Ratatan is exactly what I didn't know I wanted from a Patapon successor - hands-on

One way to know the difference between someone that owned a PSP and someone who loved it is to ask what they thought about Patapon; for my money, Patapon 2 still remains the best game that Sony has ever published. Needless to say, I've been eagerly awaiting Ratata Arts' Ratatan - and while you never quite know how crowdfunded spiritual successors will end up in the long-run, after having the chance to go hands-on at Summer Game Fest (and a few extra run attempts at home after the show), the game feels in good hands.

Ratatan is a rhythm game crossed with a roguelike, and much like the series that preceded it there's a healthy amount of RPG elements fueling progression for players to look forward to. Patapon itself wasn't a roguelike, but Patapon as a series was always one to be inspired by its peers. Patapon 3 in particular draws easy comparison to games that got popular on the PSP such as Monster Hunter - so it's not that big of a stretch that a true Patapon 4 may have been inspired by the popularity of roguelikes in the mid to late 2010s.

If you've played Patapon, you understand how Ratatan plays - especially if you go into the options and set things to Advanced. This makes the rhythm indicator and the song combos match more closely to how things worked back on the PSP, which I greatly recommend if you're a veteran. It makes inputs more engaging in regards to both timing Just inputs as well as making songs more engaging in general. One change is how players have an MP meter that's expended when ordering your Cobun units to do skills; you'll regain MP over time just by playing songs correctly, though you'll regain more MP for Just inputs as well.

Runs take a ton of inspiration from games like Hades; at the end of each room, you choose to open a door for a choice of one of a handful of rewards. These can be elemental powerups for you and your Cobun army, extra Cobun units, a shop, resources for permanent upgrades and more. Sometimes players can tackle miniboss fights against enemy Ratatan which drop special materials that can eventually be used back at base to craft particularly strong equipment for your Cobun. 

At the end of a run, successful or not, players can return to camp. While any regular currency you accumulated during a run is lost, materials such as Candy, Chocolate Bars, Donuts and enemy materials remain. These can be spent to permanently buff your Ratatan, generate specific buffs for zones such as a healing fountain that will always spawn at certain thresholds, and - as mentioned earlier - be used to craft new weapons for your Cobun. Weapons are probably the most consistent way to improve your chances of clearing a run. Enemies will occassionally drop weapons of different rarities and levels; even the same weapon can come with a set of randomized perks. Extra weapons of the same class can be burned to level-up weapons of your choice, increasing a unit's basic stats.  

Even early on, it's easy to see how engaging the gameplay loop can be - and how a heavy emphasis on stats might make the game more palpable for players with a poor sense of rhythm, doubled with the default easier options for inputs and the metronome. We didn't get the chance to test out multiplayer yet, but everything we've seen so far has us more than interested to give the game a go when it drops in Early Access on July 24 for PC (Steam).