_ _ ____ _ _ __ ____ ____ _ _ __ ____ __ ( \/ )(_ _)( \/ )/__\ ( _ \(_ _)( \( ) /__\ (_ _) /__\ \ / _)(_ \ //(__)\ )___/ _)(_ ) ( /(__)\ )( /(__)\ \/ (____) \/(__)(__) (__) (____)(_)\_)(__)(__)(__)(__)(__) P O C K E T P A R A D I S E (Nintendo DS) Welcome! Basically, if you like Harvest Moon and/or monster-farming games, you should like Viva Pinata Pocket Paradise. It's a simple game that never gets a little worse than frustrating, and the ability to save at any time makes it a good game to play during breaks at work or school. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Purpose of this Guide =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= There are tutorials in the game... but I found them a little lacking. Sometimes a tutorial wouldn't pop up until long after I accomplished the task it was trying to teach. The worst part about the game is that when you're stuck, the answer is usually pretty simple. It's a little bit late getting out, but hopefully it can help a few people that may pick up the game just in time for the holidays. This is not a guide about how to lure a particular species of pinata to your garden - for that, you will need to visit the "Species Guide" written by "somethingsdont" at GameFAQs. =-=-=-=-=-= SECTIONS =-=-=-=-=-= To jump to a section of this guide quickly, use the ctrl + f function on your computer, and then type in what section you're looking for. Section 1: Goals, Achievements (Things you have to look forward to, the point of the game) Section 2: An Introduction (What you should know, a kinda-sorta walkthrough) 2a) Intro 2b) Layout 2c) Wild and Resident Pinatas 2d) Pinata Homes 2e) Seeds 2f) Gardening 2g) General Store 2h) Gretchen Fetchem the Hunter 2i) Pinata Requests 2j) Pink Candy 2k) Sour Pinatas 2L) Fences 2m) Useful Pinatas 2n) Variants 2o) Evolutions 2p) Accessories Section 3: Making Items (How to create sandwiches, jam, and other needed items) Section 4: FAQs (Things that may stump you) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Section 1: Goals =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= To completely beat the game, there are several goals for the game: Pinata accomplishments and goals: * Get every species of wild Pinata to visit * Purchase all pet Pinatas * Get all Pinata evolutions * Get every species of Pinata to become a resident * Get every species of Pinata to romance * Convert at least one of every species of sour Pinata * Acquire at least 7 individuals of each species for "Master Romancer" * Get a variant of each species * Use all Pinata abilities (such as Macaraccoon's ability to fetch treats) * Harvest all items from appropriate Pinatas (wool, milk, etc) Garden accomplishments and goals: * Grow every species of plant * Fertilize every species of plant (that can be ferilized) * Fill your garden with expensive pinatas, plants, and decor to hike its value * Acquire all items and tool upgrades * Unlock all NPCs (such as helping out the hobo to open his store) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Section 2: Introduction/Semi-walkthrough =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 2a) Intro First, you'll want to go into the Garden. For now, ignore the Playground - its just a sandbox mode that doesn't progress the game any - and the Episodes, which will just show you parts of the cartoon that were just played in the tutorials. The beginning of the game is good at helping you along. First you will want to establish your garden by cleaning up some of the rubble using your shovel and tamping away the rock. Once you have cleared away some dirt (at least 10%), some Whirlms will become interested in your garden. Don't feel rushed - you don't have to clean up all of the garden ASAP if you want to focus on your new Pinatas, but your Whirlms won't die if you want to clear out the garden first. 2b) Layout The flower on the right-hand side of your top screen shows your experience. You gain experience every time you accomplish something in your garden. It also ticks down the hours in the day. Don't worry, though - you're not being timed and there is no hurry to level - it's just a way to show you what time of day it is in your garden. Click on the DS icon on the top right to go to the Encyclopedia - here, you can read about Pinatas, items, or characters you have seen. There are some help files, but they are generally not very informative. This is where you can go back into tutorials. The Encyclopedia is most useful for its entries on Pinatas, as that is where you can learn about what it takes to make a Pinata want to become a resident in your garden. Always pay attention to the left side of your top screen - known as the "combat log" in other games, this pane displays current news on what's going on in your garden, such as who's visiting, romancing, or if there's a dangerous sour Pinata on its way. 2c) Wild and Resident Pinatas Every Pinata has its own requirement to first skirt the perimeter of your garden, and then different requirements to actually visit. Finally, you will need to meet the requirements for a Pinata to want to become a resident. In this case, the Whirlm is very easy to please, needing only 10% of dirt to appear, visit, and then become a resident. Whirlms will