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The Patapons have not Pata-ed or Pon-ed in a new game since 2011 when Patapon 3 came out on the PSP. There’s still no clear indicator that another official entry is on the way, but some of its original creators have banded together and announced a spiritual successor called Ratatan.
Ratatan is coming to Kickstarter
According to Video Games Chronicle, the title was revealed at BitSummit, an indie game festival in Japan. Patapon designer Hiroyuki Kotani and musician Kemmei Adachi are coming back together for Ratatan, both of whom worked on various Sony games together like LocoRoco and Ape Academy 2. Ratatan’s Kickstarter campaign will also go live on July 31 at 9 a.m. PT, but a goal was not revealed.
Ratata Arts and TVT are keeping its release window and platforms under wraps, but early concept art of Ratatan was teased in March 2022. The concept art had the little main characters, who can be heard in the teaser trailer. The teaser trailer doesn’t show much, but the voices have a similar whimsical tone to those in Patapon and the main units in Ratatan look a lot like the main units in Patapon, too. And while its teaser trailer lacked gameplay, producer Kazuto Sakajiri went into more detail, revealing that Ratatan will have roguelike elements and support multiplayer for up to four players.
“The three main game concepts are over 100 cute characters fighting it out on screen, four-player simultaneous battles, and more adventure and roguelike elements than Patapon had,” Sakajiri told VGC.
Kotani said that Patapon was a “really unique experience at the time” and that the team wanted to make “another game like that for the modern age.” He also didn’t rule out a Patapon sequel, but the studio wanted to make its own game first. He said he held no grudges against Sony for what happened to Japan Studio and stated that “if there’s a chance to speak to Sony about doing a Patapon sequel, then [the studio will] go from there.”
Patapon launched on the PSP in 2007 in Japan and was lauded for its novel take on the real-time strategy genre, as it mixed in rhythmic elements that had players giving commands to a beat. It was released more widely in 2008. Its sequel also launched in Japan in 2008 (and, again, had a wider release the following year) and was more fleshed out and built on the original’s core systems. 2011’s Patapon 3 was sizeable departure from the first two, in that it retained some elements from its predecessors but was built more around cooperative and competitive play.
It was the final release from Patapon until its PS4 remaster came out in 2017. The remaster was praised for its visuals, but criticized for the newly added input delay. The sequel was also remastered for PS4 in 2020 and had the same issue. Patapon 3 didn’t receive a remaster.