Patapon

» Written on December 21, 2007 at 1:29 AM «

patapon1Is something new from the wacky guys over at SCEJ and the LocoRoco team, the brainchild of Hiroyuki Kotani and his wacky artist who shares my love of vector-based art, Keigo Tsuchiya. Whether or not you’ve heard of either of these two titles, know that they were intriguing enough to capture even my attention, a feat that could at best be described as difficult, especially so for games that involve minimal violence, gore and gorgeous beautiful anime-styled ladies. Released only yesterday in the land of the Rising Sun, I managed to get my hands on a copy, and I think I’ve played enough of it to offer my unlearned appraisal without feeling like a hypocrite.

When SCEJ’s follow-up to LocoRoco on the PS3 turned out to be Cocoreccho-ly mediocre, I had to force myself to cling to the slim hope that a PSP sequel would surface, as per the rumours abound on the Internet foretold. When it was finally announced that Patapon would be the next title to be released by the original team, the premise for the game didn’t exactly have me drooling with anticipation, if you catch my drift.

I am thus happy to say that after spending quite a bit of time with the game, my initial apprehensions were, well, initial apprehensions. Now, however, those apprehensions have been dispelled.

screen2In Patapon, you basically take control of a bunch of honorific misfits that are apparently at war with neighbouring nations (assuming my interpretation of the kanji is somewhat accurate), and help them to attain victory through taking command of your mini-minions and guiding them through the dangers of tall birds, large elephant…things and giant enemy crabs, among other surprises.

Patapon, at its core, is basically a rhythm-based game not unlike what you might find in Rock Band or Elite Beat Agents, utilizing the PSP’s face buttons instead of a plastic guitar controller or a stylus for input. For the uninitiated, this is basically akin to mashing the Cross, Triangle, Square and Circle buttons, but in a certain pattern, and with infinitely more elegance to advance in the game. In Patapon’s case, performing different rhythms will execute different commands, such as an attack command and a stop/regroup command among other unconventional instructions.

How this works is that each face button is bound to a certain drum beat, and drum beats must be performed in a rhythm, almost hypnotic pattern in order to initiate commands. For example, the Square button is bound to Pata, and the Circle button is bound to Pon. Executing a Pata-Pata-Pata-Pon move is equivalent to asking your army of misfits to MOVE UP, while a Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon move asks them to ATTACK like the pack of wild dogs they are. And that’s just two of the multitude of moves you have at your disposal, though I’m sure that for most people, those two will be almost impossible to handle at the later stages of this insane world. Seriously.

And in case you’re wondering, no, you can’t just keep spamming the attack command and watch in glee as your army decimates everything in its path. See, the attack command only refers to attacking targets within a certain range of your flag-bearer, which is the main man you need to look out for in your army of psychotic mutes. You’ll actually need to advance in order for your army to actually get within range of targets. Of course, this also means that you’re in range of their warriors too.

screen3

In addition to the combat, there’s a combination system tightly embedded into the rhythm game, as per the standard du jour for any rhythm game these days. Performing combinations in succession can result in your minions going into a fever mode, which sadly doesn’t render them weak, helpless and bedridden. Instead, your warriors become stronger, faster, and can throw their puny spears, swing their pathetic axes and fire their weak-ass arrows farther than usual, which is good, I guess, because when the screen starts filling up with targets, believe me, you want anything you throw to go farther than usual. It helps, then, that the D-pad on the PSP allows for you to shift the screen in the corresponding direction, increasing or decreasing your army’s field of vision as per your preference.

Patapon also features a quasi-RPG experience system that LocoRoco had in the form of collectible artifacts; while it may not feature cute ripoffs of Cactuar, it does have a sort of level system that borrows from the multitude of other RPGs out there, allowing your little critters to gain experience based on their participation in battles. While your characters don’t really level up in the traditional sense of the word, the amount of battles they’ve participated in contributes to their effectiveness in battle.

Another RPG aspect that Patapon borrows from its RPG camaraderies is that of equipment customization, which should be ornately familiar with anyone who’s even glanced at any of the Final Fantasy offerings. Basically, your worthless minions are divided into individual units, squads, if you will, based on their predisposition, such as axe guy, bow guy and spear guy. (Or, if you want to be more romantic, I guess you could call it splitting your platoon into archers, soldiers and spartans spearmen, but hey, where’s the fun in that?)screen6

Anyway, what this means is that the equipment of an individual character can be upgraded with better, shinier items that you may find along the way on your journey towards world domination, and I could see this being an attempt to inject some depth into the game, which, surprisingly, isn’t a weak one as most attempts are; Patapon’s item customization so far seems pretty well-done and, at the very least, isn’t a requirement in order to get past some boss monster which takes off half your health in a single hit unless you specifically follow a certain predetermined route of pimping out your character. At any rate, the interface for doing so is decent enough, and changing equipment is a relatively painless process, although I think an additional ‘assign same equipment to all squad members‘ option would have been welcomed.

