Arcade Style Gaming on one Touch Screen!
The game has appeared at the arcades and has already revised itself with tons of sequels already, it also showed up for PS2 (in both Japan and US versions with different songs) and a PSP version (which is quite amusing and has tons of minigames that are funny!) and now we are presented with the amazing NDS version of the game!
First off, the game itself provides you with 2 touch pens that are used for the drumming, they are basically the standard stylus but a bit longer and has the iconic drum head of the game at the top of the stylus ... use these or your own pair of stylus pens to play the game or even use the standard available controllers buttons (direction pads, LR buttons, ABXY buttons) to play the game ... 2 different ways to play!
The song selection are quite decent, they've kept a few standard tracks that are found in almost all the Japanese series of the game and added new ones. If you saw the official trailer, you would know they added a Mario Collection of tunes (which basically collects the NES Super Mario game music) and a Taito NES collection (which collects the games that Taito released on NES ... Mappy anyone?)
The game allows your mascot drum to be dressed up and colored differently as well. As you clear songs, you'll be given new clothes, new headgear via mails sent to you as you clear songs. The mail also contains challenge requests also ... once fulfilled, you will get a new headgears or clothes ...
There is also a Daily Dojo mode, where the game invites you to clear a song per day and once you do, you'll progress in ranking. Note that it's a per day thing like Brain Age, so once you're done for the day, you don't get a shot to improve the ranking until the next day.
Overall, this game is one of the most fun you could have on such a small device. To me, this worked out to be a better game than the PSP version as you get to physically drum to the song than just tap buttons. Fans of the game will not be disappointed for sure.
The only complain I have is that the area allocated for hitting the side of the drums (the ones that are linked to Blue color drum beats) are quite small. Plenty of space to hit the Red drum beats, but you might miss the blue ones easily if you're not ready to tap the drum's sides!
A new function they added to the game play is spinning a mini drum ... once it appears, you have to tap between the drum top and side until the mini drum's counter is done to earn bonus score! Not sure if this was recently introduced to the newer sequels of the series, but this game has it!
All in all, this package of fun is worth it's money. You'll be drumming away, do remember to turn up the volume and enjoy yourself! I wonder if US will release an english edition of the game but this Japanese one will hang around for me longer than Elite Beat Agents (oops, sorry for tossing EBA out!) because it simply rocks!!