Game Story

• Ouendan doesn’t really have a storyline.
• You play as a group of three male cheerleaders traveling across the town helping citizens in trouble.
• This leads to some pretty odd stories in the city. For example:
• A young boy tries to win a game of basketball to impress his prospective girlfriend.
• Two bumbling cops try to save the city from a robot invasion.
• A conductor is trying to hold in his diarrhea on the bullet train.
• Each of the 15 stages has its own unique song and story, told in an ‘active manga’ format.

Gameplay

• Gameplay is where Ouendan really shines.
• We haven’t seen much of anything like this before, and the only comparison thinkable would be to say that it’s like DDR with a stylus.
• It’s controlled strictly with the stylus, which you must use to poke, drag, and swirl to the beat of the music.
• Symbols pop up on the screen one after another, and you need to hit them at the right time, which is determined by a larger circle that slowly closes around each symbol.
• It’s not like the scrolling arrows of DDR.
• There is also a symbol which requires you to drag a ball across a line back and forth at the correct pace.
• Every once in awhile, you get the giant swirly symbol. You need to spin a wheel as fast as you can until you get enough spins to get through it.
• Whether you make it through each stage or not is determined by a health bar of sorts.
• If you miss too many beats, or can’t keep up with the rhythm, you lose a ton of health, while hitting everything correctly gains you a little extra.
• The point of the game is to get the highest score possible.
• The amount of points you get depends on how many consecutive symbols you’ve hit, and how accurate you’ve been.
• Your accuracy is decided by comparing the circle closing around each symbol—the closer it is to exactly matching the size of the symbol, the more points you get.
• As you finish a certain number of stages (the number varies), you unlock more.
• Only qualm is that sometimes it’s hard to see where you need to go next because your hand can get in the way of the screen.
• They’ve tried to make this easier by placing a dotted line between moves, but it doesn’t always help.
• The game starts off fairly easy, but gets progressively harder and harder, until it reaches the levels of near-impossibility.
• It’s a really fun pick-up-and-play kinda game that you’ll never get bored of.

Multiplayer

• This mode consists of competitive multiplayer games, with the winner determined solely on the score/ranking you receive at the end of each stage.
• The muliplayer function uses the DS’ Wi-Fi capabilities, but is not playable online like some of the more recent games.
• The game only requires one card for 2 player games, but you need more copies of the game if you want to play with 3-4 people.
• There is no difference between single-card and multi-card versions of multiplayer.
• If you’re getting tired of the single player mode, multiplayer will keep you entertained for much, much longer.

Graphics

• The graphics aren’t really a big part of this game, as you’re probably paying too much attention to the circles flashing across the screen to be gawking at the visuals.
• At the beginning of each level, a cute (or kind of disgusting) story is told over the two screens through very well drawn manga scenes.
• While the song is going and you’re tapping away, there’s usually a bit of manga action happening on the top screen, and just a basic background with your three cheerleaders dancing on the bottom screen.
• For what the game is, the visuals are quite well done and entertaining.
  

Sound

• Another very high point for the game.
• Because its music based, it’s guaranteed that there are going to be some interesting songs to play with.
• All 15 songs (most are covers) really fit the style of the game, and the gameplay wraps around them well.
• The sound was really high-quality, with very little crackling or other artifacts, which is surprising coming from the usually sound-impaired DS.

Captivation

• The game has an endless amount of replay value.
• You could play for hours and hours on end, mastering each song and completing all the difficulty levels, and not be the slightest bit bored.
• It never gets tiring, and that’s something very few games can accomplish these days.
• There are 4 difficulty modes.
• You start off with Normal & Easy, and eventually unlock Hard and Very Hard.
• Each difficulty mode is quite short.
• They average a few hours each, but it depends on how well you play.
• I wish there were more songs, but I can’t complain much considering how amazingly fun this game is overall.

Final Thoughts

• Positives:
• This game supplies fun in an endless amount, and you’ll be glad you decided to pick it up.
• All the songs are great, and the game pumps out a surprisingly high quality sound for the DS.
• Negatives:
• Main story is a bit short.
• If you don’t know Japanese, the game loses some of its charm.
• Do to the odd nature of Ouendan, I can almost guarantee we will never see it in North America, which is really too bad.
• Being an import, it’s quite pricey (you’d be lucky to find it for under $40 US), but truly worth every penny.

Bottom Line

• This is a must own for anyone who has a DS.