Band Brothers P ending online service

[nocturnal YL]

www.nintendo.co.jp/support/information/2019/1031.html

Sales of Daigasso! Band Brothers P, as well as its in-game currency (tomatoes), will end on 20 December 2019. All online service will cease on 1 May 2020.

I'm honestly surprised to see this series going as far as it did. All three games in this series sold poorly, including the free version (Daigasso! Band Brothers P Debut) and the various free songs that can be obtained via various ways. It's even said at one point that Band Brothers P sold fewer copies than there are people in Tottori (about 190,000).

I have Daigasso! Band Brothers P Debut myself. It's not a particularly good music game, as its main gimmick is that players of the full version can upload songs they make (either remixes of most songs sold on CD in Japan, or original creations), and individual instruments can be played as the music game charts. The main problem is, of course, that the charts are not specifically made for the music game, so quick beats are essenially impossible to clear. The required timing is also tighter than most music game I know of. The game itself never expected even advanced players to get full combo on anything, though.

The good thing about this game, and it's a big one, is that it has a library of 9600 songs (including variations), ready to be purchased, across a wide variety. The Band Brothers series is, so far, the only way to play music from Fire Emblem, WarioWare and EarthBound in a music game. And most importantly to me, this game served as my gateway to traditional music games.

The online shop is managed by Nippon Broadcasting System, spoofed in-game as Suppon Broadcasting System.

As the music made is synthesized with a very limited set of virtual instruments, the music sound like MIDI songs. Still, there are quite a few good remixes, like the WarioWare Gold medley here, as the winner of a contest:



A few more samplings:
Robinson
"Don't speak her name!" (Fire Emblem Awakening)
A Cruel Angel's Thesis
Alien Alien

[Evie ❤✿]

Great it's been running so long! (Though sad to see it go, there must be a lot of user content lost to time. You mentioned there are 9600 songs+ to purchase. Did the developers produce their own DLC songs for it too/like are there any interesting Nintendo related cameos?). Hmm so it felt a little sub-par/average. I see, the sales were poor? How was the general reception of this series in Japan? (It also reminds me of Starfy which apparently was popular in Japan but began to flop as time went on though Densetsu no Stafy 4 according to TOSE in an interview was received well in Japan. Unsure how many ultimately sold though, but it was 167k sales across the year according to geimin.net; though Densetsu no Stafy 2 (298k end of 2003) seemed to do well and made it to #4 on sales early on at some point. The Wii U Virtual Console releases seemed to revive it a little looking at the number of reception star ratings, generally positive). Hmmm)

A long time ago I played a little of the old UK localization "Jam with the Band" for DS a long time ago, but this is the only game in the series I've played. However, I've always quite admired the concept of it and find creative the original character Barbara the Bat and her personality.

[nocturnal YL]

Jam with the Band is the second game in the series, known as Daigasso! Band Brothers DX in Japan.

I think in Japan, there are a very small number of fans who do like this series. If anything, the spike in user participation in the final official jam event and the increased upload traffic nearing the cut-off time of accepting user submissions show that these few fans really do care. In terms of sales, I think DX did better, though I don't have concrete numbers. P didn't get as many casual players, partly due to having to compete with other music games and 3DS games.

There are a few DLC music packs that feature songs made by Nintendo staff, which are either pop songs or remixes of Nintendo msuic. These packs come in sets of 5, and often include songs from games aren't open for upload (see next paragraph). In case of pop songs, they're often shortened versions, which I'm not very keen on.

Unlike songs released on CD albums, for user-submitted game remixes, Nintendo has shortlisted a small number of games (some first-party Nintendo games, Fire Emblem 9-13, some Touhou Project songs but Nintendo specified CDs rather than games) that can be submitted. All other game songs (that aren't also registered on JARSAC) get rejected based on licensing grounds, even if they are from Nintendo.

Band Brothers P have a bunch of other features too, including a primitive guitar solo function, karaoke score taking (the game is too generous on this), recording (in the full version), live artists (pre-made voice artists based on virtual singers from INTERNET Co. like GUMI and Camui Gackpo, as opposed to using the player's voice), an online radio station (with pre-recorded audio), a radio talk show series by Yu Ayasaki, playable animation (standard gameplay but with video and pre-recorded, non-synth audio playing in background) and more.

All these aren't really explicitly shown on Nintendo's promotional materials for some reason. So you really have to actually get the game and play it, or at least do some heavy research, to really know what the game offers.

Somewhat related: there are some genres that I think Nintendo should stay away from. Puzzle games, rhythm games, traditional fighting games… They do experiment with those and often come up with good ideas, but ultimately they don't seem to understand what genre fans want to see in those games.

[nocturnal YL]

I went back to this game to buy tomatoes (in-game currency) one last time. Good thing I still have about 1000 yen left in my account.

I only need to buy the tomatoes, since the song and radio shops are still accessible until April. I did buy a few more songs, including the WarioWare contest songs and a few songs thatI initially skipped because they are short versions (like Koi wa Chaos no Shimobe Nari, which I was surprised I managed to pass (get an 80%) at Pro difficulty in my first try).

I still have 15 tomatoes left. Not sure what would I do with those, but if I can't find songs I want to get,I'll probably spend them on the back catalog of Yu Ayasaki's talk shows. And there's no way to get any of these back if anything happens to my 3DS because the songs are stored like save data, rather than having a purchase record in the eShop. Yay.