While some of the plankton in Electroplankton are standard synthesizers that have been thinly veiled with strange interfaces, the Nanocarp seem mysteriously autonomous. Left to their own devices, these tiny winged plankton will swim around the screen, occasionally producing small tinkling sounds. Tapping the screen with the stylus creates a concentric wave that will trigger any Nanocarp that get caught in it, and pressing on the D pad will cause similar waves to wash across the screen. But what's more interesting is the way they react to sounds you create. Clap once and they'll snap into a circular configuration; clap twice and they'll form a straight line. They'll also react to your blowing into the microphone or singing specific melodies, and if you master the techniques, you can actually design some simple animation routines. The manual actually lists all of the different shapes you can trigger, which, unfortunately, is a missed opportunity to add an exploratory aspect to the Nanocarp.

You can create some beautiful sounds with Electroplankton. Too bad you can't save any of them.

The Lumiloop plankton is the biggest one-trick pony in Electroplankton, consisting of five hoop-shaped plankton that will start to glow and emit constant tones when you "spin" them. You'll get slightly different sounds and colors depending on whether you spin the Lumiloops clockwise or counterclockwise, and you can cycle through a few different sound sets, but there's not much experimentation to be done here, and the novelty wears out quickly.

The snowflake-shaped Marine-Snow plankton start off in an evenly spaced formation of 35, with each plankton producing a different note when tapped. This orderly field quickly devolves into chaos, though, as each plankton switches positions with the plankton you tapped previously. It's not the most practical plankton in Electroplankton, but it does serve as a good example of the relationship between order and chaos. Similar to the Lumiloop plankton, though, it doesn't age well.

While most of the plankton actively avoid game conventions, the Beatnes plankton fully embrace the musical stylings of old 8-bit NES games. Five chainlike plankton fill the screen, each of which will produce a different short synthesized sound when tapped. The individual "links" in the chains represent a different note in the scale, while the tops and bottoms of each chain produce different recognizable NES sound samples. Right when you start playing with the Beatnes, the classic Super Mario Bros. "invincible" music starts looping, and any notes you trigger on the chains will start looping back with the background music at four-beat intervals, letting you build up some fun and rather complex rhythms and melodies. Aside from the SMB theme, there are three others to choose from, including a Kid Icarus theme. Beatnes is the plankton that most people will be immediately drawn to, and by providing a recognizable musical base to build upon, it's easily the most accessible, though it suffers the same limitations of the Rec-Rec plankton--you can't save anything you've produced. Even worse, after looping a few times, any patterns you've entered will just stop playing altogether, forever lost.

Finally there's the Volvoice plankton, which starts off as a big gumdrop-shaped plankton. Tapping on it will make it record up to eight seconds' worth of sound. You can play it back straight-up, but things get really interesting when you start selecting from the ring of different shapes that encircle the Volvoice, which will change the shape of the plankton and effect the sound of the playback. Some of them simply change the pitch or speed, while others will apply robotic-sounding filters or play back the sound in reverse.

Some of the plankton are simply better suited for experimentation, which directly correlates to their lasting value; but almost all of them are hindered by the fact that you cannot capture anything that you create. It's inherently pleasing when you create something you feel is worthwhile, and it's natural to want to share that with others, but Electroplankton is so concerned with being in the moment that this is difficult. Similarly, it's unfortunate that there are no interplankton activities. Most of the plankton don't create music, per se, but components of music. They're novel on their own, but being able to layer them within your DS could open the door for something much more magical. Though the game doesn't explicitly have multiplayer support, you could conceivably layer the sounds of the different plankton by hooking up with other players and forming a little Electroplankton jam band.

Whether it's art, a game, both, or neither, Electroplankton just doesn't feel completely realized.

Electroplankton's presentation pretty well matches the abstract, experimental form that the rest of the package takes on. The instrument sounds, which range from very natural-sounding pianos to the rawest of sine-wave synthesizers, are all sharp and distinct, though if you listen closely with headphones on, you can hear some slightly dirty waveforms on the back ends of certain instruments. The aquatic and microscopic themes of the game are highlighted in the sound design by soothing, bubbly sounds and a nice, low orchestral hum in the main menu. The visuals, of course, are instrumental in establishing the game's overall theme, and it does so with an elegant simplicity. Backdrops filled with rising bubbles and slowly cycling colors creates a serene foundation, and the simple polygonal shapes that make up the plankton are kept from feeling too cold or alien by being plastered with little smiley faces. It's hard to call the sights and sounds in Electroplankton particularly impressive, but with so many games so concerned with being the biggest, the brightest, or the loudest, it's a nice change of pace to experience something a bit more subdued.

It can be argued that by maintaining such a level of conceptual purity, Electroplankton better connects with the academically minded crowd that would be drawn to such an exercise in the first place. Even if Toshio Iwai had succumbed to marketing pressures and included more pedestrian game elements in Electroplankton, its commercial success would still be highly dubious. That argument, however, doesn't rationalize away the isolated nature of the individual parts that make up Electroplankton, nor does it account for the inability to capture whatever fleeting moments of creative genius you might experience. Electroplankton is bold and uncompromising, but it still comes out feeling only partially realized.