Maybe not as"filled with fun" as it could have been.
Viva Pinata opens with a sickeningly catchy theme song that wouldn't be out of place in a Nickelodeon Saturday morning cartoon series. A pre-schooler's one. It even comes with a "why not to talk to people you don't know on the internet" video in the main menu. Despite this, the game manages to find the perfect balance on a fun for kids and adults scale, even if it does stumble a bit in the end.
At first, your garden is a dusty pile of crap. Your objective is to make as nice a garden as possible and to collect as many "wild pinatas" as possible so they can be shipped off to parties and beaten to death. You can do this by meeting different pinatas specific requirements. For instance: frogs and newts like water, so making a nice big lake is essential. It gets more complex though, because each pinata has appearence requirements, visit requirements, resident requirements, and romance requirements. Sometimes in order to fit one pinatas requirements you have to literally sacrifice another by allowing the wild pinata to eat it. Romancing pinatas produces one more pinata and gives you a ton of experience points to help you level up.
That's the basis of the game. What I'm not mentioning is that you also must keep all of the pinatas happy, grow and maintain plants, keep out sour pinatas that injure the resident pinatas, cure sick pinatas, build houses for pinatas you wish to romance, and more. This is the games complexity: there is always something that needs to be done in the garden. To ease your workload you can hire one of the freakish (i.e. ugly and in no way cute) helpers to ease the workload.
Initially, the game basically hands you a worm pinata (or a whirim) to start your garden. A second worm enters, and the game asks you to make them do "the romance dance" to produce a third, baby worm pinata. I named the frist pinata "Billy" and grew rather attached to him. It was about now the game explained to me billy had to be eaten alive by another pinata so my garden could grow. So, just a precaution, don't name and grow attached to your pinatas. Tears and mulitple nights of therapy ensue.
Even though this is a kids game, you're technically mating and killing small animals. The game justifies this because...well, they're all pinatas. When a pinata gets eaten it busts open and candy falls out. When they reproduce they do a fun dance and a stork character brings an egg. Not that I find any of this offensive, it's just that I couldn't help but think "I'm...I'm reproducing a moth (or other animal)...over and over" the entire game.
Honestly, though, one of Viva Pinata's best features is its cuteness. Pinatas are silly, over the top versions of their real life animal counterparts. Hell, even the ants are cute, fuzzy, and...dare I say it...cuddly.
But really, repitition is the games main problem. Getting the "master romancer" award for each species means reproducing two specific pinatas five times. So you meet their requirements, navigate a little maze to ensure the mating is a success, let the egg get delivered, buy romance candy, and doing it all over again. The gameplay has its strong points certainly, the problem is just that it never really develops into anything different than what it shows you in the first five minutes of play.
This kind of repetition is present throughout the whole game. The sad part about this is that after a while, gardening starts to feel like real gardening. In other words, it starts to feel like a chore. Despite getting to bigger and more interesting pinatas and plants (like birds of prey and elephants) I wasn't at all compelled to keep playing, but rather to let my garden rot. Even the cuteness factor starts to wear off after about 6-8 hours because you start to know what to expect.
Viva Pinata is original, cute, funny, clever, and most importantly it provides challenge despite being a kids game. Sadly though, it can't really hold up over many hours of play time because of the inescapable fact that the game has the player do the exact same thing for the entirety of gameplay. Let me put it this way. Did you like romancing that worm? I mean really, really like it? Would you like to do it for ten plus hours? If so, go ahead and buy it, there's plenty of animal romancing to go around. For those of us who like a little more variety, this game is a great rental, but certainly not worth the asking price.
