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Game Info.

Genre Music

Publisher/Developer Nintendo/Toshio Iwai

Release 4/8/05

Many start out by saying "Electroplankton's a game that's not really a game". This line hasn't settled well with me. Nintendo isn't getting into the business of making "non-games"; it's expanding the very definition of the word "game". I'm not just saying this because I'm a rabid Nintendo geek, either. I love only video games. This is something I love. By logical deduction, it must be a video game. Stop thinking about it! :)

Gameplay
Where to begin? Electroplankton is a humbly presented piece of software created entirely by one man, Toshio Iwai, that lets you mess around with 10 little electronic plankton-like creatures to make sounds that, with time and practice, could sound like music. This is the only real "goal" in the game; there's nothing like a high score or battle mode here. But each little Electroplankton presents a challenge in having its own "strategy", if you will, toward letting you acheive the ultimate goal of making something that sounds like GOOD music. If this description sounds like a musical instrument to you, you're not on the wrong track. For lack of a better term, Electroplankton is really a "musical instrument game".

For you to get a better feel of how exactly this game works out, I'll try to briefly summarize each Electroplankton "species", or "game", or "instrument" (what have you). First on the list (which is in no particular order other than how they are on the main menu) is Tracy, in which you draw a path for one of several triangular-shaped plankton to trace. Depending on the angle of, location of, and speed at which you laid down a path, the music the Tracy produces will sound different. This one gets very chaotic very quickly, as it's hard to match up the timing of all the Tracies together. But I can see that someone with a lot of patience applying a lot of time on this could lead to a masterful Tracy composer - I just can't quite see how myself.

Second on the list is Hanenbow. These guys resemble tadpoles leaping off of a leaf into the air. Your job is to point the leaf toward other leaves and angle these other leaves so that the Hanenbow will bounce between them, producing stacatto string sounds that vary with the precise angle at which a leaf is set. My musically inclined friends seem to enjoy this one the most. Plus, with a goal of growing flowers by having the Hanenbow hit all the leaves many times, this one really comes closest to a goal-oriented game.

Third is Luminaria. Oh Luminaria. Like Tracy, you're setting paths for the plankton to travel on. This time, however, each plankton dictates its own tempo, and your control of the path is limited to setting in which direction a Luminaria will turn next on a grid (each turn producing a musical note). Mathematical people and music theory enthusiasts (like my colleague, Alex) can spend hours just playing around with this one. It's definitely the most structured and orderly of all the plankton games.

Fourth is Sun-Animalcule. Tap somewhere on the screen and a little plankton will pop up. He'll make a set of three sounds each depending on his position on the screen that repeats every 10 beats (which can lead to a cluttered, however interesting, melody). The trick is to arrange these in such a rhythm that you get a pleasant little ambient melody. Over a short period of time, day turns to night in this game and your plankton age, producing a fuller and fuller sound until they finally pop. At night, you can produce "Moon-Animalcules", which sound entirely different from their diurnal cousins. I find this one fun because the plankton have little lifetimes I create and see the end of. Oddly enough, I think Sun-Animalcule would work best with fans of simulation games. :)

Fifth, but probably foremost, is Rec-Rec. This is the one whose videos all us Nintendo geeks swooned over during the Game Developers' Conference this March. Four fish-like plankton scroll across the screen while one of 8 beats plays on in the water. Click on a Rec-Rec plankton and wait for the next measure to start. When it does, sing along with or make some kind of noise to the beat, and it'll play back indefinitely. Those of us who spend time recording things can obviously see this is a simple four-track recording program, and what ISN'T fun about those? Practice your MC skillz, homebrew. You're gonna' need it if this game ever comes out in the West saiiiide.

Sixth would be Nanocarp. This one really confuses people. There are a bunch of tiny plankton swimming around. When you make waves on the touchscreen and the waves reach their bodies, they spin around and make a note that varies with their location. So what? We already get something like that in Tracy, Luminaria, and Sun-Animalcule. However, the hidden feature of this one is in the Nanocarp's little ears. Clap a certain number of times at different speeds or in a particular rhythm, and you'll get them to line up briefly in a certain pattern. This also happens when you blow on the microphone in different ways, or sing a particular pattern of notes. The arrangements look kinda' neat and vary from a straight line to the shape of a horse, but because the results are always the same as long as you get the desired sound just right, I don't see how this one could keep anyone's attention very long.

