by ess-cee
Think Patapon, and the immediate mental jump is to LocoRoco - the visual style, the adorably cute characters and the gleeful singing and shouting as the tumble about happily… Beyond that though, Patapon is nothing like LocoRoco, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Patapon is really a lot of different genres meshed into one, and for the most part this works. A Rhythm-Action-RTS is a new Idea, and it’s perhaps expected that there would be a few issues in this quirky game. Still, what it does deliver is fun too, and worth looking at, at least.
You’re playing God (every gamer’s favourite pastime) for the Patapon warriors who’ve got to fight through a lot of enemies and find the end of the world.
There’s a few simple rhythms you’ll learn early on, making them march to your tune - literally, going pata pata pata pon in your head and out loud too until your friends and family start to think that it’s time for an exorcism. The different rhythms bring about different actions, and you learn them as the game progresses through its 30 missions, across a side-scrolling battlefield. As you move further into the game, your Patapon army shall march, attack, defend and perform other warrior like actions, spurred on by their drummer god.
If you string together enough rhythms properly, you get into fever mode where the army really does sorta go on a rampage — always handy for facing bosses — and then you realise that maintaining fever mode requires you to focus a lot more on the beat, while your army might need directions which have nothing to do with it.
You get to customise your army as you go along too, with new troop types, and items, even unit upgrades, with stat screens which are slightly intimidating at times.
The game is also highly repetitive, and you’ll have to replay sections as well, to gather resources and find objects, with your being required to replay sections whether you want to or not, which feels like a bit of a cheat.
The next problem really is that while the game is undeniably a rhythm game, there is no sense of immediacy to the rhythm. You tap out a drumbeat, and then you wait for it to catch up to you and then something happens on screen. At some points the mechanic feels frankly forced upon the game.
But the fact remains that Patapon does have charm. Play the game for a while and see if you can stop humming the beats. The same panache that sold LocoRoco despite its simplicity makes Patapon work too, for all its flaws. Though this isn’t necessarily a game which someone who loved LocoRoco will like, it is in its own way rewarding and is worth a try at least.
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