I was crazy about Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! and tore my way through it like it was the wrapping paper over a Christmas present. I spent relatively few hours beating most of the levels, but when I got to the final level, I just had no motivation to beat it. I consider myself a methodical person, so what happened?

When I got to the final level, it was a step up in difficulty from the previous levels. I knew it would take me the better part of an hour to beat it, so I was avoiding what would seem like a chore. On top of that, there were no real incentives. There are 15 levels in Ouendan, as opposed to the 19 in Elite Beat Agents (EBA). This means there are no bonus levels to unlock. There are also no other rewards for completing the game or achieving certain ranks, other than unlocking the rest of the difficulty levels (and the female cheerleaders). There is no “bonus character” to unlock like Commander Khan in EBA.

With this lack of incentives, I now had two reasons to avoid playing: (1) it was likely to have to repeat the final level over and over, unable to skip half the introduction and (2) once the game was beaten, my little obsession would be over. As for the first reason, this was only partially true. The first time I sat down to beat it, I attempted the level about five times before my hands ached so badly that I physically couldn’t play anymore. I had spent relatively little time with the game, but it was so intense that it was almost entirely a twich level. The second half of the introduction couldn’t be skipped (which was changed for EBA), and it was longer than usual, meaning that I would sometimes spend more time watching the introduction than playing.

As for the second reason, there would be no real motivation for me to return to Ouendan. I had nothing more to unlock, and the levels were so easy for me at that point that I didn’t care about getting higher scores. The stories had less meaning for me because I couldn't understand them as well, so there was less of a personal connection to the game.

In the end, I did return to Ouendan a couple days after my first honest attempt to beat it. Once my hands had recovered, I managed to beat it on the third try, without warming up on an easier level. Once it was beaten, it felt so anticlimactic that I put the game down and haven’t touched it in days. I may still have a soft spot for EBA and Ouendan in my heart, but until the Ouendan sequel comes out, there won’t be a lot of iNiS games in my DS.