Seventh is Lumiloop. Draw a circle around one of five of these guys to make an echoey, haunting note. The sound of the instrument playing the note will change depending on whether you turn them clockwise or counter-clockwise, and doing so very quickly will produce a note one octave higher. Go even faster (this may take some practice) and they'll produce a third sound. While Lumiloop is basically always limited to five notes, I've found this one easiest to pick up and play; it doesn't require a lot of thought, and yet it still sounds very nice. Arguably the best-sounding one in the game.

Eighth is Marine Snow. A whole mess of snowflake-shaped plankton are arranged on the screen. Press one and it produces a note, switching places with another plankton. From then on, whenever you press a Marinesnow, it'll switch places with the one you last pressed. Pressing 'select' changes the instrument all the Marinesnow sound like. It's hard to say exactly what all four of these are, but one is definitely piano, so if you're a piano fan, this one will probably suit your tastes the best. But it's not quite my thing.

Ninth is my personal favorite, Beatnes. Five geometric-shaped plankton with tails separated into 8 segments and a bottom anchor sway back and forth on the screen to the beat of one of four NES tunes (which you can scroll through by pressing 'select'). I'm not old-school enough to place what games all of these come from, but one is Mario's star power tune from Super Mario Bros. (et al). Pressing on the plankton's faces or anchors will produce a sound effect from the game. In the Mario song, these include the 1-up mushroom, the super mushroom, Mario jumping, smashing a block, and more. The eight segments on each Beatnes' body correspond to the eight notes of an octave (in other words, "do re mi fa so la ti do"). Your job is to play along with the background song by adding in an improvised measure-long melody. This melody will repeat 4 times after you first set it down, then disappear to make room for something new. I love playing Beatnes because it forces you to come up with new music very quickly, and if there's something you dislike the sound of, it'll fade out just as quickly. I'm sure I'll lose an amount of time equal to days of my life to this particular plankton. Unless you really hate the sound of 8-bit music, I can't see how someone playing this game couldn't.

Tenth and finally is Volvoice. With this big guy, you click his face to start recording and click again to stop. Then you can transform his shape into one of a dozen or so, which alters the way he plays back your recording. That's it. Despite being probably the simplest of all the games, Volvoice has proven to be a lot of fun when I just want to screw around and forget about trying to make something that sounds cool. Interestingly enough, the little kids I babysit got so into this one they literally fought over it. I was admittedly more concerned about the safety of my DS than of either of their lives. That should point to the quality of this game in some way.

So there you have the ten varieties of plankton and the "goals" each one intrinsically offers. The next question that seems to be on people's minds is "so can you save the songs you make?". That's a natural thing to come to expect from a video game these days - the ability to save. Surprisingly enough, Electroplankton lacks that ability. I wonder if it's in the nature of the game, though, to allow you to save your creations. Not to just make excuses, but does a violin remember what you last played on it, or can a drum set play back for you what you just played? No, you have to go out of your way to record them. I'm somewhat "computer literate", so figuring out how to save my songs happened literally the day I heard of the game. I'll share this information with everybody so as to end the "but I can't save my songs!" whinefest. First, get a speaker cable. If you own a PC, you probably have one of these somewhere in your house. They look like this picture to the right here, are functional either way you plug them in, and are universally compatible with all computers. All you have to do is plug one end of this into your DS headphone port (on the bottom-right of the system) and the other into whatever port on the back of your computer it'll fit in. If you've got a green-colored port, good, use that one. Then download a free recording program (I use Audacity). In that program, change the recording setting (it probably says "microphone" by default) to "Line-In". Then press the "record" button in that program and play around in Electroplankton. Just hit "stop" in the program when you want it to stop recording. If that doesn't work, try the "record master" setting, or try another port on the back of your computer. You should eventually get it, and in the end, you've got a free recording tool with which you can save as many Electroplankton creations as you'd like. Sure, it was probably possible for Toshio Iwai to include a save feature, but after making tens of melodies in each one of these, I can see that it really wouldn't be compatible with the spontaneous nature of the way the game plays.
Really, I can see no error in Electroplankton's gameplay besides my own disinterest with a few of the plankton species. I haven't shared this game with TOO many people, but I do know that while I dislike Tracy, Alex has said before that it's his favorite one, and while I really enjoy Sun-Animalcule, he and many reviewers on the internet fail to see the fun in it. The whole argument could be subjective, which to some means it doesn't matter. But reviews by nature are opinionated, so I can't give the gameplay a perfect score. I just don't have fun with the game 100% of the time. But man, is it close.
9/10

