Video Game / iNiS DS Rhythm Games

It always takes three to tango.^note From left to right: Yuuhi Town Ouendan leader Ryuuta Ippongi, Agent J (BA-2) and Asahi Town Ouendan leader Hayato Saoniji

You happen to be at wit's end. A predicament that you seem incapable of overcoming. Maybe you're having trouble trying to ace your exams. Or being hit with a no-win situation where you'll have to risk your taxi license rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital. Or facing the challenge of trying to keep your lycanthropy under control so that you can win your girlfriend...

You're out of options. All you can do is scream one word for help from the bottom of your lungs. And soon enough, three men clad in black show up and make some killer dance moves to the tune of a popular song to raise your morale and empower you to tackle challenges that looked intimidating before. And just as you finally accomplish what you couldn't before, you forget about thanking the guys who helped you as they secretly slip away, on to the next person to help.

Welcome to the wacky world of the iNiS DS rhythm games, where the power of music, for no apparent reason, can change anyone's day with well-choreographed dancing. The way to do it is quite ingenious for any Rhythm Game. You watch the touchscreen of your Nintendo DS for circular numbered markers, paying close attention to the fast-shrinking rings that close onto the edges of each one, and then do your very best to tap each marker in order right when a ring shrinks right on the edge. Some markers may have a track that you have to drag the stylus along, keeping pace with a ball that moves back and forth from the marker. And then there may be an occasional moment where you have to make a rapid cranking motion with the stylus to spin a giant wheel to fill up a meter before a circle shrinks onto the spindle. All without letting your constantly shrinking Life Meter reach zero.

This collection of games began and ended in Japan, where iNiS, looking to work on their next big rhythm project after the Acclaimed Flop that was Gitaroo Man for the PlayStation 2, eventually came up with the idea of making a rhythm game about oendan to help raise flagging developer morale after several failed pitches, which began taking a life of its own once founder Keichi Yano learned about the Nintendo DS and how its dual screen layout and touch input could be a perfect fit for the game. The end result was the smash hit Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, published by Nintendo exclusively in Japan that drew upon fifteen J-pop hits and sparked clamors for a more international take on the game. After realizing that the concept of oendan would be too foreign outside Japan, iNiS began work on a brand-new IP that had the same engine and gameplay as Ouendan, titled Elite Beat Agents. In this game, the player leads a team of The Men in Black instead of oendan to pull off killer dance moves to raise the morale of people in need of help around the world, to the tune of more popular Western hits. This game repeated the critical success of Ouendan and incorporated new improvements, which also found their way into an Ouendan sequel, titled Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii - Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2, which also included limited-time Downloadable Content that allowed players to obtain Crossover skins for the Agents. None of these three games were commercially successful despite receiving rave reviews, and as a result, ''Ouendan'' just got one sequel and ''Agents'' was relegated to a standalone, one-hit wonder.

The three games inspired various clones, including the Fan Game osu!. In addition, the games would also be acknowledged by Nintendo via the Ouendan, Agents and Divas appearing in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as spirits. A 30+-minute summary about the games' development history can be seen here. A series of side-by-side videos showing similarities between Agents and Ouendan 2 can also be seen here.

Please note that this trope list refers to tropes that appear in both Elite Beat Agents and either Ouendan game. For tropes exclusive to one or the other, as well as Moments, please refer to their independent pages.

The iNiS rhythm games collectively feature the following tropes:

#-L

• 100% Completion: In all three games, this at least involves S-ranking all missions on all difficulty levels. Good luck trying to do that on all of them.
• Aliens Speaking English: The Rhombulans in Agents and the denizens of Venus in Ouendan 2.
• Ambiguously Related: In Elite Beat Agents, the "Canned Heat" mission sees the Agents going to what is presumably Tokyo to help the son of the boss of Sushi Motors retrieve stolen car plans from rival company Moo Moo Motors. In Ouendan 2, the late-game mission "Music Hour" has you leading the Asahi Town Ouendan to help three women rescue a pop star idol from the Moo Moo Gangsters, who are named identically to Moo Moo Motors and may possibly have ties to the company.
• Anthropomorphized Anatomy / Womb Level: "One Night Carnival" in Ouendan and "La La" in Agents involve leading your dance team to rally anti-viral troops inside the human body against viral invaders that sicken the host. Played more straight in Agents as the titular team, with special technology, shrink to microscopic size and go directly into the bloodstream's battlefield, compared to how the Ouendan remain outside at normal size to help their target fight a stomachache.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • In all three games, you can skip mission intros (showing what happens right before your target screams for help), as well as the brief mission success/failure cutscenes. Agents allows you to skip musical intros and Ouendan 2 lets you also skip musical outros. This means that the frustration over having to watch the same stuff over again after restarting from a failure goes down with each installment.
  • Agents and Ouendan 2 also start up with a message to help players prepare for and best experience the game.
  "This game is a rhythm-action game! Please listen to the music to play successfully. For maximum enjoyment, please use headphones or turn the volume up to a suitable level."
  • Get a Game Over in Agents or Ouendan 2 and you'll be given the option to watch the last several seconds of play before your failure so you can better understand what led to your demise.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever / Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: In the sixth act of each game, there's a mission where you have to battle a giant monster that comes out of nowhere, whether it be a massive mouse in Ouendan, a fire-breathing golem in Agents, or the terrifying Mega Neko Nyaragon in Ouendan 2.
  • There's also a fictional one in Agents that's the subject and antagonist of an in-universe film, Romancing Meowzilla, which the Agents help Chris Silverscreen shoot in the second mission, "Makes No Difference".
• Attract Mode: Leave any of the three games idle at the title screen or main menu and a demo of the first phase of an early level will play on medium difficulty.
• Autosave: All three games auto-save after a successful stage clear.
• Battle Aura: In all three games, your successful cheering and dancing generates a mysterious sphere of energy. In the very final mission of each game, it can be channeled into a Wave-Motion Gun that ends a global-level threat.
• Big Rock Ending: The end of the song for the final missions of Agents and Ouendan 2.
• Big Word Shout: You just need to scream one word, depending on what game you're in, to get a dance team to come to your aid.
• Blank White Eyes: The people you help tend to have this due to the shared art style among the games.
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": The Ouendan games call your Life Meter the spirit (kiai) meter, while in Agents, it's the Elite-O-Meter.
• Cover Version: Almost all of the songs across the games are covers, to save developmental and licensing costs. Only three in the Ouendan duology ("Melody" in the first game and "VISTA" and "Samurai Blue" in the sequel) came straight from the original artist.
• Christmas Episode: The "sad" mission in Agents, "You're the Inspiration", and the third bonus level of Ouendan 2, "Samurai Blue".
• Continuity Cavalcade: Almost all the people your heroes helped so far join you for the final mission in each game.
• Critical Annoyance: When your life bar drops in the red zone, your dancers will droop down in demoralization and the camera will zoom up close to them to warn you that your mission is in jeopardy. If the meter almost empties out, the camera will zoom closer to the leader's face.
  • Averted in the final mission of Ouendan 2, because you'll only see just two dancers on the touch screen. As anticipated by the developers, this makes it impossible for the camera to zoom in when the life bar drops to a low level. In that case, the two dancers simply just droop down as the camera stays put, which has the potential downside of preventing the player from being more aware about being in danger of failing.
• Crowd Chant:
  • In the final mission of each game, crowds of people will repeatedly chant one word or phrase to generate the Battle Aura to destroy a global threat, whether that's "OSU!" in the Ouendan games or "Music LIVES!" in Agents.
  • In Agents and Ouendan 2, it takes loud three-syllable chants to free the heroes from being petrified or frozen after their Heroic Sacrifice in the face of a global-level threat in the penultimate mission. It becomes more awesome to hear the chants from both games overlapping in a side-by-side video of both games' finales.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Can happen across (and within) songs, difficulty levels (particularly between the upper two you have to unlock) and games.
  • For example, if you've mastered Hard ROCK! for Agents (the expert difficulty, a pure mirror of Sweatin' with smaller markers and faster timer circles) and expect it to be the same for the equivalent expert difficulty of Ouendan 2, Karei ni Oen, prepare to be surprised, as more than half of the missions add extra beats and markers that were not in the hard mode, Gekiretsu ni Oen.
  • In most missions, the final phase repeats a main refrain from the song, but slightly or significantly alters the typical beat format, which will punish unwary players who got too acclimated to the way how it was previously played earlier into the mission.
• Darkest Hour: The outro of the penultimate mission and the intro of the final mission in Agents and Ouendan 2, as described in the above spoiler.