continually become residents in your garden throughout the game. When you meet a Pinata's requirements, you can drag them together to romance. They will do a little dance, summon an egg, and produce a new little Pinata. If your Pinatas aren't romancing, you may have too many Pinatas in your garden (you will be able to have more when your garden grows bigger), or it's your Pinatas' bedtime and they're not interested. Also, as the game progresses, pay attention to your Pinatas' happiness levels - if they drop, they may no longer want to romance. Feed them a food that they like to spark the mood. Some Pinatas in your garden just don't get along - in this case, skip to the fences section (2L), or just try to avoid keeping two conflicting species - some of it is common sense, like snakes (Syrupent) and mice (Mousemallow)... sometimes, it's not so obvious, as in the case of squirrels (Squazzil) and badgers (Badgesicle)... so always pay attention to what's happening in your garden at all times. If a wild Pinata is threatening your residents, you can whack it with the shovel and shower your own guys with yummy candy (beware of sour candy though - it is dark red and black, and you should destroy it because it will make your Pinatas sick). You won't be able to whack a wild Pinata that is locked in combat. If you're in danger of losing a weaker Pinata to a wild Pinata that you don't want as a resident, then you can still sell your own Pinata in mid-combat. 2d) Pinata Homes Willy Builder will introduce himself. When you buy the Whirlm house and plop it down, it will take him a little while to build it. There will be a countdown timer and then you will see Willy standing outside the blinds when the house is ready. Use your shovel to give it one good whack to get rid of the blinds, and you will see your Whirlm house! Be careful though - you can accidentally destroy a home that hasn't been built yet - don't whack it until you see Willy standing outside. The higher level the Pinata, the more time it will take to build its house. 2e) Seeds The game then introduce Seedos. You won't be buying seeds from him, but he aimlessly wanders through your garden and gives you a chance at getting free seeds. You can tap him with the stylus, but he has a bad sense of humour and will sometimes play a prank by not giving you anything. In that case, it's perfectly okay to whack him with the shovel to get him to drop a random seed. When he offers you a free seed, take the turnip. After the turnip grows, feed it to a Whirlm and get your first Variant! If you can't plant a seed, pay attention to your top screen - you may have too many plants already, or the seed requires being planted in dirt or water. 2f) Gardening Always keep a variety of plants in your garden. It may be hard at first since you're allowed a very limited number of plants, but it will get easier. As your garden widens, you can plant more. The more plants you have, the better the chance of attracting a new Pinata to come take a look at your garden. A lot of Pinatas are attracted to flowers, and others will require eating a certain number of fruits or nuts to become a resident. When you get a Taffly, feed it a lot of fruit and start collecting fertilizer. Use the corresponding colour of fertilizer on the same colour of flower. It may take about 5 charges to get the plant completely fertilized, and the DS controls can be rather fickle, but your plants will be more beatiful and yield more flowers than non-fertilized plants. 2g) General Store Costalot is where you'll buy everything from seeds and food to new types of fencing, and even hired help for your garden. Anytime you unlock a new item, such as getting honey from a Buzzlegum for the first time, the item will appear in the store. Instead of farming Buzzlegums, you can just visit your store for honey from then on. Occasionally, the store will be out-of-stock of certain items, but it's temporary. You can sell items at the store, but you can also sell things by hitting the grocery basket on the right-hand side of your touch screen while you're in your garden. Then you touch anything that you want to sell - it will mark them with an icon of Lottie's head. After you've marked all you want to sell, you hit the coin/sell button on the right side. Be careful, it's easy to accidentally sell trees or houses if you're not paying attention to what you mark. Oh, and the currency in this universe is chocolate coins - yeah, you can dig them up, it's kind of gross. But you don't have to eat them. 2h) Gretchen Fetchem the Hunter She is a very important figure. She will hunt and catch any wild Pinata you want (you must have had at least one of the species before she can catch it - but this is very nice for Pinatas that are difficult to lure into the garden, so that you can get the second Pinata for romancing). She will also sell an unlimited amount of "pet Pinatas" that can't be found in the wild: Moozipan (cow), Barkbark (dog), Kittyfloss (cat), etc. When you have her catch a wild Pinata, you will have to come back to her store after she returns from a hunt (it will alert you in the log on the upper screen when she returns), and then click on the cage icon to get your captured Pinata(s). 