It just goes to show: If it's made by Rare, you can usually consider it a good game.
When I saw the first gameplay videos for the original Viva Pinata, I was hooked - I wanted to watch the show (which proved entertaining for a while, but quickly faded into another typical cartoon), I watched the gameplay videos for months on end...I was absolutely addicted. When I got the special edition, I was far from disappointed - the gameplay proved entertaining as I suspected, the music was nearly flawless, and the graphics were stunningly vibrant.
As you can imagine, when I discovered there was a sequel in the works, I was desperate to get my hands on it, and when I finally did, I was blown away for a second time. Viva Pinata is one of THOSE games: It doesn't have much substance to begin with, and probably won't charm those who express distaste on their first playthroughs, but absolutely bowls over anyone willing to dig a bit deeper into the game.
Let's begin with the storyline of Trouble in Paradise. Pinata Island is a mythical land where living, breathing Pinatas prosper. On the island is a cannon that all Pinatas are sent to so that they can be shot out to parties and used as Pinatas (not that it hurts them, assuming you care at all). Not all on the island is well, however, and dangers lurk in the darkest corners - sour Pinatas, which look like sinister variations on their normal forms and revel in making other Pinatas sick with sour candy, are mutations created by Professor Pester, a man who wants to have all of the world's candy to himself. Joining these villains are a small cast of lesser antagonists - Dastardos (the Pinata equivalent of the Grim Reaper) and the Ruffians, a group of bumbling island-dwellers who adore destroying gardens.
Professor Pester hatches an evil plan to get all of the island's candy to himself, changing the destinations of every Pinata shot from the aforementioned cannon (henceforth known as the Cannonata) to his volcano hideout. His allies, the Ruffians, make a few stupid mistakes and completely erase the databases of every Pinata on the island. This means that the Pinatas running the island (and yes, it is run by sentient Pinatas) have to get every gardener on the island to fill the databases by collecting information on every Pinata.
With that out of the way, your unnamed-and-unseen character, one of the most humble gardeners on the island, has to work his (or her - it's never specified) way up to the top of the charts by catching Pinatas and getting information on them. In order to get information on the papery creatures, you have to satisfy their desires by filling your gradually-improving garden with a multitude of fruits, vegetables, plants, Pinatas, and good climates. To help you with that, you are given a limitless packet of grass seeds, snow, or sand, along with a shovel that, in time, will allow you to dig through the ground and replace it with water. Gardens are measured in Pinometers, which aren't exactly a good measurement since how much land goes into a Pinometer is never clarified. Nonetheless, it's easier than I make it sound to grow tall grass, make a sandy beach, or freeze everything over.
Here, however, I'd like to address a common, if somewhat minor, complaint: Untamed Pinatas tend to avoid your garden unless you've met a set of requirements, and these requirements are never explained, leaving the player to scratch his or her head (or check the wiki). Nonetheless, this is a relatively minor complaint, and even without the wiki, it's not terribly difficult to determine that you need a smaller amount of everything the aforementioned Pinata needs to stay in order to get