Bangai-O Spirits: A little dispiriting, actually

DS exclusive Bangai-O Spirits opens not with a missile-filled bang but a 17 part tutorial, every explanatory intro followed by a playable example of the newly-introduced concept. When combined with the already perfectly adequate information spread across several pages of the manual it… it all feels like a bit much, really. Certainly not openly hostile in the way Advance Guardian Heroes‘ first moments are, but it still leaves me a bit fidgety, wondering when the lessons will stop and the exciting bits will begin. Now there’s a very good reason for this: unlike the game’s Dreamcast predecessor, the game I fell in love with, this leans much more heavily towards a puzzle-like kind of stage design. There are timed barriers and things I must explode or absolutely must not explode and targets and physics-based items to manipulate, and performing these tasks correctly is absolutely non-negotiable. As expected of Treasure, every last one of the game’s 160 stages demands nothing less than my…