Elite Beat Agents (2006)

Going through my backlog, this might be my biggest disappointment since Twilight Princess. Everything about its presentation is excellent, including the terrible-looking little models on the stage select, but the song-list is questionable and the actual rhythm game mechanics are imprecise, poor, and unintuitive. All the charm in the world can't make up for how bad the actual game is.

Part of the Millennium Challenge 2026 (2006).

I wish I could give this a higher rating with how charming and funny it is, but when the circle tap timing doesn't match the beat of the song is it really still a rhythm game at that point? You had one job, guys. It's called Elite BEAT Agents. Not all levels are that bad though. The Christmas level got the timing perfect and thank goodness because that's too sad to play twenty times in a row.

I was able to beat the game on normal difficulty but the last few levels took me like an hour to complete each. I had to familiarize myself with the entire song through repetition , almost like learning on a real instrument. I was still having fun though. It just takes lots of patience.

Honestly this should have been a childhood game for me. I've always known about it. I even remember reading about it in Nintendo Power magazine, but never got around to playing it until now as an adult. Back in the DS's heyday I satisfied my rhythm game itch with Rhythm Heaven instead. That was probably the better choice anyway.

An overall fun rhythm game that has some corny anime cartoons playing in the top screen (which are hard to pay attention to while you're tapping along).

The song selections range from "meh" to "kind of decent", and are definitely a product of the mid-to-early 2000s.

The gameplay is loads of fun... ...until you hit one of the occasional songs where the pattern you're expected to tap along with is not at all related to the song being played. And that's when the game gets old really fast.

To be honest, Elite Beat Agents is kind of just okay as a rhythm game, perhaps even mediocre, mechanically speaking. But the game more than makes up for that in sheer charm. You play as the eponymous elite beat agents, who go around the world solving people's random problems by dancing to bad covers of cheesy pop tunes. We got Sk8er Boi, we got YMCA, we got September, we got Material Girl, we got Let's Dance, etc etc. It's... really something, lol.

The gameplay itself is simple: just tap the screen where the numbered icons are, right when the circle lines up with them. I feel like the game's not 100% perfect with the timing of the taps, and doesn't quite match the beat of the tunes, but it works well enough. With a few tries you start to get the feel of it. Still pretty challenging at times, even on easy difficulty. The one aspect of gameplay I didn't like is when you have to spin a circle as fast as possible... I always struggled with that, and never felt good about what that must have done to my DS screen lol.

Where Elite Beat Agents shines brightest is in its presentation. This game is a real hoot. Each level starts with a sort of comic book introduction to the characters and their problem, and as your agents dance on the bottom screen you can catch glimpses of what the other characters are up to on the top screen. (You have time to see how the nonsensical stories are progressing in brief 5-second intermissions... for good or for ill, depending on how well you're doing.) The jokes are really goofy and cartoony, and the art style likewise is very silly and over-the-top. There's a certain "badness" to it all, but it's all at just the right level of awful that makes you laugh. Or at least, all the stars aligned just right for me in this one. Just about every level got me to laugh -- save of course for the infamous sad Christmas one, which freaking destroyed me!!! At any rate, I love the elite beat agents, and wish they were real. Wouldn't the world be a hundred times better if they were around to dance away all our troubles?

I recommend everyone with a DS to play Elite Beat Agents, and if you can't get enough of it try to find a way to play the Japan-only Ouendan games too (which are the same sort of thing, but starring Japanese-style school cheer squads).