Viva Pinata (Xbox 360) > Reviews (37)

I'm really not a huge gaming fan and would get really rather annoyed when my boyfriend kept playing for hours and hours, but when we came home for Xmas it would all be different - he introduced me to a game his sister had recently bought called "Viva Pinata".

***What are Pinatas?***
Pinatas are animal-like creatures whose purpose it is to eat as much candy as possible and then attend parties to entertain kids - or anyone else really. The various species get their name from "real-world" animals and a candy: for instance, Mousemallows are a mixture of "Mouse" and "Marshmallow".

***Purpose of the Game***
When you start off you get a small part of Pinata Island to start a garden which is then hopefully going to attract Pinatas. By planting and decorating, digging ponds and growing trees you'll attract various different animals and should ideally make them residents in your garden to breed them, send them to parties and thus grow the value of your garden.

***Garden***
At the beginning your garden is nothing more than a piece of hard, dried-out soil and all you get to take care of it is an old rusty shovel and a watering can. As soon as you have turned the dried out soil into "good" soil you have attracted your first resident - a whirlm!

Over time and with more advanced pinatas and plants, your garden size will grow to allow for even more pinatas. In order to accommodate some of the more advanced pinatas you will also have to give up other species to make room. This is entirely up to you, if you decide you rather have Swans than Snakes in your garden then that's your personal goal. Technically there is no winning or losing in this game.

***Pinata Species***
Overall, there are 60 different species on Pinata Island which can become residents in your garden in one way or the other. Pinatas can be grouped in different categories depending on how you achieve to make them residents: wild animals, domestic animals, evolves and sours.

~~~Wild animals~~~
Wild animals will appear in your garden depending on all sorts of requirements. Many animals need some garden requirements like flowers or other plants in the garden while others need a certain other species to be resident or some animals will only appear if you are a certain rank of gardener. This rank will increase over time as you get more experience with plants and animals alike.

When a new species appears for the first time you're game will be interrupted and you'll be shown a very short trailer about them. The next step on making that species a resident is to make them visit your garden. Again, certain requirements need to be fulfilled which range from the layout of your garden (certain percentage of gras or water) to certain trees, fruits or other animals who need to be available in your garden to be eaten.

A visiting animal will be walking around in your garden as a black-and-white version of itself and is free to leave and return to the garden whenever it likes. It will only become a resident if another set of requirements has been fulfilled, at which point it turns into a colourful version of itself and will stay in your garden.

Making an animal resident now probably sounds like a really difficult thing to do, but obviously starts off rather simple and gets only more difficult laterin the game. As an example the whirlm's appear, visit and resident requirements are simple that 1% of your garden is either (good) soil or grass. A Buzzlegum needs two buttercups in the garden to appear, 4 to visit and 6 to become resident and so on.

~~~Domestic animals~~~
Domestic animals do not appear during the game but have to be bought from a shop. These include Barkbarks (Dogs), Cluckles (Chicken), Goobaa (Sheep) and others.

~~~Evolves~~~
Some animals have the potential to turn into something else when you feed them certain seeds, flowers or do other things like accidentally burning them (oops). However, not all animals turn into different animals when they are fed certain types of food. - some simply become a variant of themselves in a different colour. It's a fun thing to experiment with and if you get frustrated there's plenty of advice online on what to feed each species to see it's 3 different variants.

~~~Sours~~~
Throughout your game you will also have visitors that you don't like. Red-looking animals that come to destroy your garden and leave sour sweets which will make your pinatas ill when they eat them. You can whack most of them with your showel and they will explode but you can also fulfill some requirements and get them tamed. This will turn them into rather nice looking little creatures like crows or crocodiles.

***Romancing pinatas***
Once you have attracted a pair of a species (or bought two in a shop) you'll have a new set of requirements that you need to fulfill in order to make them want to romance with each other. If they do, a heart will appear above them and all you need to do is bring two together... well almost. Some species can be a little more difficult to bring together - even if they have a heart above them. Flutterscotches (butterfly) are a good example and trying to romance them can be a little frustrating at times.

Once you have managed to bring two together you will have to complete a minigame which lasts 60s in which you have to direct one of the animals through a labyrinth to the other. After that you will see the mating dance of the species you are breeding if it's the first time you've romanced them. An egg will be delivered and after a little while you've (hopefully) successfully increased the population of your garden.

