Pata Pata Pata Pon.
Pata Pata Pata Pon.
Pata Pata Pata Pon.
Pon Pon Pata Pon.
Pon Pon Pata Pon.

FEVER!

Suite directe du 1 et mon jeu préféré de la licence, littéralement le 1 mais en mieux. Plus de classes, plus de boss, plus de tout en fait. Cette fois on contrôle en plus de notre armée un héros qui a un pouvoir propre à la classe qui lui est attribuée, et il est plutôt déterminant dans l'issue des combats. La bande son est excellente.
Comme dans le 1, certains niveaux vous donneront du fil à retordre et vous demanderont d'aller farmer pour booster votre armée, et le farm dans ce jeu c'est pas le truc le plus fun qui existe.

Perfect Sequel in everyway. The gameplay is absolute perfection, it keeps you on the fly and never gets old, the game is always throwing something new at you to do, most of the bosses are fun as shit to fight, the armies you can make are so unique and fun to mess around with, the hero patapon while really strong is great to play with, you can customize him to your liking, the music too is catchy with some bangers in there. This game i just love it so much, everytime i play and finish it i just wanna pick it up and play it again. Basically play this fucking game, i dont care if you're playing another game this game is short, go out and play it.

I must start this review explaining what I did this time. I've played the entire trilogy a huge number of times, so many I've lost my count. To spice it up, I tried beating the game only with normal patapons (no rarepons) as they are the weakest of them all.
Now, some of the stuff I will say might sound harsh, but in the end this is still my favorite game series of all time so there's that.

First of all, this is the first time I revisit P2 in a while, as I enjoy the first and third games way more, contrary to the popular opinion, here's why:
There are two core gameplay mechanics as to how the patapons themselves are present: squads and the hero. Both of these aspects are present in P2, however I find them to be lacking. P1 is way better at doing the squads, because every single one of them will count towards your victory, unlike in P2 where they are usually quite weak in comparison to your hero so they end up getting carried most of the time unless you get some of the best rarepons at high levels which is not feasible in a regular playthrough.
As for the hero mechanic, P2 introduced him so it's natural for it to be a bit unbalanced, but it's so much so that if you're in a boss fight with a permadeath attack you will be severely crippled if your hero dies. All of the songs you can input except for the march forward will activate the hero mode, which is not that much of an issue in normal or hard mode, but it still can become quite dangerous if you, let's say, want to jump to avoid an attack but do the combo perfectly, activating the hero mode animation and thus getting your hero killed. This is especially bad with the last boss which has quite a tricky timing. P3 is better at the hero mechanic because it's way more balanced, has more classes to choose from and even if your hero dies, you still have the summon to revive him and your other patapons aren't completely helpless without him.

As for the story, it's not good at all except for the parts where a certain character from the first game is involved (and for good reason, they're the best character in the series), and the last few missions where they explain a fair bit of who the patapons were. The rest of the story is almost a copy paste of the first game, except that it has no weight to it because the karmens don't have any personality to them whatsoever except for "i hate the patapons and i will kill them", unlike the zigotons who did have a reason for doing what they did. Not even the named characters from the karmens did anything remotely interesting.

The next thing is the rarepon tree. In this game there are 17 rarepons in total, but only a few of them are any good, and the ones you do want to get are the ones at the end of the tree, and they need a good amount of the rarest materials each to become as good as they can get. And that's only for a single pon, multiply that by the entire army and it will become a slog to farm for all those materials, even for a team made for grinding. In P1 you only need two mats per pon, which is not that slow or hard to come by, and in P3 you only need to level up certain classes to unlock the next. In short, P2's system kinda sucks.

The great aspects of P2, however, are the new bosses, scenarios and the music. But that's just a normal thing for a patapon game. It did get more new bosses than P3 though, which is a plus to me.

Overall, while I still love this game and it's still a big part of my life, I don't understand at all why a lot of the fanbase is so in love with it and say it's the best that the series can offer when it's clearly not. Patapon 1 and 3 are better than 2 depending on whether you want to play with the classic old squad mechanic or with heroes and multiplayer.

Patapon 1 was simple, but effective. Going into this, I think I would've been happy with just "more Patapon", as long as they addressed some of my problems with the first game. And so, I begin another journey to Earthend...this time, against the forces of Hell. Not even kidding.

One thing I neglected to mention in my review of the previous title were Rarepons. There were only three types, and the differences weren't obvious (unless you got the loading screen that told you what they did). In Patapon 2, Rarepons have been overhauled into a full evolution tree, allowing you to unlock and upgrade each type of Patapon up to level 10. This requires a dumptruck's worth of materials, but Patapon 2 is far less stingy with item drops than its predecessor. Consequentially, this increases the grind to a similarly exhausting degree. At least the grind has a theoretical end this time.

