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Patapon 1+2 Replay Hands-on Preview

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On May 16, 2025

There was a time years ago when Sony was happy to supplement its mainstream fare with weirdness, with its Japan Studio being an umbrella for games like PaRappa the Rapper, Tokyo Jungle, Ape Escape, LocoRoco and many, many more. One particularly memorable series on the PSP was about a little army of silhouette warriors journeying left to right across the screen, taking on all comers in a battle to reach Earthend. Marching, fighting, defending and rallying were all timed to the beat of the drum, with each four-note section being a potential command to bring the glory of victory to the Patapon army.

Oh Patapon, the Drums, the Drums are Calling

Patapon did well enough to earn two sequels, not to mention PS4 versions of the first two games released in 2017 and 2020, respectively. For the Patapon Remastered games that’s great if you’ve got a PS4, but is stil longer ago than is comfortable to admit. Namco recently announced it was doing a new version in the form of Patapon 1+2 Replay

for Switch, PC and PS5, and we recently had hands-on time with the game at PAX East. As it turns out, even if you haven’t played the game for a few decades, it doesn’t take long to dial back in to the beat.

Review: Patapon 2 Remastered

Despite having the rose-tinted glasses violently ripped away, Patapon 2 Remastered is an easy recommendation to existing fans of the series.

The way Patapon works is that the four face buttons correspond to a drum apiece and you need to create strings of four presses to give commands. Pata-pata-pata-pon is (and every controller has symbols or different letters so I’m using directions rather than any specific official layout) left button, left button, left button, right button and when entered in time to a forgiving beat window, the Patapon crew marches forward. Pon-pon-pata-pon (right, right, left, right buttons) calls out attack, chaka-chaka-pata-pon (up, up, left, right buttons) is defense, etc. It can be confusing to learn, but there’s an option to put a window at the bottom of the screen listing the commands and there aren’t so many they can’t be memorized.

For the sake of the demo I was given prebuilt Patapon armies, but between one level and the next you can edit this to your heart’s content with sword- or bow-wielders and various other types of units, plus find drops during the battle to upgrade the team back at camp. The heart of the game, though, is the battle march, with each level being a musical advance as the Patapon get fired up in Fever mode. Hit a few commands to the beat and don’t miss any notes to switch to activate Fever and the Patapon go into overdrive with a more energetic call-back of the beats to go with stronger command results. The music makes it satisfying even when you’re just repeating march or attack commands and that only gets better when you’ve got a few more advanced abilities combined with the muscle-memory to tap them in without breaking Fever mode.

A Little Bit of Polish to Send the Patapon Marching Onward

New to the Replay edition of Patapon are a number of quality-of-life features, including the previously-mentioned command display at the bottom of the screen plus different difficulty levels and timing adjustments for a more generous window on command inputs. Topping it off, the Switch version also has a local multiplayer mode where up to four people command a Patapon hero apiece in a quest to steal a dragon egg (disclaimer: the Steam page for the game has a screenshot of multiplayer mode, but all the materials state multiplayer is Switch-exclusive. Inquiries to Bandai-Namco PR for clarification haven’t gotten a response at the time of this writing). Beat the boss and there’s a rhythm game at the end to hatch the egg and earn its rewards, requiring all players to match the beats together in a victory celebration.

The Patapon series has always gotten by as much on charm as on gameplay and the Replay edition will give a whole new set of players access to discover its cute musical warrior tribe. Nothing else plays quite like it, and when the battles kick off and Fever mode amps up the music, it’s a fantastically satisfying experience. Granted, there are only a limited number of commands due to the need for the player to basically learn a four-beat drum-based language, so it ends up being more a music than military strategy/action game, but Patapon is powered by sheer exuberance so it all works out fine. Earthend is out there somewhere and in Patapon 1+2 Replay the tribe is going to march, sing, dance and battle their way from one end of the world the other to try and reach it.