While the dance component was desired, there needed to be some compelling characters to convey the experience. One of the staff came up with the ouendan, black-clad male cheerleaders found in Japan. After watching numerous videos of ouendan, it became evident that this was just the type of character that embodied what they wanted to put into the game. It turns out that the company president was once an ouendan himself, which helped the idea get approved. Hanging up posters of ouendan, the idea resonated well in development as an inspiration to persevere.

Designers came up with character action sketches as well as detailed game scenario sketches, and many of their ideas actually made it to the final game. The first sketch depicted a student trying to get into college with the ouendan standing behind him for motivation (the first stage in the game). A train scenario and a world-ending meteor scenario (final stage in the game) were also developed early on. In the beginning, they struggled with many questions: Should they have one ouendan or three? What sort of scenarios should they use? They also came up with initial designs of three ouendan, which underwent changes before the final version of the game. The characters were each meant to have a unique design and the cheer girls found in the hardest difficulty were also planned from the very beginning.

The developers then quickly created a demo of their concept in Flash. This prototype featured a scenario where a group of people stop a speeding train from running over a puppy. Even at this point, the art during the game looked very similar to the final version and the core gameplay is the same, though the ouendan did not yet have any dance animations.

Using contacts at Nintendo established previously, iNiS demonstrated their new idea to the company using their Flash demo. Nintendo liked it so much that the project was essentially approved within a week. It turns out that Nintendo really liked the “extreme" nature of the manga character design, which was something that set it apart from Nintendo’s own characters and designs. Though it was the first stage that they designed, ultimately the train scene had to be discarded. The reason was that they hadn’t considered what the result would be if the player failed this stage. Running over a puppy clearly this wasn’t the type of scene you’d want to find in a Nintendo game. However, iNiS did choose the music and stories themselves, and did not run into any problems with Nintendo over their choices.

Yano had no idea how popular the idea would become, even outside of Japan. He was shocked while watching the news one day, when it showed footage of a woman, who was having trouble cleaning a large amount of snow off of her car, suddenly throw up her hands and yell “Ouendan!" Real life ouendan appreciated the game as well.