On February 26, 2008, a new entertaining game hit the still fresh PSP: Patapon. On March 6th, gamers received the sequel, Patapon 2: Don Chaka. The final game, Patapon 3, released on April 12, 2011, and finished the series for the portable console.
All three games have received quite the warm welcome and conquered players’ hearts with their originality and general cuteness, the exciting gameplay and the extraordinary soundtrack. All three belong to the genre of arcade rhythm games mixed with a god simulator where you play the protagonist role.
The first two games were remastered for PS4 in 2017 and 2020 respectively. Now, after five years of silence, the bundled remaster suddenly appeared on Steam, with no prior advertisement or loud announcements.
It feels like Sony decided to warm up some interest and make a little money in anticipation of the upcoming Ratatan release. In case you have not been following it, Ratatan is a rhythm game from the author of Patapon, Hiroyuki Kotani. Among others, sound director Kemmei Adachi, known for Patapon, LocoRoco and Gran Turismo, as well as producer Kazuto Sakajiri, who worked on The Eye of Judgment, are participating in the development.
Why it took Sony five years to finally bring two out of three games to the PC remains to be seen. Instead, let me introduce you to the Patapon 1+2 REPLAY, finally available on Steam.
As I’ve mentioned before, Patapon is a unique symbiosis of music and tactics. Players will control small warlike creatures, the Patapons, who will follow their commands that need to be given in time with music.
Your goal is to lead them through dangerous lands to the Earthend, defeat enemies, and complete missions while only being able to use a few commands. The little Patapons have dreamed of the One, the fulfillment of the legend and the prophecy that stated that there will be someone to take them to the safe haven at the promised land. After all, pretty much anyone had it out for the little guys.
You, as their god, will find the sacred drum – one of the four of them – and little Patapons will become your sons and daughters. They will entrust their lives into your hands in return for the dream, to see Earthend.
The first game begins with the bravest Patapon, the Standard Bearer, looking for a sacred drum that can inspire the Patapons and lift their spirits. After all, the little race is on the brink of extinction. The mighty Zigoton brought them to almost complete defeat, and locked them in a small piece of land. It is now up to you, the Great Patapon, to lead them out, and figure out why Zigotons had it out for your children.
Let’s go over part 2 right away. There, our Patapons have broken through the Zigotons, and figured out that the place they reached at the end of the first game wasn’t actually the Earthend, and there’s still a long journey ahead. But, at the same time, they also saw the visions of the old Patapon capital, with the unknown egg that was calling out to them with its beauty.
Having built the Ship and, naturally, crashed, the Patapons find themselves on a new island, where they again meet their old enemies… and encounter the new ones, Karmen. They will need to pass through the new lands to reach the old capital and figure out the mystery of the egg.
Let’s move onto the heart of the two games: the gameplay and the style.
The unique style immediately catches a player’s eye. A peculiar 2D that calls out to your attention and firmly holds it. The entire world seems simple, yet colorful and recognizable. A circle with arms and legs, an eye in the middle, that’s a typical representative of our strange tribe of Patapons.
They live in a flat, two-dimensional world, drawn with bright markers by a person obsessed with the cave paintings of Neanderthals, where a crowd of barely outlined little people, shaking toothpicks, rushes towards something with a trunk and tusks. This is what you imagine in your head, once you see the visuals of the game. Bright wonders, weather effects on the maps, burning lights and magic, attacks of our Patapons – everything is done in a colorful and sustained style.
Our Patapons love to hunt, dance around totems and fight with their neighbors. The problem is that these creatures won’t do a thing without your drumbeat. You can yell at them, smack your hands, and threaten to turn off the PSP (without saving!), but they simply don’t care.
Unless the strange “pon-pon-pata-pon” is heard, they will yawn and stare at you from the screen, even if they are currently being chopped to bits by the enemies or trampled by angry dinosaurs. The second the rhythm spreads across the plains, the sluggish tribe is transformed: a flame lights up in their eyes, their hands outstretch to grab bows and spears, their legs begin to dance, and their thin voices sing a song that becomes stronger and more carefree with every beat.
With an experienced drummer, the Patapons will rush from one end of the level to the other with songs and dances, not paying the slightest attention to the resistance. The problem is that you are the drummer, and at first you’re completely inexperienced.
The heart of the Patapons is the rhythm. The whole game consists of tapping out the correct commands in rhythm, using 4 buttons. For the PC, it is the WASD, on gamepads it’s the respective buttons.
The melodies are quite simple. The first game has five commands, each consisting of four notes. If you played “pata-pata-pata-pon”, your army begins rushing forward. Your drum beat was “chaka-chaka-pata-pon”, and you can see your little creatures go on the defensive. The remaster even displays all the commands under the game screen, which helps you to orient yourself in the heat of battle.
