Bangai-O Spirits Review

It's great to see another hardcore game move over to the DS. Bangai-O Spirits is the sequel of Treasure Games' manic shooter on the N64 and Dreamcast. To those not familiar with the predecessor, you fly a small robot through a series of 2D spaces with the objective of destroying some targets. The targets sometimes include some boss enemies, or a few easy to kill grunts.
Through the course of a level hundreds, yes hundreds, of bullets, missiles, and lasers can be aimed at you from dozens of on-screen enemies. Your arsenal against all of this includes two basic attacks of your choice that can fire in one direction at a time, or the EX blasts of your liking, that can launch up to a hundred missiles from your tiny frame in one or all directions. The EX blast also has the ability to combine the power of all the enemy missiles in your proximity and reflect it onto them with a damage multiplier. When this happens, all of your missiles increase in damage and size proportionally to the number. If done right, your giant missiles can tear through your enemies, that is if they don't reflect them back on you. Easy to say at any given time there is lot happening on the little screen. It can be a bit overwhelming at times. However, there is a very charming tutorial that walks you through the basics.
Once you finish the tutorial levels, the credits roll. Yup, this is score-based no-frills gaming at it's best. The only “story” you encounter is through the little episodes between the beginner levels. The rest of the game is divided into over a hundred and sixty stages in three categories: Treasure's Best, Puzzle Stages, and Other Stages. Some of these are expansive environments that take a minute to touch corners, others are the size of the DS screen. If you manage to become bored of the preset stages, there is a very functional level-editor that allows you to create almost any area already on the cartridge.
The game itself is directed at a very hardcore audience. That said, the difficulty ramps up rather fast. If you don't time an EX blast properly you can die within a second or two of starting a level. There are also cases where if you don't choose the right weapon set, it's impossible to complete a stage. It would have been nice to see a button in the game over screen that sent you back to weapon selection since this happens fairly often. Yet, with most of these cases, all the levels feel pretty fair.
Even though the game was ported miraculously to the DS, it's not perfect. Slowdown happens very frequently. Most of the time it's a blessing giving you extra time to plan your next move, but either way, it's there. There is also a problem with the EX blasts if too many objects are on the screen. In this case if you get maximum output from your EX blast, the game comes to a screeching halt, every missile you fired is not displayed on screen (meaning some enemies that should die, don't always do), and I have found the controls to be unresponsive unlike during normal slowdown.
Unfortunately, there are a few features I couldn't test: the level swapping system that uses sound to transfer customs levels from one DS to another, and the four player co-op, which in practice sounds like an enjoyable experience, but I would definitely try it before buying the game for that reason.
Overall the title has been a great pick-up-and-play experience that I've enjoyed thoroughly in short bursts. I find myself coming back to it despite it's flaws. It's not a triple-a title, but if you enjoy a good twitch-based game, you may want to check this out.

Grade: B