Patapon spiritual successor Ratatan raised over 10 times its Kickstarter funding goal

The developers behind Patapon spiritual successor Ratatan have thanked the project’s backers after it reached the end of its successful Kickstarter campaign.

The title hit its ¥20 million ($137,000 / £108,000) funding goal within an hour of its launch and went on to raise over 10 times that initial goal.

Almost 15,000 backers had pledged over ¥219.3 million ($1.5m / £1.19m) by the campaign’s end, resulting in the project hitting multiple stretch goals.

These included the development of a console version of the game and a collaboration with David Wise, the former Rare composer who created the music for the Donkey Kong Country series.

“Rarely can you directly affect the fates of the creators you care about but this group has done that,” developer Ratata Arts said in a Kickstarter update published on Monday.

“You have empowered us and given us a great opportunity. We will do our best to make this a project you are proud to have participated in.”

Ratatan will be released for Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.

“We are actually quite far along in the production cycle and feel very confident in getting everything into the game by April 2025!” Ratata Arts says in an FAQ.

A PC beta is planned and will “most likely” take place in the latter half of next year, with console tests also under consideration but yet to be confirmed.

Originally released for PlayStation Portable in 2007, Patapon is a rhythm-based 2D platform / action game in which players command an army of cute anthropomorphic eyeballs known as “Patapons” that can be instructed to move forward, attack, defend and retreat by using a sequence of drum beats.

The game received two sequels on PSP, and the first two games were remastered with 4K visuals for PS4.

“The three main game concepts are over 100 cute characters fighting it out on screen, four-player simultaneous battles, and more adventure and roguelike elements than Patapon had,” producer Kazuto Sakajiri explained in a recent interview with VGC.

Further reading

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Team behind PlayStation’s Patapon reveal successor game ‘Ratatan’

The project, announced during BitSummit, will come to Kickstarter this month

Kotani, who designed the original Patapon games, also didn’t rule out working with Sony on a traditional sequel in the future.

“Patapon was a really unique experience at the time of its release and reflected the development environment of that era. We wanted to make another game like that for the modern age,” he said.

“There’s a possibility of maybe doing a Patapon sequel in the future, but for this we really wanted to make our own game, in our own style, with specific types of gameplay that reflect what we want. After that, if there’s a chance to speak to Sony about doing a Patapon sequel then we’ll go from there.”