the introductory part of the song, only the comic book intro; in EBA, you can skip right to the "Are you READY?" prompt. Also, similar to the full screen picture when you finish all difficulties of Ouendan, you get a full screen picture when you succeed in all portions of a song—and a star marker, encouraging you to completely "O" all the songs to collect all the stars. Lastly, as the Game|Life article notes, there are 19 songs in EBA. There are still only 15 levels in the regular game, however. The extra songs are unlocked, and I'm not sure if it's by points or what, as I've only unlocked Cher's "Believe."
Altogether, Elite Beat Agents is everything one could have reasonably hoped for in a US adaptation of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. It's great fun and you should get it!
I downloaded the Elite Beat Agents demo while I was picking up Mega Man ZX, and while I'm still looking forward to the game, the demo was disappointing. I can identify three reasons:
Maybe I'm spoiled by Steam and Xbox 360 demos, but that's kind of lame. Plus it shared a big warning up front that the demo was only a demo, that it didn't fully represent the finished game. Honestly I doubt even kids with DSes need told that, but maybe that's my bias.
Fixing any one of those things would be an improvement, but I wouldn't have liked the demo unless it was a whole song. That's so obviously a requirement I didn't expect anyone would have to mention it. Did the E3 demos share these misfeatures?
Speaking of preorders, Elite Beat Agents is also available for preordering from Play-Asia ($40) and from Amazon ($30) both.
The rumor on the internets is that in this N-Philes chat with Morgan Webb, the edited portions in:
I'm a dork, but I also like, you know this game for the DS, it's called [oops!-ed]. It's the US version of [bad Morgan Webb! bad!].
are covering up that Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is coming not only to Europe in English, but to the United States as well! The unconfirmed title is Elite Agent Force, which prompts the question: are they localizing away the cheerleader angle, or does that fit with how it's presented in the Japanese? (How would they explain the real American-ish cheerleaders in extra-hard mode, anyway?)
Given how Japanophilic (or at least Japan-friendly) the target demographic is, I wouldn't expect them to bother having new music. While a great new soundtrack would at least let them double-dip into the import market, it's probably for the best.
Update: As announced at E3, Ouendan will be published as Elite Beat Agents.
Here's some recent news. For fans of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, big news: Ouendan will be localized to English--for the European market. It'd be interesting to see how playing it in English affects the emotional impact of the game, but I don't intend to buy a copy just to see. I imagine all the people who already know the game and love it will feel the same. (I wonder who I can get to buy it; not Nick, as he borrowed my Japanese copy.)
The big news for everyone else is the DS is finally getting a web browser: a version of Opera, the best desktop web browser you can get on mobile devices, will hit Japan this summer. (No telling when it'll come out over here, so Nintendo has plenty of time to fix their web site.) The DS version shows the full width of the page stuck in the touch screen, with a draggable zoom box to select what's visible at an actual readable scale on the top screen, which is a nice use of the technology. See Opera's announcement here.
Here's a funny Phoenix Wright ad from Japan, subtitled in English, on YouTube.
Tetris DS news is heating up. Yesterday I saw the videos on nintendo.com that make it clear that the retro NES backdrops are specific play modes, not just pretty pixels. The video of the Catch (Metroid) play mode is pretty cool! You're flying your own katamari of Tetris pieces around, trying to fill in the nucleus before it clears (or something). British Gaming Blog has something like the ultimate Tetris DS screenshot collection, showing the same.
Lastly, Super Princess Peach is coming out this week. If you're interested, you might check out the official site which has like some little videos and stuff. That you perform actions with "vibes," the big heart icons on the touch screen, seems interesting. It seems a little sexist, too, that the heroine's greatest weapon is her wildly swaying emotions, but at least Peach isn't getting leered at in the shower by AI supercomputers.
For someone who enjoyed Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, the ideal case for an English localization would be something like a sequel: instead of localizing the stories and text, or localizing the songs (at exorbitant cost compared to just having somebody cover a song already in the proper language), an English Ouendan would be the almost entirely disconnected story of the New York characters shown during the backstory to the final song.
These characters would have their own original stories with their own songs in English, which could be similar in overall narrative structure, but appropriate for the American audience. Primarily the differences would be a reason for people in both countries who loved one to buy the other game, to get more of the same game.
If Nintendo and Inis could magically license every song on my iPod for $10 and a bubblegum wrapper, the lineup for an English Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan might look like this. I realize it doesn't have the same representation of hip hop-rock, and as I don't know Japanese I don't know that it strikes the same thematic notes as the Japanese game's soundtrack, but this is the best I could do while wasting time on my train commutes. So here are some interesting choices (I think):
Several more basic pop/rock songs about which I have nothing specific to say: Arson Welles - Sity of St., Barenaked Ladies - Go Home, Doves - There Goes the Fear, Pete Yorn - For Nancy.
I couldn't find any songs with quite the same theme and strength, so I would still have to end the game with L'Arc~en~Ciel - Ready! Steady! Go. That would work well with the idea that this is the simultaneous telling of the New York story, and it ends with the same event, in which the characters from both games cooperate to save the world.