2i) Pinata Requests Sometimes a little party box will show up in the lower left-hand corner of your touchscreen. These are party requests for a certain type of Pinata - click on it to see what the challenge is. It doesn't hurt to accept the challenge, even if you don't currently have all of the Pinatas it is asking for. To send a Pinata, drag them to the box, or click on the box and select the Pinatas you want, then select 'Pack' in the top of the screen. The Pinatas will be gone for just a few hours, and return with pink candy. 2j) Pink Candy When your Pinatas bring you candy, save most of it for later. This candy makes any Pinata want to romance, even if your garden doesn't meet all of its requirements. This makes it easy to romance higher level Pinatas that are very picky about what they like to eat. At level 7, I had almost 80 pieces of candy, and I didn't exactly use it sparingly. 2k) Sour Pinatas Every level or so will introduce a new villian to the garden - the first of this cast is the Sour Shellybean, a type of snail. Just drop an apple seed in front of the grumpy little guy. He'll eventually eat it and go into a short hibernation state before emerging as a friendly regular Shellybean. Sometimes a sour Pinata will snub potential food and cause more trouble than its worth - in this case, it's okay to whack the jerk to death. Be sure to whack the sour candy it leaves behind too - this will make your other Pinatas sick. As soon as you have unlocked Bart, have him convert a pumpkin into a jack o'lantern to feed to the next sour Pinata that will come into your garden, the sour Sherbat. Then work on getting some honey to make into medicine for the sour Crowla even later on. 2L) Fences Fences are useful to keep two types of Pinata from fighting eachother (for example, Arocknids and Raisants, or Mousemallows and Syrupents). The fence may not protect your Pinatas from flying Pinatas, Dastardos, or other savage visitors, but it should keep them safe from wild four-legged visitors and aggressive residents. It can sometimes be hard to see where the fencing lands when you place it. Play your DS in the dark or away from natural light where you can see the screen clearly, and look for a very faint I-shape that connects the north-south fence pieces. Another good way to test the fenceline for weakness is to direct a resident Pinata to walk in and out of the pen. It will walk through the gaps and alert you to the spot that needs to be fixed. Whenever you have to release a Pinata from a pen, be sure to sell some of the east-west fencing so you can see there are no gaps when you want to seal it back up again. And be sure to keep fenced Pinatas housed and well-fed so they will remain happy and healthy. 2m) Useful Pinatas Aside from being food or party favours, some Pinatas are worth keeping one or two around all of the time, even if you don't want to waste space on a house for them (just be sure to feed them every once in a while to keep them from running away). * BarkBark will keep some intruders away. You can turn off his guard dog status at any time. * Buzzlegum can produce honey if you purchase a honey hive and feed it a buttercup. * Chewnicorn can heal a sick Pinata. * Cluckles can sit on an egg and help it hatch faster. * Cocoadile will create "crocodile tears" to help your plants grow. * Goobaa can be sheared for wool if you purchase a shearing shed and feed it poison ivy. * Macaraccoon can go hunting for pink candy. * Moozipan can produce milk if you purchase a milking shed and feed it a daisy. * Taffly will eat any fruit and produce an appropriate colour of fertilizer (click on the.. ahem.. leavings.. to pick it up). Use the corresponding colour of fertilizer to the colour of flower you want to fertilize. Fertilized plants are larger and more hardy. You may always want to keep a few "prey Pinatas" around, even if you don't give them a house - Mousemallows, Cluckles, and Raisants will remain in d emand by a lot of visiting Pinatas throughout the game. 2n) Variants A variant is a mutation, or a special colour of Pinata. They sell for a higher price at the market, and some types of Pinata prefer to eat variants over normal coloured Pinatas. Click on the DS icon on the top right, and go to the Encyclopedia. Go to "Pinatas" and select a species - click on the option for Variant to see what's required for that species. For example, to get a Whirlm variant, you will need to feed your Whirlm a turnip. Variants can breed with normal Pinatas, but will only yield normal offspring. 2o) Evolutions The game only subtly hints at evolution, but certain actions can cause your Pinatas to evolve. Feeding a buttercup to a Sparrowmint creates a Candary - a completely new species of bird Pinata. Romancing two of these newly evolved Pinatas will unlock new achievements/romance cinemas. Evolved Pinatas won't romance with their predecessors; for example, a Candary won't romance with a Sparrowmint. 2p) Accessories To be honest, I haven't experimented with accessories yet. Sometimes they are required to make a Pinata happy (such as Barkbark's collar), but supposedly they may boost other stats like they do in the 360 version. I will post my findings later if somebody else does not write a guide for accessories in the DS version. