Patapon 3 was a big disappointment. I loved the first game, found the system even better in the second even if the story wasn’t as smooth and iconic – and so had high hopes for the third. But the designers ruined everything that was good about Patapon, and made a frustrating game I finished only out of dogged loyalty, not enjoyment.
The first and biggest flaw was that they decided that instead of a full Patapon army, the player could use only 4 units, like the second game’s hero mode for multiplayer. This is the crux of it: in order to be able to expand the whole game to play multiplayer, the concept of controlling a cute and varied army was excised. Well, I don’t like playing Patapon multiplayer – I like playing it on the train. And the whole appeal for me was building up a big army with lots of units for different jobs. To make it worse, the different units aren’t even all fully customisable – apart from the main hero, each has only a limited number of variants. Thus, rather than exploring in depth, I found the class I liked most for each and stuck with it from about mission 5 to the very end of the game. And the spear unit was pretty useless no matter what.
The change in army style also meant a change in gameplay – the ways to lose were for everybody to die (rare except when there were stupid traps) or for your flag-bearing Hatapon to die. Hatapon becomes vulnerable when all units with a shield die. My only unit with a shield was my big, powerful attack unit. Thus the entire game was nothing more than keep-your-tank-alive-or-die. With stupid summons (which are nothing more than dull button-mashing in hopes of ‘perfect’ ratings and cannot be varied without multiplayer) to bring him back to life once or twice.
The difficulty progression was stupid. The difference in power between levels is absurd, to the point that the game overall was ‘die on every attempt until your units go up one level, and then easily beat what was until then near-impossible’. This held true right to the very end, where the last dungeon was horrible at level 29 but a piece of cake at 30.
The minigames that broke up the action are gone. The humour has all but gone – the crazy bosses that raise a smile are repeats from previous games, and the one fun new enemy, a great big ogre, reappears so much he’s soon a bore.
The story makes little sense and seems very carelessly translated. Your soldiers spout the most random nonsense, and the bad guys are semi-coherent. That there are multiple endings based purely on a choice at the end only frustrates. Gone is the charming simplicity of the quest of the first game, or the fun of discovery of the second. A repetitive, weird and dull game I never thought could have been made from Patapon is all that’s left. Such a shame.
