A great portable version of the original title, with a few additions to make it feel a bit more accessible to everyone.

Viva Pinata was definitely one of those overlooked gems for the 360, a bit marred by the fact that nobody quite knew who the target audience was. The visuals were all kids stuff, bright, colorful, with a little bit of that Saturday Morning cartoon humor, but the actual gameplay felt like it was geared to the older set, with a lot of micromanagement and planning that might have been a bit over the heads of the younger crowd.

Viva Pinata Pocket Paradise does a really solid job of finding the thin line between the two, retaining quite a bit of the gameplay from the original, but now mixing it a bit more with the cartoon show, and keeping the tutorials simple and easy to understand without making the core gameplay feel bland or geared too much for the kids. Like in the previous entry, you're given a base garden to overhaul and clean up, allowing you to slowly build upon it with various flowers, fruits, trees, vegetables, and other little garden accessories like fountains, statues, lights, and more. As you build upon your garden you'll start to attract the local Pinata, each of which have certain requirements that need to be met before they'll take up residence in your garden for good. As you begin, typically with the Whirlms, the requirements are pretty basic and easy to fulfill, like having so much dirt present, but as you advance in level things definitely become more complicated.

Once you've taken on a few Pinata, you can start to breed them and either choose to sell them, feed them to other Pinata, or use them for a few other purposes that pop up later in the game, like the Pinata Party service. Breeding plays out in a similar fashion to making them residents, by meeting certain requirements that are laid out in your encyclopedia that you can reference at any point in the game, which will detail all the information you need to know about any Pinata you've encountered so far.

To aid you in creating a Pinata utopia, you can call on a few other local residents that will provide you with seeds, medical care for ailing Pinata, shop services where you can buy various items, and even a local builder that can create "love shacks" for your Pinata to mate in. All of this should be really familiar territory to previous Viva Pinata players, and for the most part it seems like everything works out the same way on the DS as it did on the 360.

Obviously the visuals aren't going to match up, but the DS does do a solid job with the 3D stuff thrown at it, and everything retains that bright, colorful trademark that Viva Pinata tends to have. The stylus controls are easy to pick up and learn, with just about every function being available on the touch screen. You have a simple menu at the top to access your tools, like the shovel and watercan, and to the right there's a menu to access the shops and other services. You can rub on your Pinata to bring their happiness levels up, and you can pick up any object lying about in your garden and move it around with ease. I'd say the style controls work just as well, if not better, than the pointer system in the home console version of the original.

The music is also ripped right out of the original, instantly familiar to anyone who's played it. There is a bit more with the characters from the animated show, and the voice work is pretty limited but it'll appeal to the kids who are familiar with the material.

I still can't help but feel that the gameplay isn't all that geared to the younger crowd, especially if you stick with the garden building into the later levels (you gain levels depending on how well you're doing). When you need to start keeping certain Pinata away from others, either by fencing or thru some slightly more nefarious versions of crowd control, it all starts to feel a bit busy and hectic, even for adults. Also, it seemed like it was really easy for my Pinata to grow sick, especially early on. It became a bit of a money sink to keep everyone healthy, which you definitely have to do if you want to keep your populace thriving.

All together though, I can't find much to complain about with Viva Pinata Pocket Paradise, and it's a great addition to the core game. It feels just as much at home on a portable system as it does on 360. If you're a fan of the original title, than I can definitely suggest picking this one up, but even if you missed out on the Viva Pinata hype for the original release, this version is easy to pick up and learn, and should appeal to just about everyone.