***Master Romancer***
You can become a Master Romancer of any species if you manage to have seven of one species in your garden at the same time. Technically they don't have to be bred but could also be purchased, whatever you think is the right thing to do. After you've successfully romanced a species for the first time, a romance sweet can be bought which is a handy shortcut to fulfilling the romance requirements of a species and certainly helps in achieving that Master Romancer goal more quickly.

***The Village***
Throughout the game you have littler helpers available in the village and as everywhere else additional options become available as you get more experienced.

The currency of the game are chocolate coins that you start off earning by smashing the junk that will be in your garden when you start off. Later on you can earn money by selling fruits, plants, pinatas, produce etc.

~~~Store~~~
The main store in the village will have almost anything you need from fertiliser, seeds, fruits, produce to fences, garden decorations and almost anything else you can think of.

~~~Pet shop~~~
Here you can buy the domestic pinatas plus a whole lot of accessories for any pinata from hats to bows to shoes. Some accessories are for pure fun while others help your pinatas in fights or enable them to produce honey or milk (in case of bee and cow) without your guidance.

~~~Tinker~~~
This place is a rather mystical one - the Tinker can turn many of your fruits or plants into something else, for example he'll turn a carrot into carrot cake which is one of the romancing requirements of a pony.

~~~The Builder~~~

He will be more than happy to build any pinata house that you want - only requirement is that the pinata is a resident in your garden. A house is one romance requirement that all animals have since they will want some privacy to "multiply" ;-)

~~~The Doctor~~~
When your pinatas eat sour sweets or lose in a fight they will be ill and need to be healed in order to not die. The doctor will come to your garden and heal any pinata if you can pay and tell him in time. Otherwise you're pinata will be destroyed.

~~~Igor~~~
Starting off his career as a beggar, Igor will eventually turn into a Trader who has the most random but mostly very useful things to sell in his shop.

~~~Arthur's Inn~~~
This milk pub is where you need to go if you want some help with your garden - either by hiring a sprinkler, someone to take care of weeds or people specifically trained to scare of sours from your garden.

***Journal***
The journal is your source of information. It contains an encyclopedia which starts off empty and fills as you go along. Whenever a new pinata was sighted in your garden you will find all necessary information about it in there.

The journal also contains the Pinata Story where new chapters are unlocked as you get more experienced. The book tells you the story of Pinata Island and its most experienced gardener.

Also in the Journal you will find Player Awards where you can track what your awards within the game are. For instance, you get a pinata award for having a pinata visit, become resident and romance for the first time. You also get awards for every variant you discover (three per species) and for becoming a master romancer. The plant section looks similar in that you get awards for growing plants and flowers to maturity and for different levels of growth stimulated by using fertiliser.

A section about the garden area tells you the percentage that water, grass, long grass and soil take up in your garden. This can become fairly important as some species require a certain percentage of water or grass.

***Gaming experience***
This rather lengthy description of the game hopefully shows you that this is a game with a lot of potential.

You can easily play for hours and hours without noticing. Staying up till 4 o'clock in the morning is not just something I've experienced myself but also seen with other people.

If you've never played much Xbox before this is probably a fairly good game to get started with. I was a bit worried I wouldn't be able to control everything I wanted, but the game starts slow enough to get you used to the various concepts and pecularities of the game.

On top of that it has gorgeous graphics and is certainly one of the most colourful games I have ever seen. I almost regret having to go back to Uni in a few days time as I won't be able to play Xbox then...I really think someone should develop a PC game of this... :-)

***Pictures***
The first picture is a picture of the special edition, which is the game that my boyfriend's sister owns. It's absolutely gorgeous!

The second picture shows the Viva Pinata logo.

The third picture is Hudson Horstachio, one of the Pinatas that appears in the TV series of the same name.

The forth picture is a Juicygoose - a variant of the Quackberry after feeding it *some* fruit... :-)

The fifth picture is a picture of the Squazzil house so that you get an impression what gorgeous detail is used throughout the game.

And finally, the sixth picture is a random shot from Pinata Island that shows a Fudgehog, a Fizzlybear and a Pretztail.

***Recommended?***
More than anything else, yes. It is so much fun and will keep you entertained quite a long time. You can currently buy it for around £40 from places like Amazon. It is worth every penny!!

Thanks for reading (all this!), rating and commenting!