As you gain more items throughout your marches, you also get the ability to create more misshapen monstrosities through utilizing some Rebirth technique or other. What this means for you is that even if you’ve somehow managed to find yourself caring for your brave little warriors bleeding their black little hearts out on the field of battle, know that when their time finally comes, all is not lost; they may be resurrected through dark, perhaps even morally questionable rituals.

Now, I understand that the actual gameplay in Patapon may sound minimal and unbelievably basic, but remember that LocoRoco essentially had 3 buttons for controls, and its gameplay still outstripped many other platformers with its unique mechanics. After the time with this new release, I can safely say that Patapon follows this trend which seems to be more popular among platform games these days.

screen1Patapon’s graphics, while based on the same vector graphics approach that LocoRoco took, still somehow manages to retain a unique identity through some artistic chicanery or other, which is actually rather impressive, especially more so when you note that a lot of the interface elements have been adapted from its spiritual predecessor; animations of the characters are extremely fluid (as vector-based animation should be), the little individual actions that characters may perform during battle adds to the charm of the game and even the main menu still centers around being based on dynamic AI populating the scenery while the actual elements remain inconspicuous in the background.

Patapon has made an extension of sorts to the UI, however; the menu is basically a very long panorama that is split into several different sections, each section serving a different purpose. For example, there’s the main section which depicts your army singing and dancing around a fire, serving as a home of sorts; there’s the section with an elder and a guy with a shovel near some structure, which serves as the recruitment area where you ‘buy’ more units to populate your army with. These sections are cycled through with the shoulder buttons, and this kind of menu navigation is one of those things that will be immediately familiar for LocoRoco fans and yet intuitive and unique enough for newcomers to enjoy immensely.

screen7The ‘world’ element from LocoRoco, which mimics that of Super Mario platformers still remains, but its purpose has actually been elevated from being a mere gateway to the actual action to something a little more tangible. The world select menu allows you to choose between focusing on item gathering, which involves your army attacking wild beasts instead of other tribes, or actual combat (thus advancing in the game and unlocking new worlds to explore). In a way, this is reminiscent of an MMORPG or even a quasi-MMO such as Monster Hunter, and introduces a slight element of grinding to the game. In spite of the usual notions that are associated with such concepts, Patapon does well to ensure that item gathering remains a fun and tension-free experience for players who may want a short break right before bedtime.

My only major complaint with Patapon is that with the large number of entities on screen in the UI or during combat, the PSP seemed slightly sluggish when I ran the game at 300 Mhz (For reference, the maximum CPU speed the PSP can attain is 333 Mhz), which begs the question of battery life performance with this particular title. I have not personally tested it, but my experience is that games that run at full speed tend to burn out the PSP’s battery a lot faster, so there’s a consideration some of you energy junkies may want to worry about. In any case, my PSP seemed fine (around 87% or so) even after 2 hours of play, so take that as you will.

screen5Patapon’s audio experience, however, is where this game has its strongest point, and may also, in my opinion, be its Achilles heel, or its greatest weakness. As a rhythm-based game based on audio commands, delivering a satisfactory aural experience is almost a requirement here, and Patapon delivers brilliantly on that front. The chants made by your little black warriors as they trudge across the terrain will have you nodding your head as you struggle to keep to the beat with your pudgy sausages that you refer to as fingers, while the background music alternates between the cheerful, lighthearted tunes that accompany general exploration and the slightly more tense tones that transition well to battle sequences, complete with war drums in the background. It’s very reminiscent of the singing in LocoRoco, only with more bass and more spears flying through the air.

However, the problem with this is that somehow, for some inexplicable reason, Patapon’s default audio volume seems a little soft, and jacking up the volume is almost a neccessity if you even want to hear any prompts in the game, let alone perform any successful beats. When playing without headphones, the drone of my nearby fan was actually a hindrance to hearing the damn beats. I had to actually grab my earphones from the other side of my desk because setting the volume to full wasn’t really helping much. Also, even though the in-game volume seems a little off, the PSP’s UI still seems to have the volume set to normal, which resulted in an unpleasant shock when I finally decided to quit the game and heard the confirm tone from the PSP. I could see this being a real problem when playing on the train, as I loathe wearing headphones outside, and even with them, the surrounding noise could be a potential issue.

screen4While this is certainly a niggling issue and definitely nowhere near game-breaking, the significance of the fact that I mentioned this as the worst problem of the game merely indicates just how awesome this title is. It’s definitely no Crisis Core or even Killzone: Liberation in terms of depth, but it’s definitely one of those games which I’d whip out on a bus trip or when I’m waiting to respawn after being blown up in Team Fortress 2, because of its simplicity, its presentation, and most importantly, its ability to make me nod my fucking head in time to the fucking rhythms. Seriously, I had to consciously restrain myself from doing that in order to avoid looking like a lobotomy patient.

Highly recommended. This means, of course, that even if you’re a honest-to-god Yankee whose xenophobia extends to flying birds of prey above Pearl Harbour, you should still import this game. I mean, what else could be more fun than ordering an army of puny bowling balls to their inevitable deaths?

Alas, this review is over because I have officially run out of funny things to call the black…things.

   

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