Anyone here on the Paizo boards play this PSP gem, or any of its sequels? I'm currently playing Patapon 3 and figured I'd see if any other RPGers like it.
I played the first two until I had to sell my PSP. Such a blast. I hated the levels with weird non-standard rhythms...
Really had some great re-playability with the way you could go back to old levels to fight more powerful enemies for better loot.
The third game in the series has changed the game up quite a bit. The biggest change is that rather than a huge army of tons of units, you only have four units- one spear user, one shield user, and one bow user, and one "uberhero" that you choose to be a spear, shield, or bow user at the beginning of the game, and once you choose, it's set (eventually you get the ability to switch between them on your uberhero, but that's not for quite a while). Rather than using materials and money to upgrade your units and recruit new ones, you gain experience as you play through levels- levelling up grants you new classes, and each of your units can freely change between classes of their particular path. (Bow users eventually can become the trumpet players, spellcasters, etc. Spear users become horse and chariot riders, and so on. Shield users become the various melee classes.) The rarepons are more or less gone- or rather, certain classes are permanently fused with various rarepons, but there doesn't seem to be a particular bonus for it (for example, one of the shield-type classes, when you turn your shield guy into one, has a tree on his head, but he doesn't seem to have a particular increase to his stagger rate, and so on). Rather, they took certain class/rarepon combinations and simply made those into the various classes. Only a few classes her and there are NOT rarepons, but those classes don't seem hindered in any way. (As such, any class can equip helmets.) Also, the mini-games are gone- you can buy and sell materials and equipment more or less at will. There also seems to be much more of a focus on multiplayer, but I haven't been able to get into that.
Anyway, Patapon 3 is quite a change from the previous games, but is a lot of fun. I recommend playing it if you ever get a chance.
Edit: Oh, and they've taken away the fight-bosses-over-and-over-as-they-get-progressively-harder dynamic (which some would argue was the entire point of the first couple games). Bosses are now only fought at the end of really long multi-tier stages, and they never get any more or less powerful, which is a disappointment. The game seems to have traded farming (that is, farming bosses for materials to make/upgrade more units) for grinding (playing the same levels over and over to level up and build skills).
It sounds like everything I liked about the first and second games was tossed out for a much simpler game...
While I won't argue that the things you like were tossed out, I'd say the game is anything but simpler. You have less units, but each unit has so many things to keep track of (levels in different classes, equipment can be levelled up/bought/sold, each class has different skills they increase/advance by performing certain actions a certain number of times, etc.) that it is even more complicated than Patapon 2 (in my opinion). It's definitely a much different game than the previous two.