these blobs can fucking sing!

We lost something culturally when a studio that put a swarm of blobs whose mouths match the vocals in the game music gets shutdown to fund games that poorly ape Hollywood. And hollywood isn't even good in the first place!

This isn't the most fun or innovative or wild game ever made yknow. But it's a game which seeps with joy, acknowledgment of the medium, and totally whips aesthetically.

Lyrical masterpiece:

kokoracche yanba-ni, pokuru shika doryucchi
ya cho ruhu kuruttou zabicchi, nacheppu
churare shika mo ruche, yanku ruchi bariche
apuru cheku tyu ruki
cherara nonnonba re muimui ya re

pa-ni-cheruta yan-mu-ka, bu bu poruche acchekku
ya-mu-cheruka shuppo kopuraretta, karupan kuerche
pa-ni-cheruta yan-mu-ka, bu bu poruche acchekku
ya-mu-cheruka shuppo kopuraretta, karupan kuruche

Creatively and graphically (well, for a PSP game) amazing but gameplay quickly becomes super stale as the levels have very little differentiating them. I've played platform games where I can remember every single level because of how many unique ideas and mechanics the devs put in to each of them, but with LocoRoco I cannot remember a single one of them, and I didn't play it very long ago. They're incredibly samey. To make it worse, the games' pacing is terrifying slow and the controls feel REALLY sluggish.

I'd also like to criticize the game's soundtrack. Some of the tracks are pretty good, like "Yellow's Theme". But the majority of them are either so irritating that I wanted to tear my ears out (and this is coming from someone who likes Birthday Cake from the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack) or, as another reviewer pointed out, kind of racist.

I really wanted to like this game because I have fond memories of playing the demo over and over again when I was young, but I can't look past how monotonous the level design really is. If you want an artistically-unique and charming game that ALSO warrants repeat playthroughs, play Parappa the Rapper or LittleBigPlanet.

One of those games where you're better off playing the first world, going "well wasn't that delightful" and then putting the game down. Every level feels like the game has no new ideas to bring to the table, all the same tricks rearranged a couple times, maybe more spike balls in places. Also, if you're looking to collect everything in a stage, it not only requires never getting hit but also a lot of weirdly precise platforming. This is a game that should be putting vibes above all else, and yet for a game that only uses the shoulder buttons to move, it expects some quick reaction and precision, usually just so you can collect an item for a mode that, while fun, is ultimately not all that engaging. It also felt unclear what was the surefire way to defeat enemies, sometimes hitting them from under works but once in a while they'll stop you and eat one of your locoroco, same with going from above, the way the Moja work in this game doesn't feel fair compared to what's at your disposal.

It's a shame I came away feeling like this, because this is a game with a lot of delightful things. The locoroco themselves are adorable in both design and sound, each having their own theme and voice lines for specific things in levels. They all speak in a made up language, one meant to sound like several different languages at once, and every song they and the Mui Mui sing is incredibly charming and catchy. A game so poppy should be a lot more consistently exciting, or just shorter and more focused. Five worlds of levels was clearly too many for this team to fill.

Also, man, the design of the Moja sure is questionable, huh? And also the black locoroco sounding and looking like that. I mean, it was 2006, surely they could have avoided stuff like this. It's not a huge deal breaker, but it just feels like this one thing that taints this game's happy-go-lucky attitude, I don't buy it's positivity anymore. Because of this, it brings me no joy to admit the black locoroco's theme goes hard.

This feels like a project that started with the best of intentions, but just ended up getting bloated while also having nothing to fill all that bloat. It's best to be looked at from a distance, as there's nothing to be gained from getting closer to it.

seeing the moja: oh. not sure about that.

seeing the black locoroco: c'mon guys.

hearing the black locoroco: GUYS

Doesn't settle for merely bad, playing this feels borderline abusive. At the start of each stage there is a windup sequence where have to wait your guy get dropped through various tunnels and only until it says go you can actually start playing. But very first thing your guy does, literally the very first thing is randomly hop around without your input, before you even get a chance to do anything, even if you were mashing the buttons the whole time waiting to finally play.

In this game you don't move by using the directional pad and jump by pressing X or something normal like that. Instead you have to use L/R buttons to move left/right and jump by pressing both L and R simultaneously. Technically the gameplay would have functioned equally well the other way, so doing it this way accomplishes nothing but make playing the game feel more laborious.

So anyway, anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent of each stage simply involves holding down the R button while repeatedly mashing the L button. There are very few instances anywhere in the entire game with any challenge and even those instances are quite easy. There are plenty of instances however (nearly in every stage in fact) where a collectible is teased but it's suddenly too late to get it without starting the whole stage over, as if the game is saying "ha, ha, that's what you get for not being psychic!"

The graphics are very basic and gross. The background is white pretty much all the time and everything else resembles paper craft. The entire game feels like it takes place on the wall of a pediatrician's office. Some stages have you inside the stomach of a whale or frog or something and you get literally sharted out at the end.

The only good thing about this game is that it saves me from having to play the sequels. Well, there are some sequences where you watch them sing for a moment in order to get a collectible, and those were kind of funny to me but maybe unironically funny since I always imagine that what's really going on is something akin to a rap battle or dogs barking.