Bangai-O Spirits Comments by Dave McCarthy

I'll probably pick this up soon, as Bangai-O on DC was great. It'll also be a nice way to test how far my Japanese reading ability has come along; two fun games in one.

riz23,
at least learn Japanese before you try to show you know it.

Hang on Dave, I just realized you hated on Folklore. I cannot trust you, at all.

i feel like i'm shouting at the great wall of china.

this game has BARELY ANY text necessary to play
i speak BARELY ANY japanese and i'd say it's worth 10/10
anyone who can't play this game because of some nonexistent language barrier has BARELY ANY brain cells

there is more gameplay packed into the cart than any 2008 release thus far. you don't play bangai-o for the plot! by all means wait for the western release, but the comments about how this can't be 10/10 because the european audience won't get it are flat-out wrong. would i lie to you?

there's a translation of the tutorial floating around anyway. in fact i think i've seen it posted on this very site somewhere.

this game has BARELY ANY text necessary to play

This is absolute rubbish, I'm afraid. All the options (and there are lots of them) are in Japanese, and you need to use the weapon-select menu - which is VERY confusing - before every stage. You can muddle through quite a lot of levels, particularly the early ones, just by sticking to the same couple of weapons, but as you progress you'll find more levels where you really need more specific ones, and finding those on the menus is a major trial-and-error chore, which in many cases can take several times longer than actually playing the level.

It's only a couple of months - wait for the US release, which will be far more enjoyable, and genuinely worth 10/10.

I spent ages copying out a complete translation of the tutorial section for you here:

http://www.eurogamer.net/forum_thread_po...

stuart - once you've used each weapon a couple of times and can commit it to memory as "the one with four characters and a squiggle at the end" or whatever, the language barrier is not a problem. i don't quite understand how remembering how to select from a few words is all that taxing - inconvenient for the half hour or so til you get used to it, i guess.

the 17 tutorial stages explain how everything works via their level design just as well as words could.

though yeah, the level editor would be a bit much i guess, that's the strongest argument for waiting to pick up a western release. that's sensible behaviour for sure, but i'm only taking umbrage with the idiotic comments assaulting the reviewer for recommending a game they'll never bother to play.

Suck on it, GTAIV!

I had the original on the Dreamcast. Has to be in my top 5 games. Utterly incredble.

@menschenfracht - Twat. The reason I made my comment in the first place is because I can't speak Japanese. Keep up dimwit.

A '10' for a game I cannot understand and will never "pick up on the jokes, or the tributes, or the experiments, that" [I'll] "begin to realise why Bangai-O is so utterly amazing"? That cannot be right. Perhaps the US version might merit a '10' on an english language gaming site, but this Japanese version cannot. Gomenensai to all the hardcore massive who might disagree.


Ok, what is it with comments like this? How in the hell is a game any worse just because it hasn't been translated yet (which it will be)? What the fuck? Do you do this with every game that comes out in Japan first? Utterly nonsensical grasping at straws is what this is.

Well - I "imported" the game and I have to say it's utterly brilliant. I was very, very skeptical and didn't know what to make of the comparisons Dave drew between this and Wario Ware etc. but now I understand. Some levels are insta win/fail. Some are large, some are small, some are very "puzzle-y", some have lots of action... It's basically a shooter-puzzler? A puzzle-shooter? Is there such a thing? Well - there is now. :-D
You have to play it to appreciate it...
The game is also very small - 7 MB after trimming. Indeed Treasure have lots of space if they want to add more features to the US version as they announced. I'll be picking up the US version for sure - without an "import". ;-)

@Nikanoru - It's not 'clutching at straws' it's about taking things in full context. Look at some of the comments from people here 'game is utterly brilliant, but incomprehensible without a translation guide'. It is the reviewer himself who alludes to the in-jokes and humour that someone who does not speak Japanese will not get. So the game is not any worse, but the users experience of it is less than it should be if you don't speak the language it is in. Take GTAIV for example. What if all the dialogue and radio station chat was in a language you didn't understand. Would the game still be as immersive and rich in narrative as it is? Or would it perhaps devolve to a decent driving game where you can shoot people? Would it still be a 10/10? I don't think it would. That's all I am saying here.

Cant wait for this! . Nice plug there for Game On, which incidentally is an amazing list of videogames. Bangai-O was a game in the list I'd never played which now I get to! Joy!

The book does suffer slightly by being about hardcore videogames generally (Bangai-O itself, Warcraft, Oblivion) yet aiming the prose at total non-gamers with not even entry-level knowledge of games. Good for the coffee table (read: toilet) to entice the unenlightened.

My thanks for the review monsieur!

Riz, you're full of shit. It's gonna be translated, and that makes absolutely everything you and others with the same "opinion" said utterly retarded.

Ya'll are hilarious.
@riz23- get. a. clue.
First of all the 10 was just McCarthy's opinion, but I'm not sure you really read his review. For example he said about the DC version,
"It did three important things. The first was that you could choose from either bouncing bullets or homing missiles. The second was that you had bombs, and they increased in power in proportion to the number of enemy bullets that were about to hit you. And the third was that each of those 44 levels was essentially some sort of a puzzle that you had to solve using the first two things."
None of this has anything to do with jokes or a story, dipshit, and if you don't have the patience to figure out the controls, that's your problem, not a problem with the game. One more thing, about calling that dude a twat, look who's talking - douche

O SHIT CAN'T WAIT TO SHOOT THIS UP GIVE ME MY BANGAI O FIX NOW.

this one is sooooo bought already... again! (have the DC version)

It's really almost nothing like the DC version.

Better than RE4 then?

This is the hardest game EVER!

Is not that hard. Your robot is the most overpowered piece of destruction ever and the game rewards you if you spam your EX weapons with more uses.

The bat can be considered the most amazing weapon in any game ever.

Well -1 for that huge USK label on the front, I mean really that is the biggest age rating label in the history of ever.

I know the slowdown is meant to be ironic (or something) but this really really kills the DS, theres a level called Longai-o in which it literally locks up for about 5 seconds every time you launch a burst attack, its quite funny.

@hoster
That USK rating logo is the size of all age rating logos now in Germany.
It's crazy big!!

Absolutely loving this game by the way. Good tip if you're stuck on Training Level 17 - press B a few times on the main menu and you'll see a demo of the level and how to play it. As a Bangai-O novice this really helped me out for the mad levels to come...