Patapon 2 News

July 11th, 2008, 00:45 Posted By: wraggster

You can say what you want about Sony Computer Entertainment's first-party games, but you can't fault them for being unartistic. In fact, they've got a reputation for off-beat games that goes all the way back to the launch of the original PlayStation, a fact brought to the forefront once again with Patapon, which hit stores in February and charmed the pants off PSP owners worldwide. Sony and Patapon designer Hiroyuki Kotani aren't waiting around for the afterglow to fade away from their efforts, though -- they're already working on a sequel, and it could be in our hands as early as this winter.

"We had been thinking about a sequel ever since we were working on the overseas version of the original," Kotani (whose previous work includes overlooked PS2 puzzle game Bombastic) told Weekly Famitsu magazine. "I wanted to make a sequel, and I was thinking about how best to go about it. We had a few different directions in mind when [SCE producer Junichi] Yoshizawa finally ordered us to make a multiplayer game in the Patapon universe."

Without a doubt, four-player ad-hoc multiplayer is the biggest new addition to the Patapon sequel, tentatively titled Patapon 2. The idea behind the co-op multiplayer mode is simple. In Patapon 2's single-player story mode, you'll occasionally come across giant eggs -- some of which contain helpful items, some of which hold smaller eggs inside. In order to hatch these suckers, you'll have to team up with other players and navigate a special enemy-laden multiplayer battleground, using the traditional pata-pata-pata-pon drumbeat to heft the egg forward and defending it whenever monsters loom nearby. Once you arrive at the special egg-hatching altar at the end of the field, all four players will perform a hatching ceremony, a sort of tribal drumline where everyone has to match their rhythms together to crack open the egg.

As Kotani put it to Weekly Famitsu, the original Patapon lacked multiplayer because he thought it would be too hard for players to come to grips with. "You control a lot of characters at once in Patapon, so we thought multiplayer would be too difficult to deal with," he says. "You wouldn't have any idea which fighers were under your control. That's where the Hero Patapon come in." These Hero Patapon, amusingly enough, play a similar role to the "heroes" in real-time strategy games like Warcraft III -- they're a central unit to your Patapon army, a very powerful character that can be further customized and strengthened with the special items you earn in multiplayer. "[The Hero Patapon] are strong, but the enemies are just as strong this time," Kotani notes. "There are lots more bosses and midboss-type enemies this time. We've got about double the amount of content to explore, just in terms of the number of stages alone. Add the customization options to that, and to be honest, you may never get to fully explore every bit of it."

Patapon 2 has a release date set for winter in Japan, although no international release plans have been announced yet. "I'd like to get people playing this as quickly as possible," Kotani commented. "People really liked the game when it debuted, and I don't want people forgetting about it if we disappear for too long."

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3168612

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