Daigasso: Band Brothers – Review

Band Brothers is a nifty little Japanese title for your DS that is in a similar style to Mad Maestro, Space Channel 5, Gitaroo Man etc. Now, what I mean by that is that Band Brothers is one of those games where you need to hit certain buttons in time to the music in order to proceed. A first for the DS and therefore definitely worthy of a look, Band Brothers may never be released in the UK so I had to import it from import retailer Lik Sang.

Now, the first problem you’ll encounter with this title is that it’s in Japanese, well duh. The odd thing is however that it has English speaking spattered throughout it and there are English instructions now and again on screen.

Overall, you can play this game without too much trouble, but to get a real grasp of the title there are going to be moments when you wish you read Japanese. At certain times, you’ll be wondering exactly what it is you’re doing, ie, are you about to save, progress, retry and so on. It’s not a huge problem because at the end of the day you’re pressing certain buttons to a variety of familiar and not so familiar tunes. Each of these tunes has different difficulty settings and therefore the better you get, the harder the moves you have to pull off become.

From what I can gather, the overall aim of the game is to make it as a rockstar and be accepted into the band. The title has single player mode, band play, wireless multiplayer and various options on setup also. For the most part I decided to play single player, getting used to the buttons and the controls. Within this you also have the option of ‘special event’ where you have to stop a bomb from exploding with your nifty finger work. The band play area is 2 player and it’s a nice addition. I’d have liked some kind of career mode but I may well simply be missing that at the moment from the non English explanations.

The graphics on this title are funky and fresh, interesting little band brothers bats are the main characters and they’re amusing and brightly colored so light up the screen when they’re on it. Most of the time you’ll be looking at a scrolling screen that tells you which buttons to bash next so overall the graphics don’t need to be that great. They are fairly cartoonish however and do a good job at brightening up what could have been a very dull dual screen game.

The sound on this title is one of the most important aspects. Now, you need to listen to the tunes and play along with them basically and this can get really fiddly and tricky as you progress. At times it can be so difficult that it edges on frustrating but it’s just so much fun overall that you can’t help but keep at it.

Deaf gamers aren’t going to get much from this title as clearly it’s music based, however in the name of research i did turn the sound off during gameplay to see if it made a difference and I actually did just as well without it as I did with it. That’s because it has a little arrow scrolling across the screen at the right time to show you where you are overall on the game and to indicate which part of the tune is coming up next.

Obviously the deaf gamer is also going to miss out on the amusement of hitting wrong notes, as this is a sound based title the deaf gamer may want to spend money elsewhere.

There are tons of songs and variations on this title and you can alter the tempo if you wish to give yourself more of a challenge. One of the coolest parts was tapping along to the Super Mario theme one second and then Classical Music the next.

Female gamers are traditionally seen as fans of music based games titles and I think this won’t be much different. If you enjoy these games then you’ll like this whether you’re male or female. The main character throughout is a funky female bat and even though I didn’t know what she was saying she still seemed really cool.

Overall I would recommend this to DS owners who want something a little different from the usual racing/adventure/touch game. It’s fun and unusual and I’m really hopeful that they’ll bring it out over here in Europe. It’s an interesting game because of the way it plays, but also because of the storyline so getting to know more about it would be great.

The main faults I found were mainly due to the language barrier and the more I played the less of a problem this seemed to be. This is a very cool title and worthy of a look, I’m off to see if I can finally finish a five star tune with something better than ‘not bad’.

Review by Angela

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