About A Game: Patchwork Heroes (PSP)

As a kid, I had Qix on the Gameboy. I did not enjoy it. It was a very bland and barebones game. Maybe my impressions of Qix in general were colored by those childhood memories. I’m not sure how the Gameboy port ranks compared to other Qixes, but most Qix versions I’ve seen look similarly barebones and not all that exciting. But perhaps I finally found the one Qix-like I can thoroughly enjoy.

Patchwork Heroes on the PSP is an unusual game in both artstyle and gameplay, and the closest comparison I can think of is the aforementioned Qix. Your main character and their intrepid crew land on flying warships and have to take them down before they reach your hometown. You cut the warship apart, basically drawing a line from one edge to another, and when two parts of the ship are fully separated, the smaller part will fall off. The goal of each stage is to reduce the ship to just a few percent of its original size, before the time limit runs out. Cutting off a part will stall the ship for a few seconds, depending on the size of the dropped part, so you can’t strategize for too long.

In later stages, various kinds of enemy robots will wander around the ship, attacking you or trying to repair the damage you’re doing. Defeating enemies, by cutting off the ground under their feet, fills your mojo bar. That bar fuels your mojo mode, which can be activated at any time and lets you cut through special reinforced steel hulls, makes you invincible, increases your movement speed, but also has a terrible turning radius and does not let you stop moving while it is active.

You play not just as a single character, but as a small team crawling around the airship. Every team member acts as one hit point, being lost when you take damage. Members can also be used as bombs, which can tear bigger holes into the ship hull and destroy reinforced sections (they actually just “guard” the bombs and then parachute off). Members can be gained back by freeing prisoners held in little cages on the hull. There are also other items strewn around the hull, which can stop time for a while or fill your mojo bar.

There’s a funny thing about bombs, which is that they allow you to end up on the wrong side of a cut. When using the normal cutting ability, you will always end up on the side of the cut that does not fall down, but since bombs explode after some delay, you can wander onto the wrong side of the soon-to-be separation, and will die when the bomb explodes. This caught me by surprise plenty of times, since it is not easy to keep track of which side is smaller, or even that you’re fully separating two sides.

Some stages add special objectives, like not cutting off a certain section, which can be pretty difficult. Later stages also make heavy use of the reinforced hull plating in various ways, requiring carefully targeted use of your limited bombs and mojo to beat them.

The game features an eccentric artstyle that looks suitably flat and patched-together, with characters in cutscenes clunkily moving like paper dolls and menus animating in a mechanical fashion. My favorite little bit of character is that every team member has a name, and when you lose one, they are specifically called out by name, age and their portrait, and then stamped with a big red “DEAD” text.

The music, in a kind of Klezmer style, is constantly driving you on and with its cacophony is adding to the general chaos of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sanRFvx4V3k

The game was developed by Acquire, who also made the quirkily named “Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This?” on the PSP, and actually a whole bunch of other well-known games like Tenchu, Way of the Samurai and Akiba’s Trip. They seem to be doing pretty well since they’re still working on fairly high-profile games like Octopath Traveller.

Patchwork Heroes got a physical release in Japan (as 100万トンのバラバラ, or “a million tons of pieces”), while other regions only had a digital PSN release.