Trivia / Elite Beat Agents

• Acclaimed Flop: Elite Beat Agents received rave reviews, but failed to meet sales expectations, dashing any hopes for a sequel. It did, however, manage to outsell the Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan duology to some degree.
• Bad Export for You: Let's say that the work for the Korean localization, which is titled Help! Rhythm Hero!, is quite an-joah. While the inability to make new or different levels based on K-pop songs is understandable, the incompleteness of the translation work isn't. While all the in-game dialogue and most of the menu interface is properly translated, it's quite jarring to discover what remains untranslated: combo indicators and their counts in the results screen, the "yes"/"no" buttons/indicators for the Elite-O-Meter, and worse yet...the end credits. Yes, you heard that right: the end credits are all entirely in English!
• Follow the Leader: The easy to pick up interface made it a prime target of this from licensed games on the DS, like Looney Tunes: Cartoon Conductor, some of the High School Musical games, and a Michael Jackson game. It was even the basis for the magic system in Sonic Chronicles. This game also caused the creation of a fan-made game for the PC replicating the mechanics of EBA.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Will likely never see a re-release due to the use of licensed music.
• No Export for You: Just as how the Ouendan duology was never officially released outside of Japan, Elite Beat Agents was never officially released in the country. Thus, the general global availability of the three iNiS DS rhythm games never overlap.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As you can see here, the Agents were actually supposed to be based on the Village People, J's hairdo looked a lot like Ryuuta's, Derek was a completely different person, and they were known as the Disco Rangers. Another early name for them group was the Super Sonic Agents, which was dropped in order to avoid lawsuits from Sega over the use of the name "Super Sonic''.
  • There's also this E3 trailer, in which makes EBA a bit more similar to Ouendan, while bearing the abovementioned controversial early title.
  • Early press releases before the game came out listed Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" as one of the songs that would appear in the game; however, the song never made it to the final version. Interestingly, in the two-player song select menu, there's a blank spot at the end of the list that suggests that a level was indeed taken out late in development, lending credence to this possibility. Eventually, an interview with series creator Keichi Yano confirmed that the song was indeed intended to be in the game and was, in fact, the song originally intended for the "Makes No Difference" scenario - in fact, the beat patterns shown in the abovementioned short E3 gameplay trailer match up with the song perfectly. Licensing issues were the ultimate culprit behind the song's removal.
  • The graphics for the Hidden Mode button in Ouendan 2 use the EBA font, implying that the mode was originally meant to debut here.
  • In the opening cutscene for the final mission, the Rhombulan leader was intended to be fully voice acted, but was cut because the developers thought the scene worked better with just text. The sound files, however, are still present in the game files and, through hacking, can be put back into the cutscene, as seen here.
  • Earlier builds of the game that were showcased at E3 had content that was different than the final product in a number of ways:
    • When the player was on a hot streak, flames would appear on the bottom of the touch screen just like in Ouendan. These were removed due to clashing with the more laid-back tone of EBA, but the sight of seeing secret agents dancing in front of a wall of fire eventually saw the light of day thanks to the downloadable "EBA mode" for Ouendan 2.
    • Another leftover from Ouendan was the calligraphic sprites of the pass/fail symbols at the end of each phase, which were cleaned up in the final version, but not before appearing in the demo download, which also used the same sound for button presses in Ouendan when the player was finished viewing the demo instructions.
    • The "Highway Star" scenario was slightly different than what it was in the final product, in that it was originally designated as the second mission of the game and two different women besides the Carrington sisters would pick up Sam if the player passed the first phase.
    • Fonts for the score counter and Elite-O-Meter were slightly different than what they are in the final build.
    • The "mission complete" cutscene would originally begin with the Agents riding the vehicle they used for the mission back to HQ, but was replaced by a shot of Commander Kahn reacting to the Agents' mission performance in the final product.

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