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Section 3: Creating Items =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Sometimes, a Pinata requires an item that isn't available at the store (for example, a banana split). When you unlock a character named Bart (when you click on the shopping basket on the right side of the touch screen, he should be the last option), you are then well on your way to creating new items (and making a lot of money in the process!). Banana Split Created from: Bananas Bread Created from: Corn Carrot Cake Created from: Carrot Cheese Created from: Milk (from Moozipan) Gooseberry Fool Created from: Gooseberry Jack o'Lantern Created from: Pumpkin Jam Created from: Blackberry Medicine: Created from: Honey (from Buzzlegum) Mushroom Created from: Toadstool Peanut Butter Created from: Monkeynut Rainbow Gem Created from: Gem Sandwich Created from: Bread (from corn) Toffee Apple Created from: Apple =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Section 4: FAQs =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= *How much does Pocket Paradise differ from the X-box version? I've only played the demo for the X-box version, but it seems like it's not too different. The progression for the DS is faster, it's a little less complicated, and the touchscreen makes it easier to carry out commands. My opinion is that it makes a much better portable game than a console game, though perhaps a little short. On the downside, though, it seems to be more of a commercial bid at getting people to watch the cartoon - the characters from the series will pop up from time-to-time, though they're not really important, and though fun to watch, the "episodes" are random snippets and usually don't have anything to do with what's going on with your game. *Why do my Pinatas sometimes refuse to eat/romance? Pinatas will not eat or romance before bed. Even if they start doing a "romance dance" in the garden, they may occasionally stop and go to bed without summoning an egg. You will have to wait for them to wake up naturally (sometimes tapping on the house to wake them up will work, but most of the time they will just get unhappy, ignore you, and go back to bed). And of course, Pinatas will refuse to eat if you're accidentally trying to give them something they don't like. *Why is my Pinata just standing there? If your Pinata is not responding at all, it is probably stuck and not eating because it's bedtime. Sometimes Pinatas get stuck in strange places that don't seem obstructed. This can happen because of a new tree that was passable until it matured, or because a non-water Pinata stepped into some water. Try getting the Pinata to move just a few steps instead of calling it a long distance. If water is blocking its path, cover the water with the tamping shovel and then try to coax the Pinata along. Leave it for a day or so - if it doesn't respond to anything, you may need to just sell the Pinata. *I keep seeing unknown Pinatas. How do I get info on them? You probably need to level up, first. You will start seeing some Pinatas at least a level before you're able to attract it to the garden. Then, be sure to keep your garden full of a variety of plants and Pinatas to make it more likely for a species to become interested in visiting. Once a Pinata visits, you will be able to access information in the Encyclopedia on how to get the Pinata to visit. *How do I unlock _______? If it's not on here, I probably do not know. I would like to expand the guide a little bit in the future, but for now, this is all the information I know off the top of my head. You might want to try looking at the X-box 360 guides - even though it's a different game, it may hint at the right direction for whatever you need to do. *So what strategy should I use? The basic strategy is variety - different plants and Pinatas will attract new Pinatas. Keep as many plants in the garden as you can take care of - hire Sprinkling (at the general store) ASAP to keep plants watered, and keep at least one Taffly around to make fertilizer from fruit. Always check for Variations in the Encyclopedia - you can make quite a profit from turning a Pinata into its more expensive version with a simple cheap flower. Don't be afraid to sell what feels like an "obsolete" Pinata. If you find yourself no longer needing Whirlms to attract other Pinatas, sell their house and sell the Pinatas to clear up space for a new species. You can always buy them back later. Check your map often. Check the store often. Pay attention to your top screen. Listen for romance/battle/illness music. Stay on guard, particularly at night, when sours and villians come out to ravage the garden. Just remember - if you grow unhappy with your garden, you can always sell everything and start again. There is no time limit. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= That's it for now - my DS' battery is dead and I'm too lazy to plug the charger back in. Important! The following e-mail address is only to correct mistakes or for input (you will be credited if changes are made). Do not e-mail me for help, I just don't have the time to reply. Julia H., Tanuki Voodoo V 1.0 10/31/2008 tanukivoodoo (at) gmail (dot) com