Ratatan Puts a Brilliant Roguelite Spin on the Classic Rhythm Experience
What’s old is new again.
The Patapon games are among the most brilliant innovations of the rhythm genre ever made, giving you little armies of adorable one-eyed creatures to command in musical combat. It felt like one of Sony’s best apps for many years, which is why it seems like such a mistake that we haven’t seen a new one in 14 years. But if Sony won’t make one, the original creators of Patapon will, with the spiritual successor Ratatan. But after going hands-on with the game, it’s clear Ratatan is much more than inspired by those classic rhythm games, it’s a genuine evolution of the formula that takes it into the territory of roguelites — creating a challenging but ambitious rhythm experience that holds a ton of potential.
“One of the main reasons we decided to go with a roguelite was because of the multiplayer aspect of the game. With Patapon, you could choose different quests and things, but that wouldn’t work very well with a multiplayer game,” producer Saisu Sakijiri Kazuto tells Inverse, “We thought a roguelite would seamlessly allow players to play the game together at the same time, and it’s also a more modern genre.”
Like Patapon, Ratatan has a striking art style that really sets it apart.
Ratatan is a spiritual successor to Patapon, with many of the development team of that series returning, including series creator Hiroyuki Kotani. Luckily, right out of the gate, Ratatan nails the most important aspect of those past games — a downright infectious vibe. The colorful characters of Ratatan are bristling with personality. It almost feels like a hyper-stylized Saturday Morning Cartoon, which then extends to the upbeat, poppy music.
The basics of Ratatan are the same as Patapon — you essentially collect a little army of minions and then use time button presses, along to the beat of the music, to command them in battle. There’s a short list of commands that do different things. For example, pressing square three times followed by X gives a gather command, where all your minions flock to your side. By using the right commands, you’ll need to order them to attack, defend, use special abilities, jump, and more.
But those cursory elements are mostly what the game draws from Patapon, layering in a bunch of new elements on top of that. As someone who played hundreds of hours of Patapon, Ratatan immediately felt different — and a large part of that is because you can move your player character at will. In Patapon, you simply controlled an army, but here you suddenly have to juggle multiple factors, including your character’s placement, your armies, and the enemies you’re going up against.
At first, Ratatan feels much more demanding than Patapon, but as you get used to the systems, it starts to feel more freeing and dynamic.
Suddenly, it becomes a game of micromanagement, almost like putting up multiple spinning plates and trying to keep them all there. It’s undoubtedly challenging and takes a bit to wrap you head around, but once you get the hang of the system, it’s a blast.
“All the kind of chaos that's going on in Ratatan was actually an idea that Mr. Kotani was thinking about putting into Patapon 4,” says Kotani, “but it didn’t come to fruition. So they're implementing that aspect here.”
Those chaotic elements give Ratatan a distinct flavor, that’s honed even further by its heavy roguelite structure — with the easiest comparison honestly being Hades. In each “run,” you play through a series of rooms, with each room giving you some kind of reward, either an upgrade for that run or currency to use back at your home base.
The roguelite nature of the game adds a nice layer of unpredictability and adaption to each run.
The roguelite elements work exceptionally well here, giving you a lot of fine-tuned control over how to craft your experience for each specific run. Maybe you want your basic attacks to inflict burning on enemies, or give a boost to your defensive barrier. While most of what I played was early on in Ratatan, I was jumped to a save much further in the game to get an idea of the kind of variation there can be. On top of nearly quadrupling my army size, this opened up a wealth of even more distinct buffs for runs, and a ton of upgrades that help give you an edge. One upgrade let my character come back from defeat a single time, and another boosted the healing I receive from finding currency items.
A roguelite is a smart pairing with a rhythm game, as the conceits of the two genres are fairly interlinked. Traditionally, rhythm games are all about practice, the more you play, the better you get. Roguelites are similar in how their progression systems work, especially with something like Hades or Ratatan, giving you a sense of methodical reward and progression the further you get. It’s easy to see how these two systems can interweave, and so far it feels like Ratatan is nailing it.
The only hesitation I have is the difficulty, which can be a bit off-putting, especially because there’s a legitimate learning curve with Ratatan as you come to grips with its array of systems and mechanics. The progression systems are compelling, but I wonder how players who aren’t familiar with rhythm games might come into the experience, or even bounce off it. But that’s also something the development team thought about.
“With rhythm, it can be difficult for some people, but with Ratatan we wanted very simple inputs, with the same button. Even though there are different actions you can do, we wanted it to be simple enough that most anybody can play it, Kazuto says,” However, with the other gameplay elements involved, such as the movement, that adds extra challenges the action, so we’re planning to implement certain accessibility options that'll make it a little easier for various players to play.”
There’s a surprising amount of variation packed into Ratatan’s progression — and that’s the real key to any good roguelite game.
In recent years, it feels like rhythm games, even more than most genres, have found intuitive ways to adapt and survive — with games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, Metal: Hellsinger, and the upcoming Lumines Arise. I’m hopeful Ratatan can be the next step in that ladder, and it’s telling that a lot of these rhythm games learn from each other. To that end, I couldn’t help but ask Kazuto if he’d played one of my favorite games of the decade, Hi-Fi Rush, and was pleased to learn it almost influenced Ratatan.
“I have played it, and how the whole screen feels the rhythm in Hi-Fi Rush, we tried to implement that in Ratatan,” Kazuto says, “Then we were like ‘Ah, this isn’t quite working.’ So we’re gonna set that aside — maybe in the second game.”
