4cr Plays – LocoRoco Midnight Carnival

I think of LocoRoco on the PSP much the same way as Katamari Damacy on the PS2. Both titles offer a control scheme specifically designed to offer simple, inviting, and intuitive controls are easy enough for anyone to try, but also offering more for those who invest the time.

In both cases that culminates in an experience that feels as if it could continue forever – they also happen to share a delightfully bizarre style that makes them oddities of interest before your hands even touch the controls. And like the Katamari series, LocoRoco is also a prisoner of what makes it great, struggling for the means to evolve on the original concept without losing itself in the process.

I don’t know whether that’s possible or not, but I do know that Midnight Carnival is an experiment in that pursuit, and much more of an expansion rather than a full release.

Midnight Carnival strips away the window dressing. There is no real plot or story, or any of the small and silly eccentricities that earnestly make me smile. It’s hard not mourning the absence, but at the same time, had the game simply rehashed everything preceding it, I likely wouldn’t have bothered looking for the words to write about it all. Experimentation isn’t always successful, rarely even, but it’s necessary, and in this case, produces something worth discussion.

This different take on the series is more of a platform based jungle gym rather than a carnival. It does away with the laid back charm of the series, opting instead for an often times sadistic level of difficulty, via jumps and pitfalls that bring back the earliest nightmares of my gaming youth. There’s never a sense of impossibility, but the game has certainly hardened enough that only the truly committed will make an attempt at fully completing a stage, while the rest of us are committed the old fashioned way at the very thought of it.

It’s fair to say this is not a good introduction for newcomers, but I’m hesitant to call Midnight Carnival a fan-game, even as it hands out the mini-games and items for stylizing the characters that go hand-in-hand with that description. It isn’t so much a case of being handed more of the same nearly so much as taking a very unforeseen detour and one that often times contradicts the roots it emerges from.

As far as mini-games are concerned, I enjoyed playing the crane game for awhile, but the bulk of the title is the hellish platforming challenge previously mentioned.

Perhaps because speed often becomes a factor within stages, the game began reminding me of Sonic the Hedgehog. And this comparison is made more apt in the way the game changes the relationship of collecting additional LocoRoco. There’s an inherent joy in collecting more, and forming them into one giant blob of happiness that swishes and sways from the weight to present new physical challenges.

In Midnight Carnival, the process becomes more about survival, making extra LocoRoco necessary for reaching the end of a stage much in the same way Sonic collects rings. And if this experiment loses something truly important to the series, it’s directly within that inability to introduce new ideas that require, appreciate, and reward keeping as many of the LocoRoco together as possible.

The game knows this, and is most often zoomed out from the action to show the largest view of the stage area, creating an experience where the LocoRoco feel like a secondary concern that could be substituted with any character to represent the player.

Again, these stages are a mix of aggravating jumps, bottomless pitfalls, and spiky traps at nearly every turn. The LocoRoco have gained the ability to do a double jump of sorts, a “Boing!” that players can repeatedly perform to jump higher and move faster. The game naturally plays to this ability within the stage design to create an increasingly difficult series of situations to overcome.

This borders on making the controls aggravating, robbing the series of its most immediate charm. Using the left and right shoulder buttons to tilt the screen, players also press both together to jump, and then again to “Boing!”, repeating the process as much or as little as required. This means that the screen is eager to tilt while the player is trying to coordinate a series of jumps.

The real aggravation is, the stages rarely seem to take this into account, often offering standard platform scenarios that assume the screen isn’t moving at all. There are a few scant places that seem to counter the oversight, but the approach to design is largely and systematically traditional – falling back on ideas just as predictable as if this had simply been another 20 levels rehashed from the first two games.

Even the visual charm of the game is downplayed, much darker and more stark. Those looking for a challenge can take the invite, but anyone who enjoys the originals as much as I do will have trouble with this detour. My experience with the game is best characterized by my familiarity with the gameover screen, and the sad look on my girl’s face as she watched a lone LocoRoco plummet to its death repeatedly as I tried to jump across a series of spinning platforms.

It’s promising to know that there’s a desire to pursue new ideas, especially if some of these ideas are refined for a fuller entry to the series, but it’s impossible to ignore that more is needed here to justify the visit.