Let me just clear this up for you before we begin…LocoRoco 2 is the happiest game ever made.
Yes, despite the masses of me-too shooters set in dreary locations and the oh-my-god-the-world-is-going-to-be-destroyed sci-fi action adventures weighing down the shelves, there is still room for the happiest game of all-time award. Previous carriers of the title include Gitaroo Man and Katamari Damacy, but the torch has been passed. LocoRoco 2 will have you smiling constantly, as if you’re trying to digest a rainbow.
Review copies of PSP titles very rarely come with any packaging or manuals, and having not delved too deeply into the original LocoRoco, this is how the game played out for me. Yellow ball with a face (which turns out to be you) is rolling through a village of sorts and the skies begin to darken. From those skies, tons of little black evil spidery type things start raining down on the population. One large purple character is pinned down by a black shape, and has a sad face because of it.
And then you’re playing the game.
And you know what? When something bad like that happens to one of the obviously “good” characters, you’ll frown and feel genuine sadness for what’s happening on screen. It’s as if putting LocoRoco 2 into your PSP actually has the ability to give you a mental regression that takes you back to the days when Thomas the Tank Engine actually was scary, until it all turned out alright in the end and the Fat Controller invited everyone in for tea and buns and some new oil for Thomas. Seriously. If this game doesn’t make you smile and frown often, then you have a heart of stone and just cannot be helped. I’m not talking a mild downturning of the corners of your mouth either – oh no – I’m talking a full blown sad face that could make your mother weep at the dinner table.
You control the game mainly with the shoulder buttons. The right one tilts the screen to the right and vice versa for the left, with the circle button pulling off special maneuvers such as diving when in water or splitting your character into all the individual LocoRocos that you’ve collected and back again. To jump, holding one bumper down whilst tapping the other will get the job done – with all of these controls being absolutely essential to your success. You begin each level as a single LocoRoco, and your goal is to collect and assimilate as many more of your species into your character as you can, whilst using gravity and your abilities to get past puzzling obstacles on your way to the end of the level. There are twenty LocoRoco to collect in each level, and they do take a heck of a lot of finding and reaching at times.
The game concept still works as well as it ever did – and that’s to say that it works incredibly well. Trying to avoid the Moja (those black spider guys) and other dangerous factions can be incredibly tricky when you don’t have any real control over your character, aside from the aforementioned jump control – but this only raises the addiction level that much higher. You know that you can leap over that annoying little Moja and grab the last LocoRoco if you time it right…damn…try again. Yes, collecting all 20 of the little devils becomes your only goal in life once you’ve started, and you’ll frequently go back to levels that you’ve already completed, just to see if you can hit that maximum.
There are mini-games to be had in the form of a simple betting game where various characters race to the end of a short level and you have to wager on which one will win, and odd takes on Whac-A-Mole and The Sims come into play too. The latter sees you building a house for your friends – the Mui Mui – to live in, using things that you collect in the game and is an interesting diversion, although not overly so. At various points during the game, you’ll be tasked with a bit of rhythm-action too, although this amounts to tapping the circle button in time with the on-screen indicators to make your LocoRoco sing in a manner that could defeat a confused newborn kitten playing with a ball of string in the cuteness stakes.
So what stops LocoRoco 2 from getting a perfect score? It isn’t the bright and clear visuals and the innovative control scheme, and it isn’t the storyline which – to be perfectly honest – will either be ignored totally as you hammer through the levels, or will be infuriatingly incomprehensible due to the nature of the cutscenes which display it to you. None of the characters speak in English – instead preferring to use cutesy cartoon noises – and there are no subtitles to speak of, so it’s a case of playing Catchphrase to find out what’s happening. Say what you see. No, the thing that stops LocoRoco 2 from hitting that magical five out of five is the length of the main game. For all the cleverness and addictive puzzling that comes into play during your time with the game, there isn’t a massive amount of it to be had. As I say, you’ll likely head back through the levels to try to beat your best, but it really does feel as if that’s what the development team were banking on. There are somewhere in the region of two dozen levels to play through, and that includes the likes of at least one level that can be whipped through in under four minutes, and the first “boss battle”, which will take you around two or three minutes to complete at worst.
Put simply, LocoRoco 2 is a fantastic game, and one that should be in every PSP owner’s collection for those times when you’re down and things are looking bleak. The downside is that for all the happiness and emotion that the title brings about, it simply doesn’t last long enough. I want a sequel, and I want it to be a darned sight longer. Not only that, but I want to know quite how they made me feel so sorry for what amounts to a purple rectangle with a simple sad face in the opening exchanges. Maybe that’s a built-in extra challenge to add some bang for your buck? Who knows? Maybe I’m just crazy.
