I was going to start this review with a quick life story recap of how I imported Gitaroo Man for my Japanese PlayStation 2 waaay back in 2002, and how it was absolutely brilliant, had some very memorable songs, an interesting story and adorable characters.

The problem is that not many people know or even care about the existence of this gem of a title that KOEI brought to the world, so why would they want to hear me talking retrospectively about the game? Well developer/publisher KOEI really want gamers to play it, so they have released the game – with a few new additions – on PSP, so we can enjoy it now, in 2006 (all over again).

Gitaroo Man is a music action game where you must play through 10 chapters beating the boss character that the level is themed around. The music changes radically from level, with many genres covered including J-Pop, acoustic numbers, heavy metal, rock, and drum and bass. Quite a lot of the songs have lyrics too, and they are all of very high quality – you can even buy the soundtrack for the game (and I did, back when it… oh forget it).

The difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, and soon enough you’ll be stuck on the drum and bass shark level and wondering if you’ll ever complete it. Luckily for us Europeans the difficulty appears to have been taken down a notch or two for the PSP release, which is nice.

Overall Gitaroo Man Lives! Is still a fantastic game that gives me the same enjoyment it did nearly five years ago on PlayStation2. It’s a great package as it is, but you can’t help feel that the KOEI could have done more with the release than a simple remake of the original game. Perhaps we’ll see a true sequel one day, huh? For now though, don’t ignore this title whilst sifting through the generally mediocre lineup of PSP software, Gitaroo Man is a modern classic.