GAME REVIEW: Patapon (2007)
Every so often, my partner buys a few cheap/free games on the PSN for me to play on recommendation. Among these most recently was Patapon, a game that was originally made for the PSP but was ported over to the PSN. It’s a beat-based game where you find and… make(?) little eyeball like characters that seek the end of the world where they might behold IT.
I’m not going to lie… this game was really hit and miss for me. There are things about the game, like the basic concept, that I really enjoyed. However, many parts of the game execution were tedious or downright nonsensical. Let’s crack into this, shall we?
To get right into it, the player is introduced to Hatapon, the first playable character, more or less right away and the game gets off to a good start casually teaching the player how things work. In a strange way, I feel as though the game did a good job not holding the player’s hand too much, but at the same time, it could be confusing. For example, most of the nuanced tips about how to play are offered during the load screens after missions or otherwise not at all. For example, the game warns you not to squander your good crafting materials, but also gives the player no idea how to optimize them or to what point and purpose the player should hold onto them. This leads to hoarding materials, rather than the player experimenting with creating new patapons like they should be doing if they want to progress in the story.
There are a collection of mini-games in Patapon as well as the main quest, which can be used to gain materials for crafting new and stronger patapons. These are a bit convoluted in instruction and have far too much text that can’t be skipped if you want to farm a bit of material, but they are simple enough to execute once you get the hang of it. Doing these mini-games is not strictly necessary but does give the player the opportunity to upgrade their patapons… and only their patapons. Yep, while the forge will give you random divine weapons if you have a top-level stone to work with, there’s literally no other way to get weapons in the game other than by playing the main storyline or grinding bosses, both of which drop items completely at random. Let me reiterate. If I want new weapons in this game, I need to either play the game forward (which, if I need to upgrade my patapons, I am likely not doing) or grind bosses.
Now, the boss system is another area where I have an issue. First of all, improving your characters by grinding the same boss which is slightly more difficult each time in the hopes of maybe getting a decent item drop is not remotely my idea of a good time. The bosses could have had a variety of move-sets to change things up, or they could… I don’t know, not all be the same boss? Yes, that’s right - each boss in the game is more or less the same. They all have three attacks plus movement. There is one attack you can probably fight through or easily block (like a fire breath or sleep bubbles) as the damage is minimal, one attack you should definitely run away from or else you’re screwed (like a slam by the worm or a crush from the crab), and the final attack will insta-kill whichever character gets caught in it. There’s also an easy and hard version of each boss, meaning there’s more of the same to grind through, only this time, getting hit by that final attack type means you lose your patapon permanently. So essentially, in order to progress in the game you have to play the same one boss about a bazillion times.
The reward system as a whole might be my biggest complaint about the game. Having to consistently grind hunt levels for ka-ching (money) and materials is aggressively boring after a very short while and there’s no way around it. Oh sure, you could fight a boss, but as the patapons need to physically touch the ka-ching to collect it (an idiotic game design flaw, in my opinion) you rarely get it from bosses because it vanishes long before the boss gets out of your way to move forward and cash in.
Frankly, the concept was fun and it was a neat game to try and it was fun enough to play through but certainly full of gameplay kinks and lazy design that, with some fine-tuning, could have made the game a whole lot better. I’d still consider trying Patapon 2 if it goes on sale to see if they’ve improved it at all, but the first one was… well, mediocre+.
