With the advent of Ratatan's Kickstarter campaign (which you should definitely check out here), I figured there was no better time to finally play Patapon. I'll admit that I bounced off this game at least twice during my high school years, but this time I'm really gonna do it. I am contractually obligated as their god, the Mighty Patapon, to lead the Patapon tribe to Earthend, where we will bear witness to IT. What is "IT"? Neither I nor they know, but I suppose we're going to find out together.
The art style here is super-simplistic, yet so effective. The Patapon manage to show a wide range of emotions, despite being literal eyeballs with wacky little limbs. Enemies and bosses get more elaborate designs, which makes them inherently more threatening, in a way. The music in Patapon is more of a backing track, with your drums and the patapons' chants being the primary instruments. You may go in expecting mostly tribal beats, or possibly grand marches, but rest assured, the Patapon know how to get their groove on too. The different chants they respond with are so endearing and memorable to listen to, they get stuck in your head. I was mumbling them to myself even while I wasn't playing.
Despite any complaints you may read below, just know that the core gameplay is so horribly addicting that it kept me playing, even at my lowest points. Patapon is a rhythm game of call-and-response. Each face button corresponds to one of four chants, PATA, PON, CHAKA, and DON. Those first three are used for giving out commands to your army, and I'll address the fourth one later. (what are the commands) For example, "PON-PON-PATA-PON" gives the order to attack, and your Patapon army spends the next four beats carrying out that action, after which you give another four-beat command. You do this back-and-forth for the entirety of each mission, using different orders of beats to give different orders on the fly. Do enough of this consecutively, and you enter FEVER mode. FEVER mode is what you constantly want to be in. The music really kicks in, and all attacks are exponentially more effective. If you're not in fever mode, you are not operating at optimal capacity. Anyways, remember the DON chant? That's used exclusively for activating special chants, but these also cost your fever. These have extremely limited utility outside of their required use cases, and are almost never worth expending your fever over.
There are a handful of optional minigames you can unlock for your home base. The gardening minigame has surprisingly difficult timing, but its ingredients are required for the absurdly helpful cooking minigame. The smithy is the very last one you unlock, which really feels like something you should've unlocked first, considering how necessary something like a smithy sounds. The only ones I'd consider outright necessary are the aforementioned gardening and cooking minigames, but they're fairly negligible distractions otherwise.
It's inevitable that you'll fail a mission at some point in Patapon, but you don't have many options at your disposal to correct that. It leads to points where you hunt and hunt, use some scarce materials, gain a new member of your army or two, and try the stage you're stuck on again, only to fail again. I frequently reached points where the solution was clearly "more grinding", but without an actual game plan, I had no idea if that grinding would even amount to anything, which is my least favorite type of grinding. The game will suggest via a loading screen that you re-fight the bosses as well to get rare materials, but those rematches have a despicable catch to them: they get stronger each time you beat them. This wouldn't be the worst thing ever if the drops were guaranteed, and if the boss' strength capped out at some point, but neither of those things are true. Part of this feels like I'm pushing the game beyond its scope. It's made with a portable form factor in mind, for sure. Play a mission or two on your commute or lunch break, and it probably wouldn't overstay its welcome. Alas, I subjected it to longer play sessions.
I say this about every game developed by Sony's Japan Studio, but it's a testament to their creative drive that they can confidently imagine and concieve ideas this cool. I can't think of many games that center around gameplay similar to Patapon's, it sits comfortably in its own niche to this very day. It has flaws, but it's nothing that couldn't be ironed out by a sequel or two, which is exactly what Patapon got. To earthend or bust, PATA-PATA-PATA-PON.
The art style here is super-simplistic, yet so effective. The Patapon manage to show a wide range of emotions, despite being literal eyeballs with wacky little limbs. Enemies and bosses get more elaborate designs, which makes them inherently more threatening, in a way. The music in Patapon is more of a backing track, with your drums and the patapons' chants being the primary instruments. You may go in expecting mostly tribal beats, or possibly grand marches, but rest assured, the Patapon know how to get their groove on too. The different chants they respond with are so endearing and memorable to listen to, they get stuck in your head. I was mumbling them to myself even while I wasn't playing.
Despite any complaints you may read below, just know that the core gameplay is so horribly addicting that it kept me playing, even at my lowest points. Patapon is a rhythm game of call-and-response. Each face button corresponds to one of four chants, PATA, PON, CHAKA, and DON. Those first three are used for giving out commands to your army, and I'll address the fourth one later. (what are the commands) For example, "PON-PON-PATA-PON" gives the order to attack, and your Patapon army spends the next four beats carrying out that action, after which you give another four-beat command. You do this back-and-forth for the entirety of each mission, using different orders of beats to give different orders on the fly. Do enough of this consecutively, and you enter FEVER mode. FEVER mode is what you constantly want to be in. The music really kicks in, and all attacks are exponentially more effective. If you're not in fever mode, you are not operating at optimal capacity. Anyways, remember the DON chant? That's used exclusively for activating special chants, but these also cost your fever. These have extremely limited utility outside of their required use cases, and are almost never worth expending your fever over.
There are a handful of optional minigames you can unlock for your home base. The gardening minigame has surprisingly difficult timing, but its ingredients are required for the absurdly helpful cooking minigame. The smithy is the very last one you unlock, which really feels like something you should've unlocked first, considering how necessary something like a smithy sounds. The only ones I'd consider outright necessary are the aforementioned gardening and cooking minigames, but they're fairly negligible distractions otherwise.
It's inevitable that you'll fail a mission at some point in Patapon, but you don't have many options at your disposal to correct that. It leads to points where you hunt and hunt, use some scarce materials, gain a new member of your army or two, and try the stage you're stuck on again, only to fail again. I frequently reached points where the solution was clearly "more grinding", but without an actual game plan, I had no idea if that grinding would even amount to anything, which is my least favorite type of grinding. The game will suggest via a loading screen that you re-fight the bosses as well to get rare materials, but those rematches have a despicable catch to them: they get stronger each time you beat them. This wouldn't be the worst thing ever if the drops were guaranteed, and if the boss' strength capped out at some point, but neither of those things are true. Part of this feels like I'm pushing the game beyond its scope. It's made with a portable form factor in mind, for sure. Play a mission or two on your commute or lunch break, and it probably wouldn't overstay its welcome. Alas, I subjected it to longer play sessions.
I say this about every game developed by Sony's Japan Studio, but it's a testament to their creative drive that they can confidently imagine and concieve ideas this cool. I can't think of many games that center around gameplay similar to Patapon's, it sits comfortably in its own niche to this very day. It has flaws, but it's nothing that couldn't be ironed out by a sequel or two, which is exactly what Patapon got. To earthend or bust, PATA-PATA-PATA-PON.