Have you ever heard of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan? It’s possible if you’re the kind of gamer who follows forum threads about obscure Japanese releases, but the average member of the public would probably simply spray pepper gas in your eye if you approached them with this question and call the police, thinking perhaps that it was some sort of sordid sex act you were into, or a cult which expects you to murder your friends and eat their hearts so that the blessed alien overlords can descend upon our earth from up high and take us true believers up, off and away through the cosmos to the promised land.

I can’t wait for that particular eventuality, having now eaten more hearts than I know what to do with, but no. It’s not. It’s a videogame which massed an incredible amount of praise from people ‘in the know’, and had filthy Gaijin brains blowing up all over the place as they attempted to make sense of the outlandish title it had been blessed with over in the Far East.

Clearly, the problem that Ouendan faced when being considered for release overseas was a cultural one. INIS and Nintendo both knew that the general public in America and beyond would react to a game about male cheerleaders bolstering people’s confidence to the cheery beats of a J-pop soundtrack  with only slightly less revulsion, bewilderment and outright fear than waking up one morning to find themeselves strapped to the bonnet of their car with a sweaty, morbidly obese sex offender leering over them with an erection in his hand and a glint in his eye. INIS therefore wisely decided that it might be a good idea to rebrand the game for Western shores and tailor the game for our more xenophobic, closed-minded audiences to enjoy.

So what kind of music would they prefer? Given the alarmingly huge variety of excellent music that western civilization has churned out over the years, surely only the cream of the crop would suffice. After all, everyone loves Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne for one thing. The inclusion of, say, Material Girl by Madonna goes almost without saying. And it would be a crime not to include Makes no Difference by Sum 41. And then there’s… wait, what? Stop it, INIS! Stop! For the love of God, what are you doing adding songs like these to the game before it’s even released? Have you lost your collective minds?

The visual theme of the game and the story both received a facelift as well. The manly cheerleading types were replaced with suave secret agents on a mission to help the populace through their daily troubles via the medium of dance and annoyingly catchy music. You know, exactly like the FBI do in real life when suspects take bystanders hostage. The hardest difficulty’s female members were replaced with… um, whores. That’s them up there at the top of the page, leering at us with an indecent amount of cleavage showing through and making it difficult for me to concentrate as they shake their soiled, tainted flesh all over the place. Finally, each and every individual storyline was rewritten and reimagined in a way that was more culture friendly to all of us filthy racists over here, yet still retained the feelgood factor which the original Ouendan title had oozing out of every pore.

And hence, Elite Beat Agents was born. As much as all the purists took this rare opportunity to vomit bile over the rebranding of Ouendan, the more open minded fans who accepted this had something better. We had, to all intents and purposes, a direct sequel to one of the most addictive DS titles ever made. Also, looking at it another way – when given the choice of a new, hilarious, off-kilter and thoroughly enjoyable game or nothing at all, who would really be so foolish as to choose the latter option?

“So”, I hear you cry, salivating like a frothy little dog as your impatiance glands kick into action and rush their juices throughout your body, “how does it actually play?”

Well, the gameplay itself is as simple as can be without regressing into Pong. Numbered spheres appear on the lower screen of your DS, dotted around the screen with a larger circle shrinking towards them in ascending numerical order. Once the diminishing outer circle overlaps the numbered one’s circumference you tap it with your DS’ stylus and, depending on your timing, you’ll be rewarded with either a perfect 300 score, a decent 100, a measly 50 points or nothing at all for a miss. In addition to this, you gain a small amount of health back for each successfully timed tap – which is an absolute necessity for finishing each stage as your health bar relentlessly drains throughout each song from start to finish, only pausing in its unending march towards oblivion during mid-level cutscenes which reflect your performance.

Do well and your subject will achieve his goals, execute your taps badly and they’ll suffer all manner of hilarious misfortunes. If you can tear your eyes off the bottom screen you’ll see how you’re well you’re doing on the top one before these cutscenes kick in… but, since you’re still playing, it’s tough to focus on both at once.

Occasionally you’ll be expected to drag the number along a narrow guidance path which appears onscreen, or scribble the stylus around a spin wheel which appears every once in a while really fast to maintain your energy reserves. And that, as they say, is pretty much the entirety of what you do from start to finish. Higher difficulties produce more complex numerical patterns which appear and disappear at a more rapid pace, and accuracy in tapping the spheres at the right time eventually becomes all-important when the difference between a perfectly timed tap or one that’s even just slightly off can kill you dead. Regardless, those three mechanics will carry you through your career as an Elite Beat Agent.

Simple, yes? Of course.

Addictive? Absolutely.

That’s not to say that absolutely anyone blessed with even the slightest degree of cognitive functionality will be able to play the game, however. I recently took my DS in to work and offered a go to an elderly female colleague during breakfast. Apparently unable to grasp the fact that you could only tap when both circles aligned with one another, she rapidly began to lose patience with the game, tapping both well too early and far too late seemingly at random intervals.

‘Bloody hell,’ said I after she tossed it back my way, foolishly sparking my ire by claiming that it was pure crap. ‘A dog with no legs could play this game better than you, you talentless wildebeest.’

Needless to say, this didn’t get me into her good books. In fact, she fixed me with a look of such incredible contempt and disgust that it couldn’t have come across as more venomous if I’d seized the opportunity to masturbate straight into her cornflakes while she was fruitlessly attempting to get to grips with the game.

