A short while ago, I finished playing Patapon. At only $20, the game is a great value. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was rather pleasantly surprised.
Basics
Patapon is a often described as a rhythm game combined with a real time strategy game. This is somewhat true, but I don’t entirely agree with the real time strategy part. During boss fights, it feels more like it’s a rhythm based fighter. This could be applied to normal stages as well, though the feeling is not as strong.
In Patapon you bang your drums of war in specific patterns to instruct your little Patapons to advance, fight, defend, retreat, or charge-up. I’m a big fan of rhythm fans, going back to PaRappa the Rapper nearly a decade ago. Because of the rhythm aspect, decent reviews, the interesting graphics, and the low price, I decided to pick the game up.
Gameplay
The game largely works very well. The system is responsive to the controls, and never feels arbitrary in if you hit or miss the beat (which some games, like PaRappa, did). The better you match the beat, the louder and more complex and rich the drum sounds the game produces. This little bit of feedback works quite well. The best feedback is the Patapon that you command. As you do better and better (by hitting sequences in groups without messing up) they chant louder and louder, then start to sing. Their little war song changes depending on the units that you have in your group.
The game is mostly quite fun. There is a delay between issuing orders and them being carried out. It’s this dichotomy that causes some confusion in the “feel” of the game. If the responses were more delayed, they would feel more like the Patapon were acting on their own and you were sort of guiding them (like an RTS). If the responses were more immediate, it would feel more light a real fight (and thus a fighting game). For the first few hours, this delay was somewhat annoying. While it never went away, I began to factor it in as I played more and it stopped being noticable. Only when I messed up (issued a attack instead of a retreat, when a boss was about to attack) did I notice it, and it felt like my fault. It didn’t feel arbitrary.
The mini-games, while somewhat fun and cute, were kind of simple. I didn’t feel like I needed them too much. Unlike the combat, they often DID feel like they were punishing me for not being exactly on the beat. This was especially true when playing with the baby mountain. The cooking mini-game, with Gashapon, was very fun though. I found his animations (walking along the top of the kettle) to be very cute.
I only have two complaints about the game. While the weapons and armor system seemed somewhat unnecessary to me (I never had to mess with it, just choose “optimize”), the Kaching system was annoying. Kaching is the money that you need to create new units, which can be quite expensive. The problem is that Kaching is quite hard to get, relative to what they want you to spend. This can cause you to replay some simple missions over and over just for the money, which gets tedious.
The other complaint is the ending. I expected more, but was quite disappointed. On the plus side, they left room open for a sequel which I will be looking forward to. At least the game didn’t solve every problem, only to come back a year later and pretend like there was some need for a sequel. The progression here will be much more natural than many games.
But for only $20, I can overlook those. I’ve enjoyed quite a few hours throughout the last week and a half.
Graphics
Like LocoRoco, this programming team’s previous game, the graphics are all vector based, which makes them quite clean and rather stylistic. The little Patapons are quite cute, and their changes of dress (based on the armor and weapon they have) works very well. The bosses are quite a bit more detailed, and the whole world is rather charming. I really enjoyed all the little Patapon animations as they threw spears, shot arrows, and swung axes. The little Megapon units really remind me of some of the characters in Pepper Land in Yellow Submarine.