• Difficulty by Region: If you consider the entire trilogy as a whole, the Western-only Elite Beat Agents, in some ways, is slightly easier than the Japan-only Ouendan games, but in different ways with respect to each installment. Agents is easier than the first Ouendan game thanks to special Anti-Frustration Features like mission difficulty ratings and a post-mortem review system. The Ouendan sequel is harder than Agents in that most missions on expert difficulty add extra beats that were not in the hard difficulty, while EBA plainly mirrors the Sweatin' beatmaps to create the Hard ROCK difficulty!
• Disappears into Light: In the "sad" mission of each game, the person who died briefly appears as a spirit, before vanishing into light if you make it all the way to the end.
• Distaff Counterpart: In all three games, the hardest difficulty replaces your all-male dance team with a trio of cheeleaders.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Occurs in Agents and Ouendan 2 in a few different ways:
  • It's quite difficult to get the bad ending of a mission (by keeping your life bar in the red at the end of every phase before the last) because you can accidentally push your life bar back up into the yellow in your efforts to stay alive.
  • Once you unlock a bonus mission, it is mandatory for all other difficulties if you are on or before the act the bonus mission is set in. For example, if you unlock "Believe" in Agents after clearing the game on Cruisin' and Breezin', but you are on the second act in Sweatin', which is where the bonus level takes place, you must now clear that mission to go on to Act 3.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Markers looked and were placed weirdly in the first Ouendan game, which also lacked features that were added in the other two rhythm games, such as the ability to save replays or review the last seconds of play before a mission failure. The first game also strangely keeps a combo counter during the tutorial, which was removed in the other two games because it's not really a level.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: As you play through the finale of all three games, you'll watch people from all around the world doing their best dance skills to charge up the Battle Aura that can save the world.
• Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: The official names of almost every mission in all three games are examples of this trope. Yes, even Agents does this!
• Fade to White: Used across all three games, particularly at the end of each mission attempt.
• Fanservice Extra: The cheerleaders that replace your dance team if you play on expert difficulty in any of the games. They're not too scantily clad for obvious censorship reasons.
• Gameplay Grading: In all three games, you'll be given a letter grade for each mission you complete on each difficulty, with the possible letters being (from best to worst) S, A, B, C, D. Take note that each game only remembers the grade of your highest-scoring performance.
• Hard Mode Perks: Hard mode displays multiple markers simultaneously, while expert mode shows them all one by one. The advantage you get in the latter is that this can take out the guesswork on how you are supposed to tap through a long chain of rapid-fire hit markers, which you don't have much time to figure out on your first go. One example of this in Agents is in the very last mission's third phase, where there is a series of four long rapid-fire Hit Marker chains (each followed by a Spin Marker). You're going to need a guide to easily and quickly understand how to tap through each of them on Sweatin', which you don't have to do in Hard ROCK! because of how the markers display one by one.
• Harder Than Hard: The expert/insane difficulty (magnificent cheering in Ouendan and Hard ROCK! in Agents), which flips the beatmaps of hard mode, shrinks the markers and speeds up the timer circles. A strong familiarity with the rhythm of each song is key to success.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The penultimate mission in Agents and Ouendan 2. Fail it prematurely and you get to see The End of the World as We Know It. But clear it and you'll watch just the heroes get put out of action by the global threat they're fighting against.
• Hemisphere Bias: Beat the final mission in any of the three games and you'll see a picture of Earth in the ensuing results screen that's centered on Japan in the Ouendan games and the Americas in Agents.
• Heroic Sacrifice / Taking the Bullet: In the penultimate mission of Agents and Ouendan 2, when the global threat the heroes battle (an alien invasion in the former and an ice storm in the latter) threatens to hit everyone the heroes helped, they leap into the line of fire and are taken out instead. Which leads right into the final mission where the people help them in return by cheering them out of their predicament.
• Heroic Second Wind: In Agents and Ouendan 2, the final mission begins with all the people the heroes helped getting together to repeatedly chant "EBA" or "ouendan" to break them free after they are rendered helpless by a Heroic Sacrifice against the world-ending threat. After many chants, the heroes break free with a fresh burst of morale, ready to finish the fight to save the world.
• Hot Pursuit: All three games have at least one mission where you help people involved in a chase.
  • In Ouendan, one mission involves helping a racehorse catch a thief en route to returning to form.
  • In Agents, by contrast, there's a mission where you have to help a taxi driver stay one step ahead of the law all just to help a pregnant woman get to the hospital on overtime.
  • And then in Ouendan 2, there's one mission where you help three women chase down some gangsters who kidnapped a pop idol.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: In Ouendan, the difficulties are lighthearted cheering, bold cheering, fervent cheering and magnificent cheering. In Agents, you have Breezin', Cruisin', Sweatin' and Hard ROCK!.
• Interface Screw: In multiplayer for all three games, performing well enough sends an attack to the second player, which usually makes their beat marks smaller or makes the screen shake.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Get a Game Over in any of the three games and the top screen plays a cutscene showing the situation becoming a disaster. Fortunately, you can skip right over to the retry prompt with one tap of the stylus.
• Life Meter: You have a constantly draining one that can only be refilled by playing well.
• Logo Joke: Agents and Ouendan 2 during startup.
• Lovely Assistant: "Rock This Town" in Agents and "Heartbreak for Julia" in Ouendan 2 have one.
• Lyrical Dissonance: A good number of missions in all three games are paired with songs whose lyrics don't mesh well with the onscreen action.

