Gameplay in EBA takes place entirely on the touch screen. As music plays, it’s up to you to tap circles on the screen to the beat of the song. Sometimes you’ll have to drag the circles around a little bit, and sometimes you have to spin a spinner to get some bonus points. And that’s it. No, really. It’s three things: tap, drag, and spin. And it’s more fun than you’ll ever have with any portable game ever.

Although the premise is simple, it’s challenging to keep yourself on beat in order to keep those Agents dancing. If you keep doing well, the life bar at the top of the screen will say “Yes,” the Agents will keep dancing, and the characters you help will rejoice. If you’re doing a mediocre job, the life bar says “No,” the Agents gets tired, and the characters you help run into (hilarious) issues. If you plain ol’ suck, the people you help will fail miserably in their tasks, and the world will shed a single tear for your lack of musical ability. Mind you, once you get on the higher difficulties, the world will laugh at you less.

EBA gets hard fast, and taking on the higher levels will take days and days of failure before you can finally get through that one part of the song that’s been tormenting your soul, only to learn that there’s one more block standing in your way. Then, as you fail, you scream and throw your DS across the room in complete satisfaction. Take it from me, losing in a game sucks. If I keep failing at anything, I’ll likely just toss it aside and never look at it again. But for EBA, it’s the drive to watch the little Agents succeed that drives me to pick up my DS on the bed of roses I throw it to and play through Canned Heat on hard just one more time.

At the end of a song, you’ll be given a letter grade based on how accurate you were in your tapping/spinning/spinning, as well as your final score and max combo. There was never any real explanation as to how the letter grades work, but I’ll be damned if I can ever get anything over a B with a little star on it. The thing that always catches my attention is the little graph they show, explaining how well you were doing and just how quickly you can go from having a perfect game to going deaf in both ears and watching the graph free-fall, then stay in that danger zone for a long, loooong time. Recovering after screwing up is one of the really hard things to do in this really hard game. It can get to the point where one missed beat costs you the song, even though you’ve been hitting them OK for a good while. I know I keep talking about how mind-bending the game gets near the end, but I promise you, it’s all a good thing.

Oh, good! The devil did keep his end of the bargain!

Graphically, the game is stunning. Comic book art makes up the majority of the game, with 3D renderings of the Agents dancing in the background. Every song starts off with an opening, several small scenes during the song, and then the ending part. There’s not exactly full-blown animated cartoons here, but they do what they need to and look beautiful doing it. The art is fully anime-driven, with the giant angry heads, the queer mustaches on the villains, and all the glitter and sparkles that surround every tall, blonde woman that all the guys in the nearest city would roll out the flowers and rings for.⁵ But you know what? As much as that stuff makes me vomit, it’s OK here. It’s hilarious to watch, and it's simply a beautiful game to observe, when you’re not losing your head over the constant tapping.

That bear has eyes, ears and claws only for you, babe.

Music is the biggie in a game like this. (This being a music game. Duh.) The track list, consisting of an odd 19 songs, ranges from classic songs like Deep Purple’s Highway Star and The Stray Cat’s Rock This Town to your 90s flair with Destiny’s Child’s Survivor, and then your modern stuff like Sum 41’s Makes No Difference and Hoobastank’s Without A Fight. This mix of rock and pop music is certainly welcome, and it's balanced a lot better than I would have expected from a game like this. All the songs give their own rhythmic challenge to tap your DS out to, but usually it follows the vocal tracks. And while all these songs are covers, they are all good covers. I can assure you that there’s nothing here that will make your ears bleed.⁶

So, this game has pop music and anime designs. Two things on the “I hate more than life itself” list.⁷ And yet, I let those by. Does this mean there’s absolutely nothing I can rag on the game over? Well, no. You see, I have this right hand that I play the game with. And the problem with my hand is that, as an organic solid, it is not made of air, and thus I can’t see through it. This is the one real big setback to the game, as too often my vision was obscured by my own body. The game does try to fix this by using arrows to avert your vision to the next item to tap/drag/spin, as well as numbers to identify what to tap next. Most of the time, it’s quite helpful, but there were several occasion where I missed beats due to my lack of invisible hands.

My other beef is that you can’t choose what difficulty to play a song on as soon as you unlock it on one difficulty. My favorite song in the game, Jumping Jack Flash,⁸ just happens to be the final song in the main game.⁹ Which means that if I wanted to challenge it on the hard difficulty, I’d need to play all the way through the hard campaign, which I will be able to accomplish once the United States accepts the patent I sent in for my Once-a-Day Hands-Go-Away pills,¹⁰ which I should be hearing about shortly. Oh, the game has offline multiplayer and all of that, and you can send ghosts of your best scores of songs to other people, but do people really play portable games’ multiplayer anymore?
 

I have eyes, ears and claws only for you, babe.

Elite Beat Agents is now a year old, at press time, and I still have not found a more enjoyable experience on my DS. I could wish that the soundtrack was just a bit longer, and I could wish for some online leaderboards and all that fun stuff these yippersnappers take for granted these days. But who needs wishing for things like this when what I have sitting here in the palm of my hand is the very thing that has lost me long hours of sleep trying to complete September after 256 failed attempts. This is a beautiful and well-designed game that makes me glad that there are cosplaying anime freaks out there to import games like Ouendan, and make them better and more understandable to the superior hemisphere.¹¹