Reaching FEVER mode in Patapon 1/2 has a few shortcuts to it. If some of your drumbeats sound particularly potent, that means you're right on the beat. Hitting four perfect beats in a command is indicated by a climactic cymbal crash, and instant FEVER mode if your current chain is at 2 or higher. Fever still gives you whole team various boosts, just like the previous game. The key to keeping bosses in check in Patapon 2, as well as the way to grind for rare materials, is to stagger them. This is similar to real life; I, too, drop my items when staggered.

One of Patapon 2's bigger additions is your very own hero! I named mine Riki, because there's no better heropon. In essence, he's a customizable one-pon army. You can choose any unlocked class for him, and the highest unlocked level of any evolution on top of that. Heroes don't show their hand until you achieve fever mode though. Hitting four perfect beats while in fever mode initiates a special attack from your hero, a unique one for each class. They range from moderately useful to ludicrously overpowered. The real purpose of your hero is to give you access to the Patagate, where you can play wireless co-op missions with three other heroes (or offline with CPUs). Your goal is to beat the boss and escort the egg so you can DON CHAKA. By "DON CHAKA", I mean that the heroes party hard in order to make the egg hatch. Inside each egg are different types of masks, equippable by your hero for massive boosts.

With all that said, not all is well in the world of the Patapon, and there is a lot of stuff in this game that got under my skin. I hate that the Hero abilities are accompanied by this loud, screaming chant that drowns out the music and other Patapons. It just keeps going eternally (as long as you keep hitting perfect beats), really obnoxious. This game actually introduced three tiers of difficulty, although they only really affect how strictly your rhythm is judged. Hard mode is for human metronomes, and easy mode may as well be playing itself. The Tatepon (sword/shield) hero ability makes every Patapon invincible as long as it's active. Put two and two together, and that's right! You can cheese the entire game this way, if you're patient enough! This was especially useful during the final stretch of the game, where they insisted on reusing the worst gimmicks of Patapon 1's stages: ones where you have to escort something without letting it break, or ones where you have to destroy an objective that's constantly moving away from you.

This was also the point where I realized that Patapon 2's grind was absolutely necessary. It was a flaw in Patapon 1, but the sheer amount of options and the resources they require add up fast. I'm frustrated that they did nothing to improve this, because I have two potential solutions:

A: Let the player keep their spoils even if they fail a mission. Even a fraction of their spoils would work too, just something that ensures they're always getting stronger, even when faced with overwhelming odds. Or...

B: Just implement a typical EXP system. Unlocking rarepon evolutions for each individual patapon is already a resource sink, but grinding those individual evolutions up to level 10 is overkill. Slowly gaining strength over time is a tried-and-true solution.

This game was enjoyable, but it's also really weird to me. It improves in a few areas, and stays the same in many others, usually the ones that needed improvement the most. Frankly, it's a tossup between whether I prefer the first game or the second game. But who knows? Maybe the third one is about to knock my socks off.

Finally, after years of looking around I’ve found it. A rhythm game I really like. And not only that, my 25th game that I’ve given 5 stars to. And oh man what a deserving game. Patapon 2 is the sequel to patapon, a little rhythm game originally released on the psp. However, when the developers realised that the first game didn’t have the best replay value they decided to create a sequel. Well, I guess it’s a sequel? I’ll try and explain why it confuses me a bit later on.

The plot picks up right after the first game…and then proceeds to go through most things from the first game once again. But that’s not a problem, trust me it isn’t. So after the patapons set sail to find new lands, they got into a crash and had to somehow get together and fight off a new enemy known as karmen and later on even more different enemy tribes. This makes it a little more varied from the first game where you were fighting the same type of enemy most of the time.

Gameplay is highly improved from the first game. For starters, you can get into fever mode a hell of a lot easier. And you can keep it easier. You see when you start to flail a tiny bit and miss the beat, instead of putting you out of fever, it’ll give you a warning. This helps a lot more as you’re now more likely to hold onto fever for a longer amount of time and decimate the enemies. Making allies is now much different, you get a certain amount of slots for the type of pons you want and you can develop them into looking like the different types from the first game. And that reminds me, THERE ARE NEW UNITS TO MESS WITH!!! These include the robopon, mahopon, and the hero patapon. The hero patapon allows you to use an online feature known as the patagate. You can connect with your friends and try to bring a boss egg to the finish whilst battling those same bosses. You can get lots of cool stuff by doing these.

So, what do I think of patapon 2? It definitely feels more like a finished product then the first game did. Whilst the first game felt like a very simple first draft, the second felt like a much more finished and all out smoothed package that just doesn’t disappoint. Even though this has been the only rhythm game I’ve enjoyed so far, I’ll definitely try to get into others. As much as I would love to play patapon 3, from the things I’ve heard, I probably won’t be able to enjoy it as much as this game which is honestly a real shame. But oh well, here’s to the eventual success of the kickstarter game ratatan.

Much better gameplay, story is basically the same, music is still excellent, new hero character is cool, pon pon pata pon!