Viva Pinata released in the worst context for people to take it seriously as a good game. Developers Rare hadn't had a hit in years. After their legendary run with Nintendo on the SNES and Nintendo 64 with classics like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, and Goldeneye, they were bought out by emerging competitor Microsoft for development on the Xbox during the sixth generation of consoles. During that generation, they only managed to release two games on the big black box, the cult game Grabbed by the Ghoulies and the remake of their N64 cult classic Conker's Bad Fur Day. While both became or maintained a cult status, neither was a tremendous success for the company (although numbers are hard to find), and generally Rare were trending downwards in popularity, with some hope for the ensuing seventh generation of consoles. Rare managed two release titles for the Xbox 360, the middling Kameo: Elements of Power and the derided Perfect Dark Zero, cementing the opinion the "good days" of Rare were now long gone.
Viva Pinata didn't seem to have a lot of hype, partially due to a marketing campaign directed at anyone but die hard Rare fans. Viva Pinata decided on a kid-focused marketing campaign, with a childish (and rather awful) tie-in TV show on cable. The release of Viva Pinata was one of secret admiration, where the reviews were stellar but just about everyone, whether teen or adult, didn't seem to like to openly admit they liked the game. Jokes on sites like Roosterteeth were common, about how they secretly loved the game but were afraid of publicly being known to play it. The identity of Viva Pinata was somewhat alienating, partially due to its colorful, cute art style that heavily contrasted the trend of gritty, violent "adult" games at the time, and partially for the concept which was difficult to make appealing in words: you built a garden to attract colorful pinatas to take residence.
Viva Pinata is a great game, an unsung cult classic to be that still gets underrepresented whenever Rare or the seventh generation of consoles are mentioned. It's the sort of game that would have done well if it had come out today on the Switch or Steam, but alas its timing was too poor. It's mechanically simple, but remarkably busy without feeling as though it was wasting your time. The premise is pretty well as simple as it sounds: build a garden and try to attract pinatas to take residence. The goal of the game is virtually nonexistent outside of whatever thing it is you take interest in. The closest the game gets to a specified goal is by throwing obstacles in your path, primarily something called the Tower of Sour. Sour pinatas will show up as you level up, and will try to disrupt your gardening or your pinatas to some degree or another, each having a different annoying mechanic to overcome. In order to stop these annoyances, you must meet some requirement to convert them into normal pinatas and take residence in your garden. Then, a new totem will be added to the Tower of Sour, blocking the sour form of that pinata from showing up again.
Outside of that, however, you are set free to do as you please. Getting pinatas is a multi-step process, and will easily take most of your time if you have particular pinatas in mind. You must reach a certain requirement for them to show up, then another for them to visit, and then yet another for them to become residents. Often these tasks are linear, such as they will show up if you have a fruit tree, visit if you have a certain amount of that fruit in your garden, and become residents after they've eaten so much of said fruit. You're given a journal where your stats are kept track of, whether that be what awards you've gained or what pinatas are currently residents. Awards can be given to you for the appear, visit, and resident requirements, as well as awards for getting them to romance and breed, and to be a "master romancer" (which, in truth, is just having seven in your garden at a given time, regardless of whether you bred them), and to discover the three variants most species have. Variants are usually discovered after you make a pinata eat a certain thing, which will change their color. Some pinatas don't have variants, rather changing into different pinatas altogether, such as the butterfly.
Viva Pinata is a series of accomplishments you are never asked explicitly to achieve, making the play of this game more or less a sandbox. Master romancing is a sincere challenge for several of the species, and some species, such as the dragon or the eagle, can be a challenge just to resident. If you are a "catch them all" type of person, you'll quickly realize that one garden isn't enough. The game virtually encourages you to make several, each with a different theme for different pinatas. Some need a lot of grass, for example, while others need a lot of water. A myriad of plants are needed if you compile the requirements for every species, more than the limit of plants you are allowed in a particular garden. Managing multiple gardens can be difficult, but your level and money carry over between them, like you are some garden entrepreneur. Making multiple gardens, however, brings up one of the biggest issues with the game.
There isn't much in the way of "ease of use" in Viva Pinata. Getting your garden ready means whacking the hard dirt that takes up much of your lot, which can take quite awhile, upwards of 15 or more minutes. There is no convenient way of going about it, unfortunately, making it an extremely slow process. Making water features, likewise, requires you digging in small amounts with a relatively slow animation, which makes gardens with a heavy amount of water relatively exhausting to landscape. Menus also have a series of animations the game wants to go through, making any sort of menu-led task arduous, especially when all you want is a simple seed to plant. To buy and plant a seed, you need to first hit X to bring up the menu, point to the town along the dial, then find the right town person along the next dial, wait for a time consuming transition to play out, select "buy", wait for an animation, pick the seeds, wait for an animation, pick the seed of choice, wait for the transition animation, then pick where you want to plant the seed, hit Y to checkout, hit A to select "yes", then hit select to back out and return to your garden. You have to do this with just about anything you want to buy. You can buy multiple of the same thing without returning to a menu if you so like, but if you want, say, multiple types of seeds, you will have to hit Y again after checkout to return to the shop, and go through all of those animations again. It is a slow process, one you get rather better at as you progress through the game, but it never really softens the blow of how tedious this design is, even though the character in the shop is pleasant.
The tedium of the game's menu system and of setting up your garden is, at least, somewhat forgivable when you consider the context of the game. This was a year after the Xbox 360's release, and pushing the presentation of the seventh generation of games was all the rage. A lot of AAA games of the time were trying out lots of fancy menu animations and style to try and really sell that "next gen" feel and set them apart at the outset from the games that came out before. It's not an excuse, certainly, but it is grounds for an understanding. It was almost like creative experimentation. Games would only add more ease-of-use features as the generation would plod along, attempting to strike a mid-point between the hardcore and the casual that would end up creating more of a divide than anything.
The dated aspects of Viva Pinata aside, there is a tremendous glee while playing, trying to get your disobedient pinatas to live together. It's like a collect-a-thon met a management sim and made a colorful, joy-filled mess on your screen. There's a lot of character you can give to your gardens as you improve, and you can individualize (up to three) pinatas of a species through their variants. It feels personalized and fun, and can easily eat away hours of your day if you aren't careful. Collect-a-thons and management sims are two of my favorite genres, and I relish their combination here and with such style. The game has a quirky character unique to itself, from the snarky villagers that joke about their inadequacies or their superficial relationship to you, to decidedly multi-cultural design of most of the models in the game. Viva Pinata has that oddity quality you get from creative Japanese games like Katamari Damacy, where there doesn't seem to be contemporaries, either before it or after it. Looking for games like Viva Pinata is futile except for games that have one minor aspect that appeals to a certain mechanic, such as the farm life of Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, or the indirect play of Animal Crossing. There are snippets everywhere, but no one else has them all in one place the way Viva Pinata does, outside of its sequel which seemed to release silently with little fanfare in 2008. Viva Pinata is a lovely game, original in concept and easy to pick up, hard to put down. It swaddles you with management and self-imposed objectives provoked from its systems, and coos you into a gentle peace with its color and style. It has its problems, but the delight far outweighs the burden.
9.0
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