// import muimuiHousePoster from ”../../assets/images/locoroco-2006-muimui-house-poster.jpg”; // deleted
The first sketch lives on a PDA. Tsutomu Kouno was on a Tokyo commuter train in late 2004, doodling, when he drew four soft circles piling on top of each other and noticed that rotating the device made them roll. He had spent the previous five years at Japan Studio drawing maps — first for The Legend of Dragoon, then for Ico. He had never directed anything. Within twenty-four months he would ship the most disarming game on the PSP, and within four years he would quietly close the genre he had invented.
What matters about LocoRoco and its 2008 sequel — nearly twenty years after the first one rolled — isn’t that they were charming, or even that they still are. They are the rare case of an Ico-school invention that lived long enough to codify itself before the door closed. The first game asked a question; the second answered it; and then nobody asked it again.
The Sketch That Got Rolled
Kouno took the PDA drawing back to the office and pitched. Twice the higher-ups at Japan Studio said no. “We weren’t able to get across the appeal of the game,” he later remembered, “and so our idea was rejected.” The team spent a month building a prototype that worked — the kind of demo where you tilt the device and the blob does what your hand expected. The third pitch turned. By March 2005 it was a project; by spring 2006 it was a Tokyo Game Show demo of a game called LocoRoco.
The man who led it had three rules: simple, fun, dynamic. The art director Keigo Tsuchiya tried clay, paper, watercolour and ink before he settled on the flat cartoon palette the rest of the world remembers — primary colours, no shading, faces drawn with the kind of conviction that survives a 480-by-272 screen. The whole game was prototyped in Maya from Adobe Illustrator originals: the levels were drawings rotated through a physics engine, the platforming layer added afterwards.
That’s the part everyone knows. The part nobody quite says is what Kouno had been doing before. Ico shipped in 2001 with him on the level-design team — “I worked on PS2 title called ‘ICO’ and also handled map planning,” he told Worthplaying in May 2006, three weeks before LocoRoco launched. By the time he led his first project, he had been thinking for half a decade about what it meant to make a game with no on-screen text, no HUD, no spoken dialogue, no exposition. About environment as character. About a vocabulary built from gesture and atmosphere alone.
LocoRoco is what happens when you take that vocabulary and point it at joy.
Singing in Made-Up
There is a sentence in the 2017 PlayStation Blog oral history of the game that ought to be quoted more often. Kouno: “I actually think that music is more important than graphics in games, so I put a lot of effort into the sound.” This is the design conviction the rest of the game grows out of. The two shoulder buttons tilt the world; everything else is song.
”I wanted to have the lyrics sung in the LocoRoco language, which is just something I came up with so the words won’t mean anything to anyone, no matter where they come from.”
— Tsutomu Kouno, PlayStation.Blog, May 2017
The language is a fiction. Kouno wrote it himself by mangling Japanese katakana until it slipped its origin. He sent the lyrics to Nobuyuki Shimizu and Kemmei Adachi — the two composers also performed most of the instrumentals themselves — along with reggae, soul and R&B records, asking for “live sound” with as little electronic instrumentation as the PSP could afford. The result is a soundtrack that sings differently depending on how many LocoRocos are on screen: each colour has its own vocal track, and the chorus mixes itself as the player splits and reconstitutes the blob. Mouth animations sync to volume. The programmers tried to talk Kouno out of the audio cost. He held the line.
Critics in 2006 reached for the same words. Kristan Reed at Eurogamer, scoring it nine out of ten, called LocoRoco “a truly brilliant realisation of how to take 2D gaming into uncharted territory.” It won two BAFTAs that autumn — Best Children’s Game and Best Character — out of six nominations. (A separate online discourse around the Moja, the dreadlocked enemy creatures, accused the design of golliwog-style caricature; Kouno told MCV/Develop in 2007 he had been “so surprised, so confused” by the reading, and the 2008 sequel kept the design.) Domestic sales were modest — about 170,000 copies in Japan in the first year — but Europe and North America bought enough that Sony greenlit a sequel.
