Things to know about me: With the holidays coming up and all, I enjoy a good rhythm game. Something with a beat and some button-pressing action. Even better, if you take the idea of a rhythm-based game and mix it with something else entirely, something akin to Unbeatable. This brings me back to my childhood when Patapon came out on the PSP, this weird little music battler that could. Sony, being Sony, has been sitting on that IP forever, not doing a thing with it, so the creator stepped in and brought it back, hooray! Hence, Ratatan, a game with a name you can set a drum beat to, was born.
Ratatan has a two-fold meaning you will learn as you become leader of the band. The Ratatan is the character you take control of, but also the sound that you chant for your team to march forward. While all of it might sound like gibberish, it’s one of the best uses of Warabe uta, traditional nursery rhymes and children’s music. You should at least get that point hammered home, even if you don’t know the term, given the childlike chants that keep the timing on your timing and shame you when you miss.
And these melodies are, and I cannot say this enough, catchy as all hell. I have literally started chanting ‘Rat Ta Ta Ta Rat Ta Tan’ when I wasn’t even thinking about it. Six bars in and I was like, oh damn, am I singing those songs again? That is the brunt of the music, as you make it your own with each run of the game. This is mixed with backbeats that never feel out of sync and have you jamming along. Or just sit in the main hub for twenty minutes and enjoy the chanting.
As one of the eight sugoii and Kawaii leaders you can take the role of, you control an army of these little guys named cobuns that you are tasked with guiding through each area and world, fighting opposing groupings of enemies and collecting upgrades. There are a few options for commands you can give, all of which are anchored on a three-note music bar near the bottom of the screen to give these commands. Want to block: hit a button, hold, hit the same button. An attack or hustle tech: hit the same button on each prompt and watch the spears fly.
This is where my mixed emotions for the franchise at large come into play, because when you are hitting the notes right, watching the combat play out is rather fun. The player is passive in all this outside of the ability to keep the timing, so these commands are then triggering the Chobun following you to then follow up what you said. This can lead to a sense of frustration, given how removed you are from the actual battle at hand. This isn’t that you feel like you are losing something because you aren’t minding it, but that you can’t control certain variables.
Triggering an attack will have the Chorbun ready their assault before following it out, and a well-placed area blast can knock your group back and essentially cancel their attack. This will not usually affect all of your units, but you can lose the attacks coming from a large chunk of your units, which loses you valuable hits. Given the lengthy cooldown of the music gauge, you can choose to move or attack, and things can change mid-combo, making a switch impossible when it matters. Then you will require the cooldown again, which means that by the time it comes up again, everything might have changed even further. Or just eating the damage on one attack frees up your next few with no issue.
The timing in general can be your greatest enemy. There is a huge gap between the music gauge bar resetting and where the note locations are to start attacks. This gives you a lot of dead space and makes any sort of failure you might have on an attack turn completely devastating. Each hit has timing, just like in any rhythm game. Think of Hatsune Miku and hitting and getting a perfect timing, or okay, or just plain bad. In a game like that, bad timing affects your score. In Ratatan, you completely fail your attack. This doesn’t even reset the attack, so if this was your first note, you need to wait for the vbar to end before having an opportunity too. It’s clear what you are going for given how the commands break down, so I feel like this should just punish damage or chance of success, rather than cancel the full attack.
And then you have your actual Ratatan, whom you never actually stop controlling. This isn’t like Theatrhymn Final Fantasy, where the ‘fighting’ is a passive button-pushing game. Your character can move the battlefield, jump, and get attacked. They have the most important health bar, as this will end the run if it hits zero. Chorbuns can also get killed, but this is part of the loop, as they will respawn after a short time, forcing you to change your strategy till they spawn back. This means that you need to balance attacking and moving to avoid the onslaught of things trying to kill you, which is an annoyingly complex thing to do.
Let me make this clear: when you have your flow, are nailing your notes, and moving your unit around the field, there are some strong high notes being hit. At one point, I was flipping around as cannonballs kept peppering everything, and I was still driving them back with hustle techs, tearing down the buildings in our way. It’s the converse of this where the game can start to drag you, which I was expecting given Patapon felt the same exact way all the time.
Unless you are a music major, you are going to need to watch your bar, and it is this tiny thing on the bottom of the screen. Right above that is your character, moving and bouncing around, with a lot of attacks indicated based on where they will hit the ground. The AOE attacks you need to avoid. Then above that are spears flying at you, and while they don’t instantly kill you, it is death by 1000 cuts. Combine this with the fact, again, that if you mess up the attack or guard commands at all, you lose that turn. The number of times I lost my move because I was focusing on getting away from an archer onslaught makes me lament all the attacks left unattacked. The point is, it is severe sensory overload.
The thing I did love, though, was the fact they made Ratatan a roguelike, which works extremely well. Even more so, each run, even the longer ones, feels quick and concise. Part of this is that the game throws a lot of rooms that don’t require combat, simply gifting the player rewards like additional chobun or additional upgrades. You will do the usual loop of grabbing ability cards that add things like fire or poison to your spears.
These will also add some ability to your Ratatan as well, which helps alleviate some of the passiveness of your character that can be a problem in other places. I kept coming back to this tornado I could throw occasionally when I triggered an attack. The only drawback of this, though, is that it shoots out forward from where your character is, meaning again you need to adjust yourself while dodging attacks, while managing the music bar, all at the same time.
Even more impressive, though, is how the Ratatans change up the game completely. The chobuns have weapons they can attach, which function differently. Each character has a set of two weapons that their Chobun can equip, and these mixtures can have drastic shifts in how they combo on the attack. You can level these weapons up with an extensive loot drop system also, so the amount of options changes throughout every run. Swapping up these characters is so much fun, and experimenting with Chobun weaponry helps make the repetition much more manageable.
Verdict
Ratatan sometimes plays itself a little too familiar to the franchise that inspired it, especially with elements that could have used some focus. Here, that is the fact that the screen has an insane amount going on at any time and requires the player to bounce around at a moment’s notice, trying to both keep the beat and keep themselves alive. This can lead to some unnecessary frustrations, in between some highlight moments. As the Ratatan, though, you are tasked with leading your group to victory. That experience hits a lot of high notes, far more than it misses. Rat Ta Ta Ta Rat ta tan!
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Reviewed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC Via Steam
*A Code was provided by GSE for the purposes of this review
Developer: Ratata Arts
Publisher: Game Source Entertainment
Release Date: October 15, 2026
Pros
+Insanely catchy beats and chanting baked into the combat
+A fun Roguelike which works surprisingly well for a rhythm game.
+Each Ratatan brings unique elements to replays.
+Cute Art Style.
Cons
+And insane amount happening on screen at all times.
+Easy to feel like you have no control.
+The rhythm guide has a lengthy cooldown, especially for how easy it is to mess up an attack.
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Ratatan
