Wired's Chris Kohler has been enjoying some time in the Land of the Rising Fun lately, documenting his trip through about a billion photographs. This one above, is of interest. It shows Elite Beat Agents, which is pretty much a sequel made exclusively for the U.S. market to that of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, which is the title on the right. What's odd is that in Akihabara, the area of Japan that Chris has been trekking around, has a few places that sell import games, but he has found Elite Beat Agents in several locations, each one priced at 4890 yen (which comes out to about $41.50 USD). This is also odd, because Chris reports that the prices from shop to shop usually vary.
See also: Was EBA good enough to make you import Ouendan?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-07-2007 @ 8:53PM
mudlouse said...
I hear that Ouendan (and most other DS titles) retails for around £7 new at some places in Japan
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5-08-2007 @ 2:41AM
Matthias said...
New games for£7, I mean, roughly 10€? Not exactly, and I am glad, it wasn't that way, when I was in Japan.
Occasionally, you get new games for a very good price, I bought Heroes of Mana for 3000¥, 2 weeks after its release, and I bet, it is even cheaper by now. When I asked, why it was that way, the answer was, that SE simply had produced too many copies.
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5-08-2007 @ 6:54AM
ssuk said...
A lot of Japanese didn't like OTO, after playing it myself I found out why. It's an unforgiving mash of confusing layouts and repetative sections, not to mention the horrid timing. EBA is much nicer and a lot more set on parts of the song which really sticks out (vocals, drums or backing), where as OTO tends to make you part of the song as an extra instrument. Very confusing and highly annoying after S ranking all of EBA. Sure hope OTO2 is more like EBA.
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5-08-2007 @ 11:54AM
JB said...
I Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! playable without knowing Japanese? Elite Beat Agents is pretty easy to pick up on, so I'm assuming that this might be as well.
Jason
http://www.nintendoko.com
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5-08-2007 @ 2:29PM
Snail said...
Yes it is. You don't need to understand Japanese to play OTO - the comic before each scene does a good visual explaination.
About the controls, it is interesting to hear that people dislike OTO's...most comments from BBS are that OTO's beat-point placements are better than EBA's. One thing OTO might turn off Japanese people is that quite a few songs have already appeared in the Taiko(drum-beat) series by Namco.
I only played OTO, and was not very good at it...I will try EBA sometime to judge which is better.
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5-08-2007 @ 3:22PM
vakerrokero said...
Elite beat Agents is way easier than Ouedan, but they both rock.
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5-09-2007 @ 10:01PM
JetSpike said...
Yeah, EBA I would have to say is readily more available than pretty much any other import game for the DS here in Japan. To find import games, you have to usually go to import shops, like Trader, Messe Sanoh and whatever than one is next to it in Akiba (Game Hollywood or somethin, I've never gone in). But EBA can usually be spotted at most used game stores and I dare say is at times in stock more often than OTO. Even used, OTO goes for around 4000 yen here and seems to be a bit hard to find new compared to most DS games which are bountiful. I guess you can chalk this one up to the Japanese liking the rhythm based games and how well it works on the touch screen, cuz from my experience, not many Japanese know the songs on EBA. Just my two cents...
JetSpike
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