PaRappa The Rapper

As you know most cult classics become thus because they are, well, different. This is a good thing, because originality is king in my book, but every once in a while I stumble across a game that is so weird that I can't help but love it. PaRappa The Rapper is one of those games.

You play as a teenage dog named PaRappa who is out to win the heart of Sunny Funny (who is a daisy). To do this PaRappa will have to, or at least in his mind have to, learn karate, get his drivers licence, work at a flea market, bake a cake, win the right to use the toilet, and finally put on a concert. PaRappa won't be doing this alone though, he seeks out the aid of "masters" to teach him. Each master will explain everything in the form of rapping, and PaRappa will have to copy or improve upon their raps in order to learn.

You rap by watching the line at the top of the screen. When a master says a line that you are to repeat, symbols representing the buttons of your controller will appear on the line, fallowed by a depiction of your master. Then, your likeness will race across the line towards the symbols. You have to press the correct button at the exact moment your head crosses the represented symbol. You can either just press the buttons and repeat your teacher verbatim, or you can add in some more button combinations, to improve on the lyrics.

During each level you will be rated on how well you are doing. At the bottom, right hand side is a meter that says U-Rappin', fallowed by either cool, good, bad, or awful. You always start out at good, screw up two times and you drop to bad, two more to awful, and two more to fail the song, you can move back up by rapping good two times in a row. At the end of each line, you will hear either the scratch of a DJ to let you know you rapped that line well, or you will hear a "quacking" sound to let you know you messed up. To pass a song you will have to complete the song with a good rating, so there isn't much room for error.

Your masters include, a karate master onion, a driving instructor moose, a rastafarian frog, a cooking chicken, and a professional rapper who is like a spider/monkey. Each master has their own style of rap, but all of them feature the same thing; catchy, humorous and downright weird lyrics, set to a funky beat. The music is where the game really shines, after all, it is about rapping, though, that doesn't mean that just because you don't like rap or hip hop, that you won't enjoy PaRappa. I personally don't like rap one bit, but still this game manages to put a smile on my face with it's cheery, oddball lyrics.

Somebody was also having a good day when they came up with the artistic style. All of the characters in the game are two dimensional, while their environments are 3d. This creates a sort cardboard cutout like world, which is both artistic, and amusing. During the levels though, the 3d rendered objects that are present in the cutscenes are gone. Instead the developers used 2d objects, but arranged them to create a 3d looking stage. Think of it like this, if you take a piece of paper, fold it into thirds and stand it up you create the illusion of 3d, kinda like Wolfenstein, or Doom, only prettier. The environments you are rapping in also change depending on how well you are doing. If you are doing good your teacher will be really into the song and jump around and dance. If you are doing poor, they will lose interest.

The story is heart warming, and is told through a series of amusing cutscenes, but don't expect anything epic. The characters are, like in any good story, the best part. Each has there own special mannerisms and quirks. PaRappa is your stereotypical nice guy who gets ignored by the pretty girl, Sunny of course being that pretty girl. By the way don't try to make sense of the game or the story, you'll just end up hurting yourself.

Let's take a brief look at difficulty. Simply put, this game is hard, like makes you question your skills hard. I have to admit, when I saw the game's cutesy style, I wasn't expecting a challenge. For starters, the game's manual doesn't do a very good job of explaining how to play. You assume that you push the button right as your head passes over the symbol, after all that's what it says in the manual. But no such luck, you mess up even though your rap sounded good. So you try again, this time and the next couple of times you get it, but just when you think "hey, I got the hang of this" you mess up and fail the song. Then you start to wonder if the game is broken, or if you've just been deluding yourself into thinking you were a good gamer. Only after an hour or so of trial and error, do you realize, your supposed to hit the button, just after PaRappa's head passed over it. Duh!!

So once you figured out how to play, you can fly through it, right? Wrong. You see the game is only six levels long, which means in order to make a challenging game the difficulty has to step up exponentially. So for a game that could be beaten in less than an hour, you end up spending more like three or four (or six in my case). You don't necessarily get mad when you fail though. Actually, I found I was having so much fun, that it didn't bother me. What did bother me was when my sister, who never plays video games, sat down and beat the first level on her second try, when it took me like ten. Life just wanted to kick me in the nuts repeatedly that day.

PaRappa The Rapper hasn't age well unfortunately. This game came out when rhythm games were just starting to make an appearance, and although it blew those who played it away, it now has little ground to stand on. Now a days the rhythm genre is extremely big thanks mostly to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but back in the days of the Playstation PaRappa was top dog (no pun intended). On August 30, 2001 PaRappa The Rapper 2 hit shelves, although it sold fairly well, it is not considered to be a very good game. For one it is about the same length as the first, which is to short to justify spending fifty bucks on. Also it seemed as if the creative spark that carried the first game, no longer existed.

PaRappa The Rapper was really popular in his day, spawning plenty of merchandise, along with a children's anime in japan, and a spin off game, UmJammer Lammy (weirdest name ever). PaRappa's success is like an Offspring song, good, but ends shortly after it's begun. The hip-hop hero may be back sooner than you think though, with talks of a third game on the PS3, hopefully it will be more than six levels long, and slightly easier, but most importantly, it better be as goofy and lovable as it's predecessor.

Overview:

Story: 3/5

Gameplay: 3/5

Graphics: 4/5

Music: 4/5

Originality: 5/5

Difficulty: Hard

Learning Curve: High

Length: Short

Total Score: 3.8 Worth Buying

Next Post Hint: Clean between your toes, and put on some funky jams, we gotta find the pieces of our ship!