In the current generation of party games across the platforms – Mario Party, Wii-Sports, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Wario Ware, etc – there’s one major thing these games have in common

Co-ordination and or timing – and mini-games.

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my day, we were lazy. Our ‘party’ games so to speak were the likes of Madden, Tecmo Bowl, NBA JAM, Blitz, You Don’t Know Jack, Pong and such. (Shh I’m leaving Track N Field out of this one.)

What I mean by this, is they were relatively sedentary games, learn a few button clicks, maybe a little bit of choice quick finger movements, but that was really it. We had buttons dedicated to juke around an opponent, or to dribble between their legs. Long gone are these games and their lazy ire for the lazy video game playing nerd. Now we have the six-axis to flick our controller in various directions to help angle his shot, a guitar with a gyro in it to detect when we are swishing our instrument into the air to ‘rock out’ harder, or a wii-mote to swish around in a graceful ark to do make a hook at a guy’s jaw.

Interactivity makes the game better I’m told. I thought it was pretty interactive when I pushed left and Little mac dodged to the left to enable me to dodge Mike Tyson’s (or Mr. Dream for those more politically correct or for our younger crowd) deathly uppercut and come back in with a few quick jabs of my own.

So then there are the Wii’s waggle games. Little co-ordination of timing, but lots of flipping your nun-chucks around in a pattern to achieve the goal of various mini events. Great concept, problem is the motions rarely seem to actually give a shit about what you’re doing, more that you’re just moving. I’ve played Mario Party 8 and when it told me to swish the wii-mote around in a circle to paddle a boat, simply just swinging it around in whatever direction I wanted worked just as well. I found that all kind of disappointing, as a system and series of games that tried to be the front man for the whole life-like motion concept – it felt rather half-assed.

I hear there’s an attachment coming out eventually that will actually make the wii-mote’s motion more life-like and less sporadic. I’m on the edge of my seat. (/sarcasm)

But then came Dokapon – It’s Mario Party without the mini-games with the addition of an adorably charming RPG in the mix. Yes! Finally! A game I can play with friends and don’t have to worry about scratching up my touch-screen when we’re spazzing out to flick soccer balls in a goal, or something equally as obnoxious.

What I mean is – You have a Kingdom (coincidentally Dokapon Kingdom on the Wii,) ruled by a silly little king who has a daughter. He wants to marry his daughter off to the bravest adventurer in the land – so here come you and some friends (or AI, up to 4 players/AI max.) There are 8 classes to chose from that all have their own stat-gains and abilities and carrying loads or spells available. At it’s core it actually has a pretty acceptable RPG. There are shops to upgrade your gear, monsters to kill to gain experience and get gold. Minimalistic PVP, quests and boss monsters.

Charmingly cartoony graphics give this game a unique feel compared to the seriousness of most current RPG’s

All the players move around on a giant game board map similar to Mario Party’s, with a ‘rolling’ system to move your spaces each turn. Items that enable you to move a specific amount of spaces, or get additional rolls. Spells can be cast against one another to screw with each other’s progress or hamper your health before a big fight.

Generally whoever is richest at the end of the allotted amount of time (Or all the quests have been finished) is the winner.  There are a few quests along the way to help you earn more money (One quest has you retrieving an elixir to cure a town’s poisoned well, another has you rescuing the King’s daughter who wandered off on her own to go on a shopping spree) and rescuing towns from evil monsters adds to your net worth and earns you tax-revenue.

All in all it plays like a Mario Party, but it’s adorable and doesn’t have aggravating mini-games that newcomers would have no idea how to play – thus making it easy for anyone to jump in and play.

Oh, right I knew I forgot something – 4player Wireless one-card support. One of my favorite features about this game is that nobody else needs to have it to play. You can stream it out to 3 of your friends and then can join you for a dumbed-down version of the game (8 weeks long, starting zone and about 12 towns only.) But its nice to see multi-player games that still support this feature on the DS (and just solid multi player games in general) – one of the main reasons I got one in the first place.

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