M-Z

• Meaningful Name: All three games have at least a few characters that are named very appropriately.
• Mood Whiplash: The "sad" mission in all three games is this. After over ten missions of upbeat rhythm action, you are treated to a slower Tear Jerker song. Even the intros and outros have been significantly toned down to show respect for whomever you're helping in this episode.
• Morton's Fork: In all three games, what happens story-wise at the end of a phase in a mission has no immediate bearing on how the story of the following phase plays out. If you make it all the way to the end of any of the final "Save the World" Climax stages in the games, the ending you get is always the same, regardless of whether or not you passed or failed each section. And there are no branching cutscenes at the end of the final phase.
  • In fact, there is only one ending in every mission from the first Ouendan game due to the lack of Multiple Endings.
• Multiple Endings: Every mission before the last two in Agents and Ouendan 2 has three possible endings if you complete it successfully, depending on which phases you passed and/or failed.
• Musicalis Interruptus:
  • Naturally occurs when you get a Game Over, accompanied with a sound effect that's somewhat like Letting the Air out of the Band.
  • The penultimate mission of Agents and Ouendan 2 end with this as the heroes make their Heroic Sacrifice.
• "Nations of the World" Montage: The final mission(s) in all three games briefly show people from various major cities around the world getting involved in a "Save the World" Climax.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: In Agents and Ouendan 2, the heroes make a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the penultimate mission to save everyone they were protecting from a world-ending threat, and are now helplessly put out of action. The world would certainly be doomed for sure at this point, since they're supposedly the only ones with the power to save the world. But then the people they helped suddenly develop the power to save the heroes by presumably giving back the morale energy they got from them through repeated chants of "EBA" or "ouendan", freeing them so that they can finally put down the major threat once and for all.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Al three games use the same engine and gameplay mechanics. A few of the sound effects made are the same across all three games, and gameplay interfaces have been re-used and re-skinned for each installment. One graphic that surely remains the same are the timer circles, for instance.
• Ocular Gushers: Some non-playable characters throughout three games can let out unrelenting tears from their eyes.
• Once per Episode: The plot of all three games roughly share the same skeleton template:
  • Your dance team's first assignment is a very small one in which you help someone in an ordinary household.
  • As you progress, you respond to more important problems with higher stakes. Common themes include helping people with their work, finding fortune away from the earth or even helping someone deal with a health problem (whether through Anthropomorphized Anatomy or a Battle in the Center of the Mind).
  • Then after a while, a very special call for help comes from someone who tragically lost a loved one. Your dance team now has to help them cope with their death.
  • And then after that, your dance team has to help get some crazy threats under control that could result in high casualties, whether that may be a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, zombies or even terrorists.
  • Finally, a global threat puts humanity in danger. Time for your dance team to rally everyone to shut it down and show them the power of music.
• Only One Save File: All three games only allow one save file per copy of the game, which can be erased with a factory reset procedure during startup.
• Pose of Supplication: Appears every time you get a Game Over in the Ouendan duology and in certain missions in Agents.
• The Power of Friendship: What saves the heroes in the final mission in Agents and Ouendan 2.
• The Power of Rock: In these games, music and dance can raise anyone's morale and save the day.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Meta-example: The Ouendan duology is known for stirring up fiery passion, while Agents likes to play it "cool".
• Rookie Red Ranger: Your leader on easy difficulty across all three games is a rookie dancer.
• Rule of Three: Meta-example: There are only three games in this pseudo-series, and in each one, you control a 3-man dance team, although the final level of Ouendan 2 is the exception. There are also three unique dance squads (the two rival Ouendan in their eponymous duology and the titular Elite Beat Agents), with their medium difficulty leaders forming the page image.
  • And there are three bonus levels to unlock in Agents and Ouendan 2.