Control
This game is a prime example of what makes the DS unique. I'm not saying all DS games should be so "out there" and unconventional, but given the technology that no other system has built-in, a touchpad and a microphone, look what you can come up with! There are a few hiccups here and there, like how Rec-Rec seems to add a blip of time before each recording you make, but these shouldn't ruin your experience by any means, unless you're a fuckin' weirdo who makes Electroplankton music and puts it on the internet (whoops...).
9/10

Graphics
The game's visuals are very appealing overall. The design of the plankton alone makes up a large portion of that appeal. They're just so unique and cute looking. Why are the Japanese so good at producing the cuteness?!
On the technical side of things, the game does suffer a bit from pixelyness and even clipping - in every plankton game, you can zoom in and out on the spot you just clicked with the X and Y buttons. The further you zoom in, the more pixels show. The further you zoom out, the more some things on the screen try to flicker away. I don't know why this happens. It worries me that the DS has been showing uglies like this at such a crucial point in its competitive lifetime. People (but not me, despite my ranting) seem to care so much more about graphics than anything else in games.
8/10

Sound
It's a music game in which you create all the music. So I guess... the sound is good? I mean, seriously, it all depends on how good you are at making it. Technically speaking, the sound quality is amazing. Plug this into a speaker system with the aforementioned type of speaker cable and you will hear sounds you'd thought you'd never hear. There's even a "headphone" sound option on the title screen to give the audio a less tinny quality when it blasts in your ears. Using headphones, though, there are some "sandy" sounds you can pick out when the game gets really quiet. But that's just about it when it comes to a downside.
Back to the subjective argument, I do think some of these plankton sound better than others. Lumiloop sounds fantastic to me and Tracy drives me nuts. But alas, for you, Lumiloop could sound like clawing a chalkboard and Tracy like the harmony of angels.
9/10

Replay Value
The lack of a goal is something I got used to as a kid with Sim City (et al) games. So when Nintendo releases games like Animal Crossing, it doesn't really bother me that there's no end to your adventure. In fact, isn't that the ultimate solution to endlessly replayable games - making them endless? In Electroplankton's case, it probably helps that there are no goals, and thus no precise measurement of "how good" you are at it. This piece of software is really less like a game and more like a collection of 9 or 10 instruments that you can learn how to play however you'd like. Like a flute, drum set, or bass guitar, once you pick up a plankton that suits your personality, it could offer immeasurable replay value. Excuse me while I kiss the sky.
Because some plankton feel more limited than others, they get old entirely too quickly. For example, Nanocarp is just kind of "there" in the game. I mean, sure, it makes use of the DS microphone in some interesting ways, but like I said in Gameplay, after five minutes, you've seen what it can do. It's not something you're gonna' find yourself playing on the bus cause you desparately need to bust out the jams. Beatnes, Rec-Rec, Hanenbow, and Luminaria are much more likely to offer that. I seriously find myself thinking up Beatnes melodies all day long in the back of my brain; it's like a wonderful virus.
8/10

Overall
So if it's not a "non-game", but because it lacks a goal, it's not entirely a "game" either, then just WHAT IS IT? That's what everyone seems to want to know. "Here, play" should be the only answer you need to that question. I feel like it's a fantastic gameplay experience. Some could argue this feeling depends entirely on your tastes as a gamer. But indeed, your tastes would also dictate whether or not you'd even pick up a handheld system in the first place, so I'm not gonna' go there.
Overall, Electroplankton's greatest flaw is that it may have been too expensive. Why it's 48 bucks on the Japanese market and probably closer to 60 to import is beyond me, seeing as an experimental game like this would probably only sell at a bargain price in America (or anywhere but Japan, for that matter). The first wave that shipped last month came with exclusive earbud-style headphones, which makes sense, since there's absolutely no point to playing this game on mute, and boy, I triple-dare you to play it on full blast in public. Then again, the responses I've gotten to playing this game have all been positive, even from my parents and non-gamer friends, many of which actually said (albeit probably half-jokingly) "now I'll have to buy a DS!" after playing this game. If that's the reaction it can get out of people, Nintendo has something hot on their hands and it would be wise of them to market the hell out of it in America.
Oh, and it's my favorite thing on the DS so far, for sure. Nintendogs stands a chance of pushing it down in the future, but I can safely say that up to now, no better software has been released for this system.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10
=Amazing=
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