Electroplankton

The game offers two game modes: Performance and Audience. Performance mode allows the user to interact with the plankton through use of the stylus, touchscreen, and microphone. Audience mode is like a demo mode, which simply allows the user to put down the system and enjoy a continuous musical show by all of the plankton, although the user can interact with the plankton just like in Performance mode. The game does not save data of any kind, which prevents players from saving any composed pieces. However, this can be circumvented by connecting an audio recording device, such as a cassette recorder or a personal computer, to the headphone jack of the Nintendo DS.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata explained that the unusual reason why director Toshio Iwai's name appears directly on the game's packaging is because he alone had created it. The game is the second collaboration between Nintendo and Iwai, having done so with Sound Fantasy for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which was never released. The developers considered including a save function, but opted not to because they wanted the players to enjoy the game both viscerally and without preparation. They believed that if a save function had been included, then the game would have been used more as a tool, where the player must open several additional menus and windows or must input file names to save. Another reason was that it would require a large volume of flash ROM and would take a long time to save and read the data in order to save the voice files for Volvoice and Rec-Rec.

Joystiq gave it 8.0 out of 10. Nintendo Power gave it 8.5 out of 10. IGN gave it 7.0 out of 10. Official Nintendo Magazine gave it 78%.

Kidzworld said that one of the most common complaints concerning Electroplankton is that the game offers no true way to save the audio created by the player. The musician Stemage produced a track using the game in 2005, albeit with reliance on Adobe Audition for editing.