Patapon Devs Announce a Spiritual Successor Called Ratatan

The PlayStation-exclusive rhythm and strategy series Patapon is getting a spiritual successor in Ratatan from some of the original’s developers.

As reported by VGC, Ratatan was announced at BitSummit and Patapon creator Hiroyuki Kotani and original Patapon musician Kemmei Adachi are both onboard. The game is being developed by Ratata Arts, Tokyo Virtual Theory, and pH Studio, and a Kickstarter campaign for Ratatan is set to go live on July 31 at 9am PT/12pm ET.

We still don’t know much about Ratatan, but the developers did tease it would include roguelike elements and 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,” producer Kazuto Sakajiri said.

While it’s exciting to be getting a game that honors Patapon, Kotani isn’t ready to close the door on a new Patapon arriving in the future.

“There’s a possibility of maybe doing a Patapon sequel in the future, but for this we really wanted to make our own game, in our own style, with specific types of gameplay that reflect what we want. After that, if there’s a chance to speak to Sony about doing a Patapon sequel then we’ll go from there.”

Patapon was first released on the PSP in 2007 and was co-developed by Pyramid and Japan Studio. Two sequels – Patapon 2 and Patapon 3 – followed in 2008 and 2011. The first two games were ported to PS4 in 2017 and 2020, but Patapon 3 remains exclusive to the PSP.

The game starred the player as a god of sorts to these Patapon who could be commanded to act by using drum beats. In our Patapon review, we said, “rhythm game, strategy game, mini-game collection, action game, light RPG – Patapon is all of these and much, much more.”

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.