Viva Pinata Review by Alli
Viva Piñata from Rare Ltd. is by far the most adorable game ever created in video game history. I know you might be thinking, what about Spyro, Elebits, or even Nintendogs? Believe me, they don’t even come close. I admit the little creatures from Pikmin are quite cute, but the animals in Viva Piñata are so adorable that even the most hardened criminal who registers as a level 22 on Dr. Stones Scale of Evil wouldn’t disagree.
The gameplay can be compared to that of the Sims in the sense that you are free to do pretty much whatever you want. You are a gardener who is given a neglected piece of land on Piñata Island. In the beginning you meat Leafos, a native american looking young lady who is crying about how run down and ghetto her land has become. Only you can restore it to its former glory. Only you can prevent wildfires….
From there what you can do is seemingly endless. Your main goal is to create a beautiful garden and attract piñatas to come live, grow, and eventually be chosen to go entertain at parties. You begin with a few basic tools and soon you attract the simplest of piñata animals like the Whirlm and Taffly. Each visitor that shows up in your garden will appear black & white in color, until you meet its conditions to stay and become a resident in your garden. For the simple piñatas like the Whirlm, the requirements are fairly simple, clear some garbage, plant some grass, don’t pick your nose for a day, etc. As you continue to grow and customize your garden, your gardener level increases and you attract more and more (and subsequently cuter) piñatas. The game gets more challenging as you go on; sour piñatas (a.k.a bad guys) come and mess things up and make your piñatas sick, piñatas become frustratingly harder to attract to your garden (I’m talking to you, Elephanilla), and mating becomes quite a chore.
Yes, mating. A little hot piñata-on-piñata action (ok, not quite like that). After fulfilling certain mating requirements such as buying a house for each particular species, which are also incredibly cute, the piñatas fall in love, do a little Romance Dance, and before you know it, you have a baby piñata who is tiny and, yes, somehow even more adorable than his/her parents. Evidentially, all of the Piñatas are asexual because all they have to do is a dance to create offspring. They also apparently don’t have problems with incest, since you can (and usually have to) mate the offspring of a species with its parents or sisters and brothers. After mating Whirlm #1 and #2, its offspring, Whilrm #3 (don’t worry, to keep them straight you can name them if you want) definitely did not have any qualms about mating with its mom or dad….or, eventually, its sister or brother or cousin or Uncle Billy Bob…Git-R-Done!
A cool feature to note is your ability to go into town and buy cute little accessories for your piñatas like baseball hats and mustaches (if you want your piñata to look like a child molester) or other charming pieces of flair (”Joanna, we need to talk about your flair…”). One of the best parts of the game is the names of the piñatas. Most have clever and, of course, quite cute names that combine food/candy and the animals name. Horstachio (horse + pistachio), Bunnycomb (bunny + honeycomb), Taffly (taffy + fly), Elephanilla (elephant + vanilla), Cocoadile (crocodile + cocoa)….you get the point.
So, I bet you’re asking, what do you do with the piñatas? Well you can keep them around, mate them, send them off to parties, sell them for chocolate coins (the currency on Piñata Island) or sacrifice them as food to bigger piñatas to satisfy residency and romance requirements. Weirded out yet? Keep reading… When one piñata eats another it sort of hurls strange projectiles at the other piñata, killing it. It explodes with candy and confetti sending surrounding piñatas into a carnivorous rush towards their slain comrade in an effort to consume its spilled innards. You’ll experience a sick joy seeing happy Piñatas feasting on the candy of a ruptured piñata carcass.
The graphics are great. Colorful and happy. The music is nothing special but the animal sounds are, for the most part, adorable, with the exception of the snores from the sleeping Horstachio or the whimpering cries of sick or unhappy piñatas. For those obsessed with upping their Xbox gamerscore (cough, Donnie) there are 50 achievements that you collect throughout the game.
What I thought would be a simple and easy game turned out to be a compelling and deceptively complex strategy game. You start with a shovel and some dirt. Simple. You get a worm. Next thing you know, you’re 50 hours into it, hunting down he elusive Chewnicorn. Be forewarned, this game is extremely addictive – I’m talking cocaine covered in milk chocolate with an extra side of caffeine addictive.
I cannot wait for Viva Piñata 2. Can. not. wait. More pinatas, interactive gameplay. Penguins, camels, snow.... All my dreams and more. September cannot come soon enough!
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