The Question Asked Itself Again
LocoRoco 2 shipped in late 2008. Same studio, same composers, the same round yellow protagonist. Kouno is credited as designer across every reliable source; the directorial credit is murkier than any retrospective lets on. What’s certain is that the man who had built the game’s vocabulary was still at the wheel.
What he did with the second pass is the part nobody quite wrote about at the time. The sequel adds swimming. It adds the squeeze — the ability to flatten the blob into a coin and slide through cracks. It adds branching secret stages, four-player ad-hoc multiplayer, a building-block hub called the MuiMui House, rhythm interludes spliced into cutscenes, a Stinky LocoRoco that repels enemies, and song variants per character colour, so that each LocoRoco’s chorus reads like a different cover of the same record. The level designs lean into puzzle-platforming where the original had leaned into mood. The whole thing earned a D.I.C.E. nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Portable Game Design and a Metacritic score of eighty-five — two points above the original.
Not all of it lands: the boss fights are pushovers, and the plot Sony layers over the stages reads as bolted-on. The moment-to-moment is where the codification lives, and there the sequel knows exactly what it is.
The reviews are spookily uniform. GameSpot: “very much the same as the first… when the same is this clever, it’s hard to complain.” Pocket Gamer: “essentially, there’s a lot in LocoRoco 2 that’s familiar — and we wouldn’t want it any other way.” IGN, Push Square, and Game Informer all reached for the same compliment. The sequel was redundant, the consensus said, and that was the compliment.
It wasn’t redundant. It was the only complete entry the genre ever got.
The Words Kouno Used
Listen to the same designer at two ends of the same arc. In August 2007, with the first game already a BAFTA winner, Kouno told MCV/Develop: “I understand that there are a lot of barriers for game designers to create original concepts — you really have to fight to do it in this industry. But still, let’s face that challenge! Don’t rely on old concepts or old designs.” That is a manifesto. It is a man writing in primary colour.
In March 2009, three months after the sequel shipped, he told Game Developer something quieter: “Most of the feedback we got from players was really positive so we didn’t want to mess with the original formula too much.”
Both sentences are true. They belong to the same designer. The contradiction is the story.
What the second quote means, read against the architecture of LocoRoco 2, is that the sequel is a designer choosing protection over reinvention — and, by his own admission, the choice was made on purpose. The reception’s “more of the same” reverses cause and effect. The first game wasn’t a finished form the sequel diluted; it was a single experiment the sequel codified. Swimming, squeezing, the MuiMui House, the rhythm minigames — these aren’t bells and whistles. They are the only time anyone got to fill in the genre’s grammar. After this came LocoRoco Midnight Carnival in 2009, a spin-off, then nothing for eight years until the 2017 remasters, and nothing again since.
What’s Left to Play
Both games sit on PlayStation 4 today, remastered in 2017 — the first in May, the second in December. On PS5 backwards compatibility they run at a locked 4K and sixty frames per second, which matters more than it sounds: the physics depend on smoothness, and the original UMD build couldn’t always provide it. They cost £11.99 each on the PlayStation Store and go to £5.99 in PSN sales often enough to make full price feel like impatience. The first game is about ten hours; the sequel is six and a half on the main path, thirteen and a half if you fill the side stages, forty-one if you complete everything. Played as a pair: a long weekend.
If you have never touched either, start with the first. It is the cleaner experiment — the genre’s question asked for the first time, at the level of texture and conviction. Then play the sequel for the answer. The thing you will hear, if you have read this far, is the same songs widening: LocoRoco 2’s soundtrack is mostly the first game’s themes recast per character colour, and that recasting is what codification sounds like. A method, briefly enough at home in itself to riff.
It is rare in games to see the entire lifespan of a small method. Most inventions die of indifference; the ones that don’t are absorbed into franchises that smother them. Kouno’s blob got two games — long enough for the school he came up in to put one foot inside the daylight, long enough for the songs to arrange themselves twice. There is no third LocoRoco, and the way the second one closes — a steadier hand on the formula than on the fight — suggests there was never going to be.
Thirteen hours of yellow blobs singing in a made-up language, drawn by a man who used to plan maps for Ico. That is the whole story.
