nly an obscure niche of gamer is looking for a game like Bangai-O Spirits. Any genius the game has only reveals itself after a hefty time commitment – the early hours are baffling and complex. The game is plagued by slowdown and confusing controls. But if you push past these issues you’ll find a rich and varied experience filled with brain-teasing puzzles, insanely intense action, plus a fully featured level editor and sharing system to keep fans addicted even after finishing every stage.

The Bangai-O Spirits introduction mixes innovative design elements with irritating technical and balancing problems. Constant frustration assails players in even the earliest levels past the lengthy tutorial. Incidentally, the only story in the game comes from the brief, amusing anime interludes during that tutorial. Once you finish that, there really isn’t any context to the levels you’ll play – just a sequence of unconnected stages. For the short levels that follow, success becomes about the trial and error of picking the appropriate weapons and following the right path to completion. It can be tedious, but it’s also awash in interesting strategies and puzzle solutions. Repeated level restarts aren’t just likely, they’re expected. With homages to video game classics, enigmatic box puzzles, and fights against gigantic foes, every new level brings new challenges – many of which are extremely fun.

Four-player co-op is a blast, even if it’s also where the already questionable slowdown becomes the worst. The flexible level editor adds some great replay value. These new levels can be exchanged with another DS by an ingenious method of sound exchange, even if getting it to work is sometimes a little iffy.

Bangai-O Spirits is a revival of an original franchise that blends puzzle solving and action in a way few other games can. An unfair learning curve and some noticeable technical bugs haunt the title, but it’s also filled with varied content. Given enough patience, it reveals some refreshingly challenging gameplay. For me, it was a vacillating mix of frustration and brilliance.