Post by: Halbred on July 21, 2025, 05:02:44 PM
FEVAH!!
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/71788/patapon-12-replay-switch-eshop-review
Patapon 1+2 Replay was announced back in March in a Nintendo Direct and I squealed with delight in a crowded Seattle-Tacoma gate where perturbed people were waiting to board a plane that still had not arrived. I could’ve cared less, because my head was filled with the rhythmic chanting of those lovely, charming little eyeballs.
Pata-pata-pata-pon! Pon-pon-pata-pon! Chaka-chaka-pata pon! FEVAH!!
For those unaware, Patapon is an unusual rhythm-strategy game originally exclusive to the PSP from 2007. Players control an army of walking eyeballs, Patapons, by tapping the face buttons on a beat to perform different actions, like walk forward, attack, defend, run away, and more. Do this well enough and your posse will enter “Fever” mode and do significantly more damage. Your eyeball army will engage with an enemy army, the Zigatons, defeat gigantic boss characters, and farm resources to build better soldiers. You’ll unlock new formations, unit types, weapons, chants, and play a host of minigames for unique resources.
Patapon 2 (originally released in 2008) offers a significantly beefier, more colorful experience that involves a lot of grinding and resource management but, I feel, results in a more fleshed out game. Its primary new feature is having a “Hero” character who has a ton of HP and special attacks. There’s also an interesting skill tree where you can upgrade your units to a variety of forms with different attributes, as well as level each one up individually. Finally, Patapon 2 features a multiplayer tower defense mode in which up to four players must defend a giant egg from enemy forces before coming together and synchronizing a chant (good luck with that) to win. Patapon 3, released in 2011, remains marooned on a dead handheld.
Both of these games looked drop-dead gorgeous on the PSP and were eventually re-released on the PS4. You might wonder how well they scale to a 51” flatscreen TV, and I can assure you they don’t lose a single step. Sadly, the PS4 ports were cursed with a nasty case of input lag with no easy way to correct it. This is not the fault of the games themselves; different TVs have different degrees of audio lag. On the PS4, the sound of the background beat didn’t sync with the visual of the background beat, which meant that your button presses were never exactly in time. This unfortunately meant that the PS4 games were mostly unplayable without wired headphones or earbuds. Using a Bluetooth headset just introduced additional latency.
As you might expect, that’s also a problem here in Replay. Perhaps in an effort to remedy this issue, the main menu has a 10-point “correction” scale (from -5 to +5) meant to address On-TV Play. Unfortunately, this scale is implemented in the worst possible way: outside of the games themselves. You have to set a random value, load up a game, realize it doesn’t work, quit the game, set a new value in the main menu, load the game back up, try again…repeat ad nauseum. Why it’s not accessible within each game is beyond me. The main menu also includes three difficulty settings which affects how precise your timing has to be when using commands. The intention here, I assume, is to further pad the latency issue, but I just use it to more easily maintain Fever mode in my old age.
(Personally, I just defaulted to playing Patapon 1+2 Replay in handheld exclusively because there is no latency at all and that’s how I’m used to playing these games anyway.)
There are two problems with the games themselves. First, neither game auto-saves between missions, which led to me losing tons of progress in Patapon and Patapon 2 because I forgot to manually save in the village areas. Let my sorrow be a warning: save your game after every successful mission, if you get a particularly good item drop, or whatever. Get into the habit of it. Second, you can't pause these games. Sure, you can press the Home button and essentially put the game to sleep, but you can't pause in-game. I understand the intent (gotta keep on that beat) but I don't even have kids and frequently have to pause my games.
I should also mention that the multiplayer mode in Patapon 2, which is exclusive to the Switch version, is local-only, as you can only host or join a party. I assume all your friends need copies of Patapon 1+2 Replay and that GameShare is not applicable here; I haven’t seen evidence otherwise. Thus, I was unable to try it but if you find yourself in an area where multiple people have this game (PAX, perhaps), it’s an interesting take on multiplayer.
I really love these games, so much so that I’ve completely ignored the otherwise fatal latency issue by playing them exclusively in Handheld mode. After all, isn’t the Switch 2 just a very large PSP? I do wish they’d built in auto-saves, but…I guess I can live with it. Your own mileage may vary on that point. Go forth and get your pata pon.
