Bangai-O Spirits

Posted 4 years ago By - Brian Edey

A pure brilliantly innovative, exhilarating, fun and very punishing experience are the best words to best describe Treasure’s latest and by far the greatest gaming experience on the Nintendo DS. Using the internet and a PC to trade your user created levels and replays with the community is just one of the amazing features you will experience. With many more amazing gameplay options at your finger tips, this is one game equaling a giant strawberry sundae with a cherry on top, giving you some of the best gaming to be had for your dollar.


Bangai-O Spirits has some fantastic gameplay options, from its single player and multiplayer gaming, to its level editing, replay system (record, transfer to friends your victories) and even send your user created levels to your friends with an audio burst signal to your PC, and it sounds much like a old dial up modem would sound like. How completely cool is that?!! This is also the same way you transfer your replays to your friends to show them your ability to kick some serious butt on levels. With most level editors on consoles and handhelds ranging from ‘the suck’ to just bad we finally have a level editor on a console which we can now quickly and easily create then share our creations with the gaming community, just like our PC mods have done for years and all of this is on the Nintendo DS of all platforms.

Your mech has many different weapons from a sword, shield, napalm, missiles and much more. Finding out which weapons work on each level is very important since the difficulty is so high, there are different weapon combinations you must use to be successful and finally victorious by beating the 160+ levels. If you actually can beat all of those levels you have accomplished something very impressive, I have been a fan of Treasure’s shooters forever so I am used to their unique level design but in the case of this version of Bangai-O I found on many of the levels I would have to replay each one 4-5 times just to beat it and even some of them as many as 10-20 times. Sometimes in the end it was just pure luck that I beat a certain level, but often in the end I solved the idea of which weapon to use, at which time.

One of the best features in the game is the replay feature, this is also a great way to see where you went wrong or what you did right and brag to your friends who just could not beat that one killer level. It is more then a little incredible that such a feature would even be considered for a Nintendo DS title when bigger games never seem to offer a similar feature or if they do it does not work.

Each level has many targets you must destroy, while the entire time you are being bombarded by hundreds of missiles to soccer balls… yes soccer balls, and if you think basketballs is weird in an action mech based shooter, you power up your mech suit with fruit… which is just another completely peculiar piece of this very exciting game. Even though the games levels range from the bizarre to the insane in most cases the end result is almost all the same, with everything blown up and destroyed.


Graphically the games base graphics are very low quality even for a Nintendo DS title, but do not worry because the other side of that coin is the sheer amount of things happening in the game at once, hundreds of missiles, explosions, things flying left and right and more. Unfortunately there is one major issue with the games graphics and which is the game suffers from some major slowdown which can be annoying for some, but it actually is something very easy to deal with because the actual slow down does not last very long.

The level design interface is excellent in its simplicity with simple buttons to change options from backgrounds, items you place, targets, laser cannons and everything else that is possible. By selecting the size of the map you can have maps which range from giant in size to very small and your level design can range from highly detailed to basic, from simple rooms to very complex mazes.


The Nintendo DS has produced some amazing audio for such low powered handheld, but the Bangai-O developers did not push the audio as far as I would have liked, but the audio it does have is well done with a decent musical score and some good sound effects which in the end work well, but they did leave me wanting more.

There are not many games with such a high value in single and multiplayer gaming and if you like shooters and fast action games this is simply one of the best games on the Nintendo DS. With a possibly huge online community coming, this is one of those games we could be playing next year or even the year after.


While this game is very insane at times with an ‘on and off again’ difficulty which humbled my poor old fingers at the best of times, it is very addictive and fun. The replay value is very high especially with the level editor which is fun and such a great addition. If the overall online Bangai-O DS community supports the level editor this is one game that will be more then worth the price you pay for it.

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