The opening scene says it all: Someone comes along with a big stick and beats a small animal to death; what's left of it cascades onto the ground, spelling out Rare's logo. As a company in Nintendo's fold, Rare is responsible for some of the most revered games in gamingdom, including Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye, Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong 64, and Banjo-Kazooie. And under Microsoft, we get Perfect Dark Zero - an unpolished diamond looking for all the world like any other rock, and now, Viva Pinata.
But once the stick was applied to Rare, all that's come out are the innards; the soul of the pinata-that-was is gone. Viva is an example of how far Rare has fallen from grace; brilliance diminished by a lack of focus and problems at the top - an example of just how badly someone else's marketing department can screw up your game design unless you fight.
The Cliff-umentaries are legend, by now - everyone has seen how hard the Gears of War team had to fight to keep basic principles alive, to protect their game from being watered down and destroyed by Microsoft's marketing. It doesn't really matter what you think of Microsoft, or of Epic; these fly on the wall cameras document behaviour that's strikinglly obvious: Epic fought tooth and nail to retain key elements of their game design, and nearly lost the battle more than once; if not for Cliffy, much of the signature that we see in Gears just wouldn't exist.
Rare has no Cliff Blezinski. When you walk away from playing Viva, as I have after about 8 hours, you realize that there are some pretty fundamental problems with this game's implementation.
The concept is brilliant; pure Nintendo-style grasp of what an all-ages, family-friendly game can be. Brilliant artistic design. Brilliant character design and characterisation. A simple premise, with clear ways to expand upon it.
So where did it go wrong? What, exactly, is wrong with Viva Pinata?
- No Tutorial.
The introduction ends abruptly, and early; this just screams unfinished. You will never be walked through most of the tools you'll need, and nothing will introduce those elements to the gameplay. This isn't about the magic of discovery - this is simply failing to support the player. Given that the target here is clearly kids, this is pretty unforgivable. The tutorial is not a tutorial when it doesn't really teach you how to play; all it truly will show you is the limit of the patience of yourself and your children. Sure, you can perservere - but how can perseverance be compatible with "family fun"? What's the point of being able to take over the controller and help if you don't know what the hell is going on yourself? - Poor Usability: Alerts
Finding out what's going wrong is left to an overused, overtasked "alerts" system that will spend most of its life being very, very full. Designed to tell you when problems are happening in the garden, or when you've achieved something important, it will instead spend most of its life full of stuff that just isn't useful when you need it to be. An alert, for example is not updated when the thing changes - you just get another alert on the list creating more alert noise. Severity is not clearly marked. So, if X and Y get into a fight, you won't know, at the earliest, until they've already started - and when X kills Y and leaves it ill, you'll have another alert added to the list that a pinata is ill. All the old alerts still exist, even when they're not relevant. If you wrote software that did this on your desktop, you'd stop using it in about an hour. With Viva, you're stuck with it for life. - Poor Usability: Menuing
Slow, noisy menu systems that you have to use all the time are the bane of good long-term viability in a game. They're slow, they're loud, they're repetitive. They're badly-laid-out and wasteful of space. They fill the screen instead of popping up. They're not pretty to look at, nor designed for clarity. They feel fudged. - Overpaced.
Because there's so little to hang on to, someone decided that the game, which must have felt a bit thin, would be fixed if you just crank up the speed. And so from the very beginning, before you can even finish planting grass and doing the basic tasks your walkthrough is trying to tell you to, you'll start attracting pinatas. First, just whirlms, but before you know it, you're attracting stuff at a breakneck pace - faster than you can deal with - and will spend large chunks of time just calling the doctor because they're beating themselves senseless. For the most part, the game does nothing to either teach you how to manage this, or help you with preventing it. This isn't a potter-around-the-garden game, as many of the games trying to emulate provide in feel; there's too much going on too fast to allow for that. This was a late tuning decision by someone in management, and it's destroyed the feel of the game. - No story.
Sticking a bunch of pages into a journal you'll never really need or be required to use and pretending that's backstory is... well, it's an afterthought, isn't it. I'd say it's weak sauce, but it's not even that. Story was added to support the TV series, or Microsoft's marketing, or both - but it clearly was never a proper part of Rare's design. That means chunks of UI, and bits of gameplay, do nothing except take time and attention and menu clarity away from core game functionality. It's so badly done that what is provided is actually a monumental waste of time. - Meaningless Achievements
Connected to the fact that everything feels overpaced is the little pats on the back the game tries to give you every five minutes or so. Mate something new? Win a bit of praise. Something new turn up in your garden? Win a bit of praise. Sneeze? More praise. It comes so fast, and so thick, that they literally devalue all of the achievements you actually had to work to get. And all of this just feeds back into a badly designed set of alerts, so each one of these meaningless achievements will compete for your attention with your psychotic fudgehog killing every butterfly in your garden. You can't even stop and smell the roses once you get one. - Poor Control
You will, without question, often feel that you don't truly have control over what's going on. Breaking up a fight is harder than it should be - as a matter of fact, I've never truly been able to stop a fight in progress; only prolong it. Your shovel is used to mete punishment as well as dig holes; and often you will inadvertently do the latter when you meant the former. Your cursor never truly feels like it's in the world that you're operating in, and your controls and on-screen display often fail to register exactly what you meant to do. Cursors too often fail to have any kind of affinity for onscreen objects, and on more than one occasion, I've had to destroy a plant to get at the seed sitting next to it.
Many of these problems are unforgivable; this game has been in production a long, long time. Too long, by any argument, given its problems; too many cooks have been in the kitchen, and have clearly spoiled the supper. Mushy controls and poor menus and badly designed alerts... it's as if the whole "user interaction" portion of the game was written late, or without any thought to usability. If the UI gets in the way of the game, the game isn't fun.
If I were going to take a guess at what went wrong, I'd guess that somewhere late in the design and development process Microsoft began to ramp up its push for a Viva Pinata TV series and project expectations onto a game design team that just lost their vision or will to fight. This is a game I wanted to like; I'm a fan of Animal Crossing and other games in this genre - but ultimately, Viva Pinata does a disservice to that community, and to Rare. It's pretty, and soulless. It feels both belabored and rushed - a sign that development stagnated due to a lack of critical vision internally, and suffered from the whip-crack of external groups applying pressure; it's an example of what can go wrong when good people don't feel they're really responsible for what they're creating.
Two stars for effort and whatever residual love of Rare's past achievements I still have. I now understand why some of Rare's statements have been a bit cold on things like downloadable content. Given how wrong things appear to have gone, I wouldn't be surprised if the developers on this project felt they'd rather move on. Bolting on more pinatas isn't going to fix the game, Microsoft. The lives of anyone left working on this game must be a world of suck, left to feel like an abandoned parent, left behind to care for a child born with a mortal birth defect - left to care for its needs in futility while mourning the child that might have been.
If you think it sounds harsh, spend 50 quid and find out for yourself. Alternately, you can just send me the money and I'll give you my copy - think of it as babysitting.
