Getting to grips with Patapon

With the amount of coverage on PlayStation.Blog, I was intrigued and decided to give this game a go; especially with its low price point of £25. Now, Patapon isn’t your ordinary game. No sir. It breaks the mould of game design just like LocoRoco did. And like LocoRoco, it is a 2D game yet still packed full of gameplay, charming graphics and a catchy soundtrack.

If I was to sum up Patapon in four words, I would do so like this: pata-pata-pata-pon. What exactly am I trying to get at? My rather crude explanation is that as the gamer, you fulfil the role of the god of the Patapons, ‘Almighty’. It is your job to beat the drums for the Patapons to follow and obey. You take turns between beating the drums and hearing the Patapons chant. You’ll eventually unlock four drums which map to to the buttons: X (Don), O (Pon), triangle (Chaka) and square (Pata).

Different ‘chants’ or combinations tell the Patapons to do various things such as march forward, attack, and defend. If you keep the rhythm going and don’t miss a beat, your army will build up into a frenzy which increases attack speed, power and all-round impressiveness.

I’m still struggling to get to grips with the game as a whole as sometimes I might not be pressing a button hard enough and therefore ‘missing’ a beat. Also, you’ve got to beat the drums at a steady pace; not too fast, or again you will be losing the rhythm. Furthermore, in frenzy mode it can be easy to lose track of the beat, so I’ve found it useful to tap the beat out with my foot. It makes things a lot easier!

Related reading: PlayStation.Blog’s ridiculously good Patapon coverage

And more specifically: How to cross the desert without burning your Patapons to a crisp!

Tags: LocoRoco, Patapon, PlayStation Portable, PSP, Sony

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 2:17 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.