628th played so far
Genre: Music
Platform: DS
Year of Release: 2004
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
While music games are popular everywhere, the Japanese seem to have their own odd style of games that don’t make a lot of sense to us and feel different. Only some of them make it to the west, such as Elite Beat Agents, and they always seem to stand out in some way.
Daigasso! Band Brothers was Japanese only, making for a more interesting challenge playing this. I assume the button prompts are recognisable, so we can go from there.
Our Thoughts
I am still not sure what exactly the backstory was – the Japanese dialogue almost completely passed me by. The game itself didn’t really need many words though, so that helped. What you’re doing – as with so many of these games – is to press the right buttons at the right time. There aren’t many options in this game – basically just the left or right side of your console at first, although it gets narrowed down to specific buttons and the shoulder buttons on modes that got too difficult for me to play.
I mean, I struggled with the faster songs anyway, but it was fun to go through anyway. What helped is that a bunch of the music has more interesting sources – a lot from Nintendo games and properties, which makes for more interesting games than the J-pop that fills most of the remainder of the game.
There are some different followup modes – including one that lets you record your own music – but I wasn’t in the best place to investigate all of these without a better translation. It mostly brings its own specific style to the genre.