I picked up Patapon on day one because I liked the demo so much. It was the first demo that I played through twice. Since the game picks up where the demo left off, I didn't feel any need to read the instruction manual or even pay attention to what the pons where telling me. Thanks to some minor spoilers I read from the forums, I felt I was well equipped to tackle the full game.
Ah, how wrong I was. For a whole day, I kept trying to beat this one boss that I thought I beat in the demo already. After I finally beat him, I returned to the map and –what? I have to beat him again?? Turns out that I wasn't paying attention and kept picking the boss fight from the map instead of picking the section in the map to actually progress through the story. Oops.
When I finally got to progress through the story, I encountered another roadblock: how to start a miracle. I thought all I needed was the Don drum and the miracle song. The screen kept telling me to drum the rhythm, but it took me twenty minutes of drumming to realize one crucial thing: I wasn't in fever mode. Oops. Once I got that sorted out, it was easy to make miracles happen.
After playing Patapon for an hour or so, I always come out feeling like I'm emerging from a trance. Then the catchy songs just stay in my head for hours. I wouldn't recommend playing this before bed, unless you want to be awake at night with your brain chanting "Pon Pon Pata Pon!".
The fighting aspect of the game, especially the boss battles, are the best part of the game. What I don't like though, is having to play the tree mini-game over and over just so I can get ingredients to make more pons with. I didn't think it was a problem at first, but now I dread having to do it. I'm also getting a bit tired of performing the whole miracle dance each time I want a miracle to happen; it throws off my rhythm.
Despite my dislikes, I still can't seem to put the game down. It's one of those "Okay, just one more level" type of games.