Which, of course, I had.

So yes. The game is very, very simple to get to grips with, but does require just the briefest of learning curves before you really get the hang of it and it all clicks inside you.

Don’t be fooled, however. As Elite Beat Agents progresses from stage to stage, you’ll soon come to realise that the game can get pretty bloody hard indeed. By the time you’ve hit the highest difficulty you’ll be tearing out chunks of your hair and then attempting to strangle anyone unfortunate enough be passing by  just to vent some of the irrepressable rage that’s been steadily building up inside you. You’ll swear a lot. You’ll hurl your DS clean out the window in frustration. Then, five minutes later, you’ll be bounding across your lawn in your pants, willingly risking life and limb by wrestling a Rottweiler in order to reclaim your copy just so you can have that one more bash at whatever section’s been giving you so much grief.

Even if you were to completely lose your mind and obliterate the game in a blender, you’d probably sulk for a few minutes at most before spending hours gluing it back together in the vain hope that it would still work. There’s just that special indefinable something about the game that grabs you by the nuts in an iron grip and will never, ever let you go. Make no mistake – if you thought smoking, heroin or your Pringles addiction was difficult to give up, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Part of what makes it so difficult to put down has to be the frequently insane scenarios the Agents find themselves thrown into. Helping a teenager babysit some horrible kids while the object of her affections is over visiting, helping an old treasure hunter find an underwater treasure trove in a cave full of evil skeletons, helping a lost puppy find his way home via an incredible thousand mile journey, or even aiding a forgotten Major League baseball star in recovering the old magic – by fending off the attacks of a fire breathing golem rampaging through a funfair, naturally – all add their own emotional backing to your playthrough.

It doesn’t matter for the most part if you hate the original music track for each stage, once it becomes synonymous with your task you’ll be tapping away quite contentedly in an effort to pull your targets through whatever scrape they’ve gotten themselves into, the lovable little idiots. The expression on the puppy’s face when he learns that he’s half the State away from where he should be, for example, is undoubtedly one of the most amusing things you’ll ever see in your life.

And make no mistake, the stories really do add to the experience. If the hackles on the back of your neck aren’t standing up on end during the intro to one particular chapter where the crowd is roaring out your name and Jumping Jack Flash (as performed) by the Rolling Stones slowly but powerfully kicks into life in the background, I’ve got some fairly startling news for you – it’s time to check your pulse, since you’re probably already dead. If your pulse continues to beat, the warning still applies. You’re merely dead inside.

Problems? Well, I suppose that beat icons occasionally appear underneath the hand you’re using to hold the stylus, forcing a certain amount of memorization in harder difficulties. And if you really, really hate some of the songs in the game, like nearly all music games out there, you’re going to be forced to play through them in order to advance through the stages. And if you’re a bad person who hates amazingly fun and catchy games, there’s a chance that this might not appeal. Finally, if you have no eyes, ears or fingers, you might want to skip it.

Other than that? It’s a non-stop party from start to finish, filled with increasingly enjoyable and addictive difficulty settings that will have you frothing at the mouth to go back and attempt an even harder playthrough every time you complete it, kept fresh with a new set of agents and more involved dancing patterns for each tier. Rewards fly thick and fast at you, bonus stages unlocking for players who have the balls to push through some of the tougher moments in the game or cutscenes unlocking for later viewing in the gallery.

Perfected Jumping Jack Flash on Hard Rock? You can save the replay and annoy ignorant fools who don’t understand the beauty of the game as you shove their eyes to the screen to witness just how awesome you truly are. Someone else done the same? Link your DS’ together via wi-fi and duke it out with them in an effort to put them in their place through scenarios that don’t appear in the main story mode. Or do what I do and play Jumping Jack Flash on Hard Rock mode every time you’ve a spare five minutes at work.

What else is there to say? It may be three years old now, but it was probably the best game released that year and, more importantly, is still available to buy in shops these days for dirt cheap prices. If anything I’ve said in this review even got you so much as thinking about picking up a copy, my work on this earth is done. And if not, at least I got to vent about a game that I’m still playing three years later, not as solidly perhaps as the three months when I first got my sticky little hands on it perhaps, but it still stands as one of the perfect ways to pass the time when I’m out and about and faced with the unthinkable prospect of basic human interaction. Just flip the DS open, Elite Beat Agents at the ready and hey presto – instant reality avoidance machine!

Elite Beat Agents is an incredible title. One that is highly uplifting and leaves you feeling good when you come away from it. That really is all there is to it for all my waxing lyrical over the past bunch of paragraphs, and it deserves to be in every gaming home in the world. Even the ones in Japan, imported by the gamers over there who are desperate to get their hands on some ridiculously high quality import titles that are ironically only available in the US and Europe. Finally, justice has been done.

And hey, let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. Isn’t it kind of uplifting that what is undoubtedly one of the greatest, most addictive games to come along in decades doesn’t involve breaking into someone’s house while they sleep, blasting them in the face with a shotgun and then injecting heroin directly into your eyes via a dirty, broken needle for a fleeting health boost whilst you lie around the corpse convulsing, swearing incoherently and generally being sick all over the place?

Of course it is.

10/10

Test Freaks Freak Score: 6.5/10