When I was a kid I actually hated piñatas. I considered them yet another adult-conceived contraption purely meant for the taunting of children. Think about it - they make you wear a blindfold and then as if that wasn’t enough, they spin you around to the point of nearly vomiting. After handing you a large blunt object, they face you vaguely in the direction of the piñata and laugh as you wobble and swing violently at anything in your path. Eventually you may hit the piñata and be rewarded with candy; except you have to fight off all the other kids that swarm over to get their hands on it. Thankfully Rare’s versions of piñata related games are drastically more reasonable and fun.

Monique was benevolent enough to send me Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise for the DS as a graduation and thank you gift. As my days were full of the monotony of schoolwork and the occasional 3am Denny’s trip, I am eternally grateful to her for the distraction.

And let me just say: My God, what a distraction this game is. Addictive doesn’t begin to cover it. For the last three days I’ve practically had my eyes welded to my DS screen.

The basic concept of the game is that you’re given a plot of land to create a garden. You can add ponds, fences, trees, grass, etc. The idea is that you want to attract living, breathing (I think?) piñatas to live there and give the garden some pep. For those that played the 360 version, it’s pretty much the same thing but with some new additions. They also removed some of the features from the game like the romance maze, but I’m told those features were more obnoxious than intriguing, so maybe it’s a good thing.

As your gardening skill increases via the piñatas taking up residence, so too does the size of your garden along with the type of piñata you’ll attract. Some of the piñatas have really odd requirements for becoming a resident of your garden. Occasionally they’ll eat one of your other buddies, or you need to have a certain amount of grass or water, etc. If you don’t want them to kill and snarf down on the candied remains of one of your pets, you can smack them upside the head with your magical shovel until they themselves pop.

Sometimes enemies like sour piñatas will harass your garden. You can beat them with a shovel, or you can opt to reform them. Reforming them causes them to join your garden and gives you a special totem pole that keeps all sour versions of that species away permanently. It’s quite handy.

I’m not sure if I can accurately convey how fun this game is to play by pure definition. It’s a bit of Harvest Moon meets Animal Crossing. There is no looming threat to the universe, no zombies on the horizon. It’s pretty much for people who enjoy life simulation games. Thankfully for those of us that do, it gets most all of the other addictive parts of the games we love and combines them into a respectable hand-held game.

You’re constantly watching your garden. Planting, building, destroying, rebuilding, etc. You can make it fit to whatever your aesthetic senses desire. Meanwhile, you’re taking care of the piñatas (though they don’t require feeding or anything mind-numbing like that) by giving them accessories, mating them to get new variations, just all kinds of stuff.

The controls are a bit of a downside as everything is done with the stylus and touch screen. The movement with the stylus and control pad is pretty slow. To counteract this, they added an overhead map. If you tap the location on the overhead map that you want to go to, then the travel button, you end up there in a flash. But you still have to use a drag and drop system to move items or piñatas around the field. It gets pretty tiring eventually, especially if you accidentally drag the wrong thing to the wrong piñata.

The whole game is fairly open-ended. You can do whatever you want, even if you don’t want to progress. I know some people hate to play games that don’t point them in a specific direction, and this really isn’t for you if that’s your preference. For the rest of us, I can definitely recommend this beauty of a game. The graphics really push the limits of the DS, so they look pretty darned good. The music? Ehm. Can’t really say I noticed it at all, which could be good or bad. It’s good because it didn’t annoy me, but bad because it didn’t stand out.

It’s also a pretty easy game. There’s some challenge in getting your gardening level up, but besides that it’s easy to pick up and put down, then return to at a later time. There’s also instructional ‘episodes’ for you to play through in order to learn the more complicated aspects of the game, like breeding and getting honey.

All the piñatas are adorable and modeled after real life animals. They’re also cleverly named after candy as well. Even if one of your critters does the unthinkable and eats one of its garden-mates, it’s just too damn cute for you to stay angry at it.

So yes, if you’re into this genre of game, I would highly recommend picking up Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise. The clunky movement barely distracts from the game at all. Overall it’s been a really pleasant experience for me.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Reviews, New Releases, Nintendo DS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.