Offers the same great gameplay as Ouendan and EBA, while expanding on their features, yet doesn't feel quite as fresh.
THE BAD: Difficulty can become extremely unforgiving, not quite as many great songs as Ouendan and EBA, still forces you to start from the normal difficulty, spinners in the harder difficulties are a little too crazy.
Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatake! Ouendan 2 is the sequel to the 2005 Japanese hit, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, but it's really the third game in the series. It expands upon the features in Elite Beat Agents, the American counterpart to Ouendan released in North America last year which had in turn made improvements to the original Ouendan formula.
Ouendan 2 is a rhythm game in which you are tasked with tapping numbered circles on the DS touch screen with your stylus in time to music. Each note is graded on how well-timed you hit it. a perfect hit will give you 300 points, a good hit will give you 100, and a poor hit will give you 50 points. Though it may not sound like much on paper (er, computer screen) it can become maddeningly addictive and tons of fun.
At the top of the screen is a meter bar that tracks how well you are keeping up with the song. Hitting beats will bring the meter up, and missing them will obviously bring it down. Let the meter hit the bottom and it's game over. The higher score you get on a beat, the more it will raise your meter. On top of this, the meter will be constantly running down, making it imperative to get as many 300-point beats as possible in the harder difficulties.
The last element of the gameplay are the spinner. It's a essentially a circle on the screen that you have to spin by making very very fast circles with your DS stylus. On the two harder difficulty levels, the spinners become a little too hard. it's not completing them that is the problem, but rather that they require you to spin so fast and hard, that it's easy to scratch your touch screen.
But all that's not even the best part of Ouendan. What's really so great about the series is that the beats that you are tapping on your screen correspond to dance moves that will be performed by a team of three cheerleaders in the background. The point of all this dancing and cheering is (of course) to solve the world's problems. That's right. In each song you will be on a specific mission to help a distressed citizen in need, whether it be something as petty as helping a school boy catch the eye of a pretty girl, or a task a large as stopping a gigantic Meowzilla from destroying a city. The stories are played out with manga-style cutscenes that serve to make Ouendan a unique, funny, and a joy to play.
The new twist in Ouendan 2 is that you will be controlling two different teams of cheerleaders this time. The original 8 of the red team return from the original Ouendan, but there is now a second, blue team also with 8 members who arrive shortly upon your completing the first song. It quickly becomes apparent that there is some animosity between the two teams.
The Blue team will take all the events on the East side of the city, while the Red Team resigns to the Western side. The story between the two teams is shown in very short manga cutscenes after you complete a tier/group of songs before moving onto the next. It all comes to a boil in the final two songs which, story-wise, play out in a bit more of a dramatic fashion like what we saw in Elite Beat Agents.
As for a few of my complaints with the game, firstly, because the rating meter is constantly falling, the difficulty can become really unforgiving. In very few other rhythm games can you find yourself in a situation in which you hit 10 beats perfectly . . . and then still lose.
My biggest complaint with the game is that, like Ouendan 1 and EBA, it only allows you to choose from the first two of four difficulty levels when first starting the game. As someone who completed both of the previous games on the highest level, I was very disappointed because it meant not only spending a few hours tediously playing through barely challenging songs, but also ruining the storyline before I got to really experience it with challenging levels. Seeing as how this is a sequel, you would think the developers would realize some people would want to skip straight to the harder levels.
Lastly, although I can't quite fault the game for this, I think it's worth pointing out that, personally, I just wasn't quite as excited while playing this game as I was with Elite Beat Agents and Ouendan 1. I guess part of that just stems simply from the fact that this is the third in the series and it kind of felt like more of the same in some parts. There weren't as many songs that I really got into in this installment, but there are still plenty that I did.
Oh, and Ouendan is also very import friendly. Those, such as myself, who cannot read Japanese will have no trouble navigating the menus and understanding what to do. Although there is some amount of Japanese text, it has little to do with the gameplay and is mostly in the cutscenes which do a fantastic job of visually conveying what is happening.
If you are a fan of rhythm games, you absolutely NEED to check out the Ouendan series. All the songs in Ouendan 2 are, unsurprisingly, very Japanese, so depending on your feelings towards that style of music, your mileage may vary. If you're not sure if this game is quite worth importing for upwards of 50 or so dollars US, go pick up a copy of Elite Beat Agents first. I'd be willing to bet many people would come back for this game.