The “Break it Down” Blog

Ok huge thank you goes out to our man Laurence Hartje for putting together a hell of a Viva Pinata review for us all and here it is:

Ok, now that I’ve spent about 20 hours with the game over the weekend (and only 7 achievements left), I feel as though I can write a mini review.

I picked this up as a rental since Megan saw the ad and expressed interest in seeing what the game was about… little did I know what I was going to get myself into….

The basic gist is to take Animal Crossing, and replace the animals with Pinatas. The pinatas appear once you meet a certain requirement (level 2 gardener, 2 worms in your garden, etc.). From that stage, they will visit — meaning they will enter your garden, but you have no control over them. Once you meet their residency requirement, they change color, move in, and become controllable. At this point you can also breed them (if you have a second one).

In order to breed them, they have even more requirements — including having a house (for them to get the nasty pinata sex on in), and a list of other requirements. These range from the simple (the worms have only a house requirement), to the annoying (the pigs want 3 different types of rotten fruit — of which you need to purchase the ripe fruit (or grow a tree, then harvest it) and then protect the fruit as it spoils from other pinata who want to eat it. Stupid pigs….

When you meet the romancing requirements, you get to play the romancing mini game. You need to navigate from one end of a maze of bombs to the other (where your pinata mate is waiting). There is a life count and timer countdown while playing these games. They start out hella-simple, and get pretty hard. As your population of a particular pinata increases, you get less lives to work with in the romancing game. Also, the maze layouts get complex — and then you add in sleeping bombs (which you have to walk very slowly by) , moving bombs, hidden bombs, and finally moving hidden bombs it can get pretty difficult. The first time you finish the romancing game sucsessfully, you are treated to a video of hawt pinata sex, for that species. Some of them are quite strange…. (you can view them again by romancing a species, selecting their house [once they crawl into it to get it on] and selecting “view inside”).

There are the antagonists in the game: sour pinatas, ruffians, and Professor Pester. These guys drop sour candies, which make your pinatas sick. The ruffians also mess with your terrain (filling in lakes, etc.). The sour pinatas are tamable — meaning that if you meet certain requirements, they will join your garden as a good species — usually with the opposite effect that they had while as a sour (the BonBon talks pinatas into fighting each other — when in your garden as a good pinata, he breaks up fights between pinatas).

Finally, there is Dastardos. He comes into your garden and breaks sick pinatas (that are sick from being unhappy, injured in a fight, or sick from a sour candy). So there is a need to keep your pinata healthy.

The pinatas have variants that you can unlock (by feeding them certain combinations of items), while some pinatas have evolutions/updates. Also, pinatas have natural enemies, so if you group two species together that hate each other (Tafflies [fly] and Lickatoads [toad]) you’re going to have some problems.

As you progress through the game you earn experience, and level up. Leveling up allows you access to the better pinatas and better items in the store. It also expands your garden size at pre-determined levels (which can get quite large).

One of the great things is that the game really doesn’t rush you. You can always sell off your pinata for money, and once you have a species that has taken residency, you can pay a pinata hunter to bring them back. That way you can focus on what you are doing, and move on to different pinata when you want to. Also, your level, cash, and pinata residency collection is persistent across gardens. So as you level up in one garden, you can take advantage of the extra items/pinata earned in another. Because of this, I’m happy to sell off a pinata that I’ve recently tamed, to deal with it in another garden (especially if it doesn’t get along with a species in my current garden).

For example, I have my main garden, a “cash monies” garden (that I use to gain cash hella fast by selling very profitable crops), and a “whore house” garden, where I send off pinata to make sweet, sweet love (for their master romancer requirement — you need to breed a pinata 7 times). That way I can focus each garden on a specific activity. I think I’m going to create a new one when I get home that will be geared for attracting water pinatas, since I need more of them. You get a total of around 9 or so gardens, if I remember correctly.

Personally, I thought Animal Crossing was neat (I rented it a long time ago), but I couldn’t put this game down. It’s a ton of fun seeing a new pinata, and getting it to join your garden. Also, the game allows you to send packages (items/pinatas/etc.) to other players on XBox Live, but I don’t know anyone else who is playing the game currently.

Highly recommended, especially if you want to ruin your social life.

Laurence