In the second game, there are more commands to use. Charge, retreat, even jump, during which the Patapons jump and comically wiggle their feet while they hang in the air, and some other commands to diversify the gameplay. Both games also feature Miracles, special commands that change the weather, enhance Patapons’ attack or defense… For example, there are missions where you desperately need rain, after all, your tribe has to wade through seemingly impassable scorching desert that literally sets them on fire.
Each command is done in 2 phases, in the first you beat it out with the drum, and in the second the Patapons start singing it out, and you have to match them. I have noticed that sometimes I tap my foot in time with the rhythm or keep counting one-two-three-four in my head. It helps you enter Fever, the mode in which the commands become stronger, and the Patapons get buffs to their attack range, speed, and more. However, it also requires you to match the rhythm clearly and without mistakes.
In each game, you will have to go through 30+ missions, a part of which are plot-driven, while others are mostly farming or hunting. To upgrade your army of Patapons, you need resources: stone, meat, metal, wood, vegetables, and more.
The Patapons themselves are split into several types. In the first game, you don’t have access to a lot of variety at first, just shield-bearers, archers and spearmen, but as you level up, you will unlock more exotic options such as riders and giants.
The second game introduces some additional classes, such as riders on flying ponies and mages that use their spells to attack enemies from afar, or musicians with their trumpets who grant additional attacks and buffs.
In part 1, the birth of Patapons and their Class (passive weaknesses and strengths) depend on what resources you mix for their birth. You need to have 2 for each Patapon, and the resource has its own grade from 1 to 4, where grade 1 is regular, and grade is extremely rare and hard to get. The subspecies of the chosen class depend on the mixing of different grades.
In part 2, the developers complicated the leveling and birth of Patapons, but also gave you an option to change the grade of the already born warriors. For each of the base classes, an extensive “branch” of leveling was added, where each of the subspecies of Patapons could be opened.
Both games have their own interesting mini-games that come in handy if you are tired of the usual hunting missions (and you will have to hunt a lot, and often – the Patapons eat a lot of resources). The game with the newborn mountain will give you various ores and metals, and so on.
Each class of Patapons can wear their own armor and weapons. Spearmen – spears, Archers – Bows, Shielders – shield and sword, Riders – horses and spears, Giants – clubs, and so on. The second game added more classes and thus equipment, such as the trumpets for the musicians.
The mini-game with the anvil allows you to craft random equipment, or you can hope to get something through the missions. In the first game you could simply replay maps that featured bosses that would drop both resources and equipment.
In the 2nd game, new special stages were introduced. There, you play a mini-game with the egg: your character and three others controlled by AI have to carry an egg to the designated target. In the end, you will play a small music game and earn coins to buy chests filled with random items and resources. Different eggs give different rewards, some contain new hats for your protagonist, others rare resources, and more. These levels are hard, interesting, and demand good organization and adherence to the rhythm.
The leveling mechanics force you to farm them again and again, from simple currency to all resource types, so prepare for the grind. On the one hand, I understand the need for this approach that was adapted 10+ years ago when the games were originally released. On the other hand, releasing these games as they were without addressing such mechanics seems like a lazy way to include the old game emulator, which is exactly what Sony had done.
The remaster feels blatantly half-baked. When you first launch the 1+2 REPLAY, you will be greeted with a low-resolution introductory video that wasn’t even upscaled to bring it up to the modern standards. Against the background of the upgraded textures and fonts of the main game, it looks very jarring and uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as the lack of autosave in 2025. I would like to see at least such obvious conveniences in a remaster of a twelve-year-old project. I am also not sure whether the sound has undergone at least some minimal processing, since it seems that it was left in its original quality.
Animations and sounds do not always match, the fact that the game was made for 60 FPS is not the best decision. Jerky animations instead of smooth ones, abrupt movements of Patapons and enemies… Why are you doing this to a beloved old game? And they also managed to ruin… The sound. In the rhythm game. The music on the levels sounds very bad, the Patapons’ singing after entering commands does not match the music, while in the originals it correctly matched the rhythm of the music!
As a result, we have really cool games of youth… which were lazily ported to PC for some reason, without even bothering to make a competent remaster. Sony took the 5+ years old version, in-built an emulator and released the games for a biting price tag.
Honestly, I’m sorry that such successful and beloved games were so carelessly released on PC. Sure, they added functions that simplify the playthrough. It is possible to adjust the input delay time, skip entire stages and adjust the strength of opponents. This is cool but… Why did they forget about everything else and treated it so carelessly?
