Growing up as a Nintendo kid in the nineties, you’d better believe I owned a fair few Game Boys. Portable gaming has always held a special place in my heart, and a lot of that has to do with those early days playing Super Mario Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Imagine my surprise though when I heard another portable console was coming, this time from Sony. Now a multi console kid I was more than happy to have another place to play games, and the PlayStation Portable had some wonderfully weird ones to choose from. Patapon was absolutely one of these, so I’m glad the franchise is getting another chance to shine with Patapon 1+2 Replay.
If you haven’t played a Patapon game before, prepare for something pretty unique even by modern standards. Patapon is a blend of rhythm game, RTS, and RPG, all of which combine to create a wild experience. It’s your job to guide your tribe of the titular critters to victory in combat, which you’ll do by playing various songs in time to the beat. Each song is four notes long, and each of these notes is assigned to a different face button. As you progress through the game you’ll learn different songs which will help in different circumstances, but don’t worry it’s not really as complex as it sounds.
The first song you’ll learn how to use in both games is the “Advance” song, which tells your vocal little eyeball buddies to move from left to right. On Switch this means hitting A, A, A, then B to drum the sound “Pata Pata Pata Pon”. Next you’ll need to get your warriors to fight any enemies or obstacles ahead of them with the attack song, which goes Pon Pon Pata Pon. As songs are slowly introduced they become second nature, and you’ll always be ready to instruct your units correctly when the situation calls for it.
Once you’ve given your orders as the general of the Patapon, it’s largely down to them to do their thing. There’s quite the variety of Patapon you can recruit into your army, with all sorts of different strengths and weaknesses. The starting spearmen are useful for their ranged attacks, but their projectiles often end up a bit wide of the mark. Melee Patapon are great at up close combat, and are also a great defensive wall when told to block. More unusual units start to appear as you progress (especially in the second game) and it’s up to you to decide which of them are the best to bring to each battle.
Every stage of Patapon 1+2 Replay offers something different to overcome, and rewards to gather. Some stages are infinitely replayable and offer wild animals to hunt for materials, some feature all out war against a nasty enemy tribe, and some feature wild boss fights against a screen filling foe. I was initially concerned when playing through these two twenty hour games that they’d run out of ideas before I made it through to the end, but that’s not the case at all.
A lot of the depth of the Patapon games come from crafting the most powerful army possible, which means getting good materials from a selection of sources and spending your “Kaching” to form a whole new warrior. Hunting tougher foes will grant better quality materials to use for this, but you can also engage in other activities like playing the trumpet with a dancing tree to get the best wood possible.
Before playing this new collection I had already beaten the original Patapon in my teens (because partying and getting drunk are for people who aren’t friends of the Patapon) but Patapon 2 was entirely new to me here. It’s a much more fleshed out game, with commands you can use to jump over ground based hazards, that heal status effects and also a whole host of new exciting units. It’s also a little bit more of a grindy game with more to manage, but this didn’t really detract from the experience for me.
Now I was already aware that the Patapon games are a lot of fun before trying this collection, and was intrigued by what was new. The answer isn’t a whole lot, except for new difficulty options. I remember the first Patapon game being tough, especially early on, and having to replay the hunting stage over and over again to make a powerful army. On easy mode that isn’t the case at all, and it made the playthrough so much smoother.
Although the difficulty options are a great improvement, there are also a few issues with this collection. Not having an autosave will absolutely cause everyone to lose progress at least once, which is miserable no matter how you slice it. There’s also an issue with the buttons assigned to the drum beats, because although these have been updated to map to the Switch buttons they still have PlayStation icons on them. This is the case with certain stage elements too, and it feels like a big oversight.
Speaking of big oversights, where is Patapon 3? It’s bizarre that one game from the trilogy was left out altogether, and is stranded on old hardware that most of us don’t have easy access to. I guess the third game could be released on its own at a later date, but it would’ve felt nice to have a collection of the entire trilogy.
Patapon 1+2 Replay is a lovely bundle of two weird and wonderful games, but there’s a distinct lack of upgrade to either of them. A new release not having autosave in 2025 is baffling, and this on top of a few other issues make it feel like a bit of a lacklustre remaster. Still, the games themselves are great, and that’s what really matters.
