Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and the burden of awesome

Most game consoles have only a few "must purchase" titles released in any given time. These are primarily sold around the Christmas season to cash in on people new to the market that need a reason to buy one console over another. They also keep people most interested in games looking forward to something all year. We slather all over ourselves over the latest released screen shots, talk endlessly about the possible game mechanics, and discuss strategies. These are the franchises people buy year after year, or new big name games from established gaming companies.

The Nintendo DS has been putting out new original gaming properties that interact with the user in a new way, namely the touch screen display, and they've been doing it the entire year. It's actually starting to get ridiculous at this point. Games I've been looking forward to for upwards of a year are getting released together on the same day, week after week, for months in a row. So while I have more games for my Nintendo DS than I've ever purchased for any other system, there will be more games I want to purchase between now and the end of the year than all the time before it.

My latest game is Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, which means Go! Fight! Cheer squad. This is a completely new sort of game concept. In Japan apparently cheerleaders are men dressed in black trench coats that scream at people at the top of their lungs. This game lets you be one of these teams. On the top screen, people in trouble call out for help. You as a cheer squad go help them by cheering to the rock music. If you cheer well, they will accomplish their goals. If you fail, they fail at their task. All of this is played out in expressive, easy to understand animated cut scenes entirely in Japanese. They are easy to understand due to the suburb animation, expressions. For example, one student couldn't study due to his loud family, so the cheer squad came and he scored well on his test. Awesome.

The actual game play is deceptively simple. Here are two videos of the game. The game is a rhythm game, which boils down to timing and memorization. All you have to do is hit circles and sliders in time to the beat. Your "life" meter constantly depletes. Perfect timing refills the beat, while good simply keeps it from depleting as fast. Bad timing, or missing will cause it to shrink faster. This means accuracy is very important.

The music and the cut scenes are superb. It's all Japanese rock, and it goes well with the stories they show in each stage. The game is extremely challenging, but it builds in difficulty as well so you can increase your skills as you play. I was always off put by the difficulty and public performance aspects of rhythm games in the past. Now that I can put on headphones, rock out, and still tap to the beat it's more forgiving. I've never enjoyed a game in the genre before, but this is definitely something I'd recommend for anyone looking for something new on the Nintendo DS. It's one of the best games on the system.

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