The only game company that always instils a tinge of excitement in me whenever I boot up a game for the first time and see their logo is, or was, Japan Studio. Even when a game they produced wasn’t necessarily great (and they often were), it was almost always a safe bet that it’d at the very least be different from everything else. They were the embodiment of the happy medium between creativity and just the right size of budgets & teams to actualise that creativity without corporate meddling getting in the way. Patapon represents the very best of this sort of thing.

There’s still nothing quite like it today, even conceptually. Who’da thunk that rhythm and strategy would go so well together? Unlike most strategy games, Patapon piles on the pressure via music – you have to issue a command to your army every four beats or else they’ll stumble over, lose their combo streak and be unable to accept commands for about a second. It creates this balancing act where you have to constantly juggle quick decision-making, precise timing and your ability to keep a cool enough head to follow the 1-2-3-4 rhythm while dealing with rival armies drowning your screen in projectiles and/or big monsters trying to nibble on your army of eyeball people. It sounds intimidating, but it’s made easier by the absolutely expert touch of having a small border around the screen that pulsates in time with the rhythm, meaning that the timing is always being communicated to you via your peripheral vision as well as the music itself.

There’s that, and there’s also the fact that Patapon rewards you for doing well in equal proportion. Issue ten commands in a row and you’ll enter the Fever state, significantly buffing your army, but you can get it as early as with three commands if you time your drumbeats perfectly (signalled with louder, clearer, relentlessly satisfying drum noises). Keep up the offensive against a boss for long enough and they’ll stagger, not only cancelling their next attack but also causing them to drop either money or rare items, which you can then use to make stronger soldiers. Regularly switch up the composition and equipment of your army and you’ll be able to exploit weaknesses of certain creatures that a lazier player might not even notice – burn the limbs off of a boss with fire weapons to remove one of its more dangerous attacks, for example, or get rid of your cavalry to more easily sneak up on game animals (since the scent of horses spooks them off). It’s deceptively deep in a lot of ways.

Patapon’s excellence doesn’t stop there, though. Another one of my favourite parts about it is the weather system. Different weather patterns occur randomly in almost every mission in the game, which means they rarely ever play out the same way. Strong winds can either limit or extend the range of your projectiles, while rain can mask your scent or put out fires, and lightning strikes can either help or hinder you in any given battle. The best part is you can (temporarily) manipulate the weather yourself, but you have to sacrifice your Fever to do it, adding yet another layer to the strategic side of things – is the temporary advantage worth becoming slower and weaker until you can get your Fever back again? Decisions, decisions.

This part probably goes without saying, but every ounce of the game oozes charm. Rolito’s art is minimalism done right. The Patapons aren’t much more than eyeballs with limbs and hat, but that’s all you really need to be able to convey their character – this even has an in-game purpose, since they start to look angry once they’re in range of an enemy. If Sony were actually capable of holding on to any of their potential mascots, these fellas would be a shoe-in; I have no data to back that up, but my mum has started to refer to them as “those wee people,” so I’d say they’re pretty recognisable. Market analysis aside, their little speech bubbles during battles always get a smirk out of me, the soundtrack is the perfect mix of bizarre and catchy, and the story has a nice storybook-like presentation that wraps it all up with a nice, adventurous bow. It’s got a ton of soul put into it for sure.

This ended up being a bit longer than I thought it would, but Patapon deserves being gushed about a bit - not just because its average score on here is bewilderingly low for how brilliant it is, but also because it's doubtful we'll see anything like it again any time soon. Japan Studio were always one for taking risks and bucking trends, or facilitating that sort of thing in cases like this where they were mainly producers, and Patapon’s a fitting addition to that lineage. Their dissolution was one of more than a few semi-recent things which pretty much confirmed that Sony are heading in a direction that isn't really for me anymore, but games like Patapon will always have a sort of archival value in that they hearken back to a time when they were bursting at the seams with creativity.

Don’t cry because it’s over, though. [Daba-daba-dabapon because it happened.]( https://i.imgur.com/kR3HKJs.png)

Fired this up again to scratch an itch. Was expecting it to have aged badly, but provided you can deal with micromanagement and time units it's still best in class.

As far as I'm aware, they really don't make them like this any more. Modern XCOM set the bar for a sort of streamlined complexity, and I don't think JA2 would go down well now, but for me there's something really satisfying about its attention to detail that nothing else can quite match.

This run, one of my mercs threw a strop because she didn't want to work with another guy who was a goofy slob, so I had to fire him to keep her on. I know it's more common these days, but it still seems incredible to me that they squeezed in voice lines for every merc's opinion of every other merc in the game, of which there's like 30-odd? It just adds to the feeling of it being a live, whole, perfectly formed little world.

Update: managed to get the 1.13 mod working on Mac and it's a whole new world of complexity, gonna take me forever to play and I'm okay with that.

Played on hard, turned into an exercise in determination as my save got wiped over and over again. I found out after play-through 5 where I had almost beaten the game anyways, that if you eat embryos you get an extra life. You find a fair amount of embryos. I would have beaten this game on my first save if I would have known this, and you probably will too!

Moral of the story is: play the game on hard mode to preserve the sense of tension and the impact of losing. The game is better when dying drops your heart into your stomach. When every death brings you closer to oblivion (of your save file), your pretend fear becomes a real anxiety that creeps up as you face threats.

An experience that has stuck with me for months, I highly recommend it! Play it many times, there's different ways to experience the story.