Review – Bangai-O Spirits (Nintendo DS)

Bangai-O is a little like Wario Ware, but instead of picking noses and you’re smacking giant ants with baseball bats and collecting fruit. Bangai-O is quite a bit like Brain Training, but instead of doing math puzzles, you’re training for bullet hell shooters, run ‘n’ gun action titles and all manner of restrictive and difficult Japanese games. Bangai-O is a school for wannabe Treasure players.

Spirits, a 2D platformer come shooter, borrows aesthetic choices from Treasure’s Shmup line; Bangai-O is devoid of intergalactic robotic maids and detachable puppet heads, choosing a more clinical and ultimately less friendly motif. You play a giant mechanised robot (piloted by quirky anime stereotypes, who vanish after the tutorial) and complete over a hundred minuscule tasks in anonymous space stations, caves and planets.

Each task involves you destroying a number of enemies or energy cores with your robot’s secret weapon; an outburst of reciprocal missiles, immensely more powerful if shot into a wave of enemy bullets. You dash over a platform and spy a torrent of incoming homing bullets. Instantly, you charge your missile launchers and unleash a taste of their own medicine, filling the screen with over one hundred giant rockets.

And the DS splutters to a halt.

The game can slow down, with a cough and a gasp at the eventual bullet rendering it will have to perform, to a literal standstill. Every time you perform the game’s most lauded feature, Treasure delivers a shocking sense of inertia, a horrifying reminder that the DS, just cannot keep up.

Not every missile cluster will pause your DS, but 90% will cause frustrating slowdown, no matter the level. And the levels are varied; some are puzzles, some are mini-dungeons, one even looks like Pac-Man. Some force you to think about your entire arsenal of specialty weapons, time-freezers and bouncy rockets – homing missiles and baseball bats, and create the perfect four warhead load-out.

With a massive collection of 160 levels, Bangai-O’s complete and utter lack of structure is peculiar. Every single stage is available as soon as you load the game. Spirits’ evolution from an era so concreted in structure and formation, levels and passwords and no Grand Theft Auto in sight, the design choice is confusing. Gamers have a special brand of attention deficit disorder, needing to be led to the next challenge by a carrot on a string, so closely dangling to their head that they’ll masochistically replay the same stage, the same corridor, the same enemy again and again and again. Bangai-O is hard, but it isn’t addictive, because any sign of difficulty is a cue to change level; there are 159 others to choose from, after all.

If Bangai-O’s 160 levels weren’t enough, the game features an expansive level editor, allowing you to create fresh stages or tweak current ones for more or less challenge. They are transferable, over the internet, to other Spirits players, but you might just think I’m joking as I explain. Levels are transferred over the web as MP3 songs, a cacophony of bleeps and screeches (similar to your 56k modem) that are played in to the DS’s microphone to receive data. A neat and quirky idea that apes the time-era Bangai-O has time-capsuled from, but one that rarely works. Placing one earphone on the mic and altering volume leads to a tiny fraction of successful level (or replay) downloads.

Again, Bangai-O’s less than stellar performance proves that it is out of place on the Nintendo DS. Framerate issues are casually swept under the rug in graphically impressive Xbox 360 games, but Spirits’ pixelated, tacky graphics receive no mercy. The audio-level transfer is clever, but no match for genuine file sharing. Bangai-O even feels cramped and claustrophobic on the tiny screen.

If created for Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network, then Bangai-O would be a must buy, but on the DS, it should be left for the most hardcore fans of Japanese games. Bangai-O Spirits is addictive, unique and extremely inventive, but mercilessly shackled by the technical limitations of the Nintendo DS.