Patapon 1+2 Replay Review – Rhythm-action repeat
There are sounds in life you will never forget. The tone of your mother’s voice, the pure joy of your child’s laugh, the opening notes of Oasis’ Wonderwall. These sounds shape, memorialise and fashion your life, but they diminish next to the sheer titanic weight of the songs of the Patapon. Now with Patapon 1+2 Replay, a whole new generation of gamers can tap their way into a fever dream of rhythm-action warfare.
Beaten on drums by you, the Lord of the Patapon, the songs of the Patapon are capable of commanding legions of one-eyed soldiers, leading and directing them in battle. When, taken alone, the basic sounds of the Pon, Pata, Chaka and Don drums, have no meaning, no reason, but as you stack them up, what you have isn’t just a call to war, it’s an earworm of cacophonous power that will never release you from its grip.
Where you could once picture your child’s laugh, now you just hear the high-pitched chanting of Pata, Pata ,Pata, Pon, the repetition of the musical command putting you in a trance-like state from which there is no return. This isn’t a bad thing, far from it, as Patapon is one of the greatest games of all time, and really, do you need to remember the first few chords of Wonderwall?
Patapon originally released on the PlayStation Portable, at a time when Sony was still happy to indulge its most experimental developers and studios. This is a first-party rhythm-action title that’s played on a 2D plane, has a cast of adorable eyeballs, and uses songs to make those eyeballs attack things. As elevator pitches go, it’s pretty out there, and the reality is even more weird and wonderful. In a truly unexpected move, Bandai Namco is bundling up the first two games together, and bringing them to PS5, Switch and PC under license from Sony, meaning that a whole new set of previously un-Pataponed platforms can discover what makes this series so special.
At least they can, once you’ve got the bad bit out of the way. Patapon 1+2 is a modern collection of two classic rhythm-action games, and the one fundamental to that is being able to press the buttons on your controller in time with the music, while a flashing border around the screen also appears in time with the beat to help you out. The problem is that modern TVs and sound systems all feature varying levels of latency: a delay in either direction between what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing.
These games were designed for the closed, fixed system of the PSP, and the simple act of being on different platforms means that, through no fault of your own, your TV, sound system or console may not match up with the buttons quite in time you press them. In other modern rhythm-action games – Guitar Hero or Rock Band for example – there’s a calibration tool, which tells you the delay between what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing, and tweaks the underpinnings of the game in response. Patapon 1+2 doesn’t have that.
What it does have is a ten-point input timing scale in the main options. This lets you tweak the input timing to try and match your TV, but it offers you no additional help to do this. Instead you’re forced to change the setting, load up one of the games, and then see if what you’ve done is better than what you had before. If it doesn’t work, you have to back out all the way to the front menu, and try again. It’s unbelievably frustrating, and quite possibly the most obvious oversight in recent gaming memory.
This is all exacerbated by playing on Switch, where there’s the further wrinkle of being able to play in both docked and handheld mode, and having different input delay across those two use cases. Handheld play feels perfect out-of-the-box, but only when playing with the Switch 2’s built-in speakers. Trying to use Bluetooth headphones renders the game nigh-on impossible in this mode and I couldn’t find a setting that made it feel comfortable. On Switch, you’re going to have to tinker across two use cases to get your input delay right, while headphones and speakers might change that on the fly. It is, frankly, a bit of a mess.
All that said, if you persevere, Patapon and its first sequel remain two of the most unique, joyful and utterly hypnotic experiences in gaming. The central loop sees you building up your army of eyeballs by acquiring different materials while out on missions, or, in the case of tree branches, playing a mini-game where you have to play along with a tree singing a song.
You make your way through each level by performing musical combos, stringing together the musical inputs for attacking, defending, advancing, and a batch of more specialised commands. If you successfully string ten combos together – or fewer if you’re perfectly on the beat – you enter Fever mode, which ramps everything up, from the song you’re playing along to, through to the Patapon’s high-pitched and chaotic chorus. It also makes your attacks more powerful, enhancing the Patapon’s strength and power, making it nigh-on essential to be in this mode at times, which is easier said than done.
Patapon was always tough, but it feels even more so here thanks to the input latency issues that the PSP never had to worry about. There’s a lot of grinding to be done, and your enjoyment and perseverance will depend very much on how much you’re sold on the music and presentation, as well as whether you can actually play the game. I still adore it, but I can see it being a fairly contentious title for some.
When it gets things right, Patapon 1+2 is an utterly brilliant collection, with a steady stream of songs and moments that will cement themselves in your memory. It’s so simple, and yet excruciatingly tough at times, giving you a real sensation of success while you pick up a host of new materials and weapons to upgrade your army with. As you earn move specific materials, you can create even weirder and more powerful Patapon, until your army looks like a pool of babbling, multi-coloured frogspawn carrying an array of tiny weapons. It is, in a word, iconic.
There are some minor concessions in the name of quality of life, so in addition to the timing adjustments, you do have the ability to display the core commands on screen, and there are now three difficulty settings, but the core challenge of this game does remain.
