LocoRoco (2006)

LocoRoco is a PSP game I appreciate that it exists, but I don't actually care to play it. It's a game where you tilt the world, making round fruit characters (who love to sing Telletubby-ish gibberish) roll down and up slopes and hop across platforms/past enemies in order to collect dots and reach the goal. I have seen it called a precursor to a lot of mobile games, and yeah, that's kind of what it feels like.

Extremely bright and cheerful, I love the vivid colors. Very creative and cute. But I'll be honest, it's a bit much, lol. I could only handle the childish earworms for so long, and world-tilting games just make me feel ever-so-slightly woozy in general.

This playthrough was a long time coming. The same year I bought a Nintendo DS Lite to play New Super Mario Bros., LocoRoco was the only game that caught my eye on the rival handheld. I liked its flat, cartoonish aesthetic and simple yet unique physics-based gameplay. Years later, Rolando on iOS would inspire me to port an old Flash game I'd made to the platform while also reminding me of LocoRoco (which seems like a pretty obvious source of inspiration for Rolando).

All that said, when I finally fired this up on my Vita my expectations were set pretty low. Not only is LocoRoco nearly 11 years old at this point, it's a game with a style and substance that feels almost back-ported from the first few years of iOS and Android gaming. For every Mario or Zelda game that appreciates in value over time, there are at least one or two titles that were innovative in their day but are rendered obsolete by their successors.

LocoRoco probably falls more in the latter category.

Don't get me wrong, it's easy to see why LocoRoco was so striking when it came out. It retains a lot of its signature charm in its design and presentation, its simplified control scheme makes it very approachable, and it's still an enjoyable title to play. Its levels include many secrets that feel rewarding to discover, and I appreciate that it combines a basic lives system with the gameplay mechanic of your character growing larger... almost as if the Super and 1-up mushrooms were the same power-up, with both being cumulative.

All that said, there are really very few aspects of this game that weren't improved upon by titles like the aforementioned Rolando series or modern rolly platformers like Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. Its controls feel clunky in an age of touchscreens and gyroscopes, its visuals appear washed-out and desaturated (most likely to avoid having to outline the foreground characters, which is surprisingly processor-intensive), and there's very little variety to speak of... initially novel mechanics like slippery or spooky levels are all recycled before the game's five worlds reach their conclusion.

But LocoRoco has at least one thing over almost all of its progeny: Availability. Most Nintendo games from the DS onward aren't legally available to purchase on modern platforms. With the comparatively short attention span of mobile gamers making long-term maintenance unprofitable, many of the mobile games LocoRoco inspired in the initial App Store gold rush are being removed from sale (and those already downloaded will presumably cease to function in some future OS update). But the original LocoRoco is still available to purchase on the PlayStation Network for Vita, with a planned PS4 remaster in the coming year.

So perhaps it's best that we got LocoRoco early. While it missed out on some input, display and processor innovations that would have made it an even better game, it might have meant there'd be no LocoRoco to play by this time next year. And that would be a shame.