Patapon - First Impressions
Monday, March 10th, 2008
- Pricepoint Makes this game worth it before even playing it.
- Introduction is spotty and difficult as it asks you to do things that you do, but get stuck repeating them over and over again even though you are doing what the game asks.
- Process of gaining new abilities feels a little too slow. Any new player who gets struck before the dodge chant will most likely quit due to its….
- High difficulty. Nay, Early High difficulty. High difficulties are decent as long as you keep it hard towards the end or on extra missions.
I only bought Patapon for it’s pricepoint. Plain and simple. Sure, the idea of a rhythm-based-rts-sidescroller with eyeballs sporting legs and spears sounds enticing in some world on it’s own, really, the game new costs $19.99. You just can’t really beat that.
Although I’ve heard rave reviews about this game, I just did not trust them ever since LocoRoco game out for the system. Having never played the full game, I can’t really say I hated that game too much, but from the 20 minutes I did play I found it’s cutesy singing appeal to be quite annoying and the entire game felt like an annoying “let’s make this more tenuous then it needs to be” platformer. Ironically, 4+ hours later with Patapon, I have quite a different taste in my mouth.
In early stages you don’t have much to do. Each button correlates to a different type of drum and the only song you are given is a basic move forward song. You play your drum for 4 cycles, and depending on what cycle you play, your patapon troops will sing back to you if it’s a valid song…. Pata-Pata-Pata-Pon….. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon….. which is simply the basis of this game. If you can keep the same cycle going for a while without messing up, your patapons will jump into fever, where they, in a very cute way, start chanting in harmony while performing better! To attack, you just change up your cycle to the attack cycle…. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon……. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon…..
And this is Patapon. Very simple, very adictive, but very hard and unforgiving for the casual player. You will find yourself backtracking to get better gear or more money to get more numbers in your troops. If a patapon dies, especially if you were lucky enough to purchase a rare-patapon while being unlucky to retrieve their hat (needed to bring them back) then you might as well reset the game so you don’t waste your time rebuilding your troops all over again.
Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon…… Chaka-Chaka-Pata-Pon!
More on this game later!
