Thursday, November 27, 2008Patapon 2 Returns!!
Four-player ad-hoc multiplayer is the biggest new addition to the Patapon sequel. 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."
Hmmm after trying it out for a couple of hours, the gameplay is pretty much the same as from the old one with some additions. You get to use a "hero" char now, who can do special attacks pretty much like dota. The army upgrades through a tree system like diablo, with branches to different/new classes. You can level up individual soldiers too. And there's the egg thingy which i haven't explored yet... have to find other players to do multiplayer. Items seemed easier to get i think... so far no mini-games yet.. no improvement on the music..