• Save-Game Limits: In addition to there being only one save slot per copy for any of the three games, you can only save one replay file per unique mission in Agents, and you have only 20 replay slots of any mission on any difficulty for Ouendan 2.
• "Save the World" Climax: All three games end with a final mission or two in which you must lead your team to dance well enough to generate a powerful burst of energy that can stop a threat of global proportions, whether it be an extinction-level comet in Ouendan, an anti-music alien invasion in Agents or a giant ice storm in Ouendan 2.
• Secret Level: Agents and Ouendan 2 have three bonus levels that unlock as your total high score passes certain thresholds.
• Serial Escalation: The scope and stakes of the problems your dance team must solve will progressively grow bigger and bigger as you advance through each of the three games.
• Shared Life-Meter: In co-op mode, all players share one Life Meter, and it's mission failure if it empties completely.
• Skyward Scream: People who scream for your dance team for help tend to do this.
• Some Dexterity Required: The unlockable harder difficulty levels tend to have beatmaps that'll require you to tap carefully and quickly, especially with the expert mode, which has smaller markers. The reduction in size means there's the possibility that you thought you tapped the marker when you actually didn't. Hope you like seeing long chains of rapid-fire hit markers, or having a chain of hit markers to play right after a phrase marker...
• Swapped Roles: In Agents and Ouendan 2, it has almost always been that your dance team does all the helping. After their Heroic Sacrifice in the penultimate mission, it is now themselves who are in need of help. Fortunately, everyone they helped before is able to summon the energy to free them and put together one last musical spectacle to save the world proper.
• Thanking the Viewer: The end credits of Agents and Ouendan 2 are immediately followed with the message, "Thanks for playing!". In the case of the latter, the message is presented billingually in acknowledgement of import players.
• Those Two Guys: Your backup dancers in the team you control.
• Time Skip:
  • Six years pass between the two Ouendan games.
  • Two months pass between the third and fourth phases of "Believe" in Ouendan 2, in which Mana Shiratori prepares for her international figure-skating contest in memory of her late older sister Rina.
  • The ending to "I Was Born To Love You" in Agents skips over one month after Leo and Mona Lisa start a romantic relationship, in which he gets to work painting the famous picture.
  • There's also an alternate one in Agents should you fail "You're the Inspiration", in which Lucy and her mother give up hope that her dad could ever come back at all.
• Time Travel: "Neraiuchi" in Ouendan brings the heroes to ancient Egypt to help Cleopatra, while Agents has "I Was Born To Love You", in which the titular team travels back in time to Renaissance Italy to help famous artist Leonardo Da Vinci win the love of Mona Lisa.
• Tropey, Come Home:
  • Elite Beat Agents has "Highway Star" where you help the Agents guide a lost dog 200 miles back home.
  • Ouendan 2 has the bonus mission "Monkey Magic", where you help the Asahi Town Ouendan guide a toy monkey and his soldier friend back to the girl who owned them.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Your score is tied to your current combo, meaning that your chances of beating a high score are effectively shot if your combo breaks in the middle of a level.
• Urine Trouble: Present in all three games if you don't play well on a certain level:
  • In Ouendan, the ramen shop cat will pee if your life bar goes down in "Linda Linda".
  • In Agents, if your Elite-O-Meter dropped in the red zone at the end of the first phase of "Walkie Talkie Man", Tommy will pee on Don. And if you got the worst ending in "Canned Heat", Sam the pug from "Highway Star" will pee on the refrigerator whose plans Ken managed to steal by mistake.
  • In Ouendan 2, this is what happens if you get a Game Over in the "Bambina" level because you failed to help young Takuya keep his bladder under control in his sleep (although this happens offscreen).
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: On a fresh save file, only the lower two difficulty levels are available to play for all three games. Beat the medium difficulty to unlock hard, and beat the hard difficulty to unlock expert mode.
• Unwinnable by Design: Polite example. In some songs, if you happen to let your life bar almost empty out in a section with long delays between markers, consider yourself screwed because of how it constantly depletes.
• Verbal Tic: There's at least one character in each game that tends to have this. Tan Yao in Ouendan, Thomas Petree in Agents and Monkey-kun in Ouendan 2.
• Very Special Episode: The "sad" mission in all three games.
• Wolverine Publicity: The cover art for all three games shows just the playable medium difficulty leader(s), who only appear on one difficulty level.