
	Platform DS Genre Action / Shooter Publisher Atlus Developer Treasure ETA June 2008
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Bangai-O Spirits

When Bangai-O came out on the N64 (and later the Dreamcast in North America), it turned some heads (albeit mostly the heads of the hardcore) for its fast, arcade-style shooter experience. It was a very frenetic action game that had players running around in robots, blasting everything is sight. There were lasers, hordes of streaming missiles, and plenty of epic boss fights. The whole thing was pretty darn spiffy. Now it’s headed to the DS so we can not only get reacquainted with the joy of Bangai-O, but also take it with us so that we may never be apart again.

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The basic premise of Bangai-O will remain the same for its DS iteration, with players controlling a tiny robot through massive, free-roaming levels jam-packed full of sprite-based graphics (wow, that’s a lot of hyphens!). There are still plenty of bad guys to shoot at with copious amounts of lasers and missiles, culminating with a big, bad boss fight at the end of some

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of the stages. Interestingly, there have been reports of a tiny bit of slow down in the Japanese version of the game because so much is happening on the screen at once, as the fire fights are just that ferocious, especially when players let loose with a barrage of 50 or so missiles for one massive attack.

One area that will be getting a lot of attention this time out is multiplayer mode. Treasure have tailored the game’s levels to make them very accommodating to this so that players will be more inclined to not only go it along in Bangai-O Spirits, but also take a friend along. Cooperative play appears to be a big theme in this game.

Also of note is that there will be a level editor available, so players can make their own levels from scratch, or edit existing ones. After they are done, they can then trade these levels with their friends, thereby further increasing the amount of playtime available to them.

Bangai-O was a fun, fast-paced title when it first came out, and we haven’t seen too many other games come along since then that have been so to the same extent. Spirits could help to fill that void when it gets released in June.

Jeff Nash
May 19, 2008