Ratatan Early Access impressions for PC

If you went into Ratatan completely blind, you might not think very highly of it. After all, it bills itself as a “spiritual successor” to Patapon, but that’s understating the degree to which it feels like an unreleased Patapon 4. The music, the gameplay, even the font in the game’s main icon on Steam – all of them come straight out of Patapon, and you might be wondering where the line between “homage” and “theft” is drawn exactly.

There are two things that make it more than just a Patapon clone, however. The first is that Ratatan’s studio, Ratata Arts, was founded by some of the people who created Patapon, including its creative lead, Hiroyuki Kotani. Given we’re unlikely to see Patapon 4 anytime soon (unless Patapon Replay was a test-run for that), it’s hard to fault Kotani and company for reinventing their creation under a new name.

Secondly – and probably more importantly – Ratatan really feels like an evolution of Patapon. It takes the rhythm battles of the original trilogy and builds on them, creating a game that almost has its own identity. Where Patapon felt like it had a more rigid structure, Ratatan is a roguelike, which means that every run is a little different. On top of that, you can also mold your little army of attackers (Cobuns, if you want to be precise) how you see fit, mixing and matching different abilities to adapt to your play style.

Consequently, it feels like there’s a little more strategy involved in Ratatan. Your attacks can be much more explosive (literally, in some cases), meaning you can play a little more aggressively than you might have in Patapon. You can also pick and choose which quests you want to embark on, which adds to the roguelike feeling the developers were going for.

Given that Ratatan is still in Early Access, you might expect there to still be some issues – and, to be honest, you’d be right. The biggest is probably the length of each level: as anyone who’s ever played any rhythm game knows, there’s a lot of concentration involved. Having levels stretch out for well over five minutes (and in some cases probably more than 10 minutes) as they do here can be a little exhausting. That said, the developers have noted they’re already working to address this issue and others, which is good, but they’re still there as of this writing.

Still, it’s hard not to look at Ratatan and feel excitement at where it’s heading. It already lives up to its billing of being a spiritual successor to Patapon; whether it evolves into something beyond that will remain to be seen, but even if it doesn’t, as rhythm battlers go, it’s a pretty enjoyable experience even in its current state.

Game Source Entertainment provided us with a Ratatan PC code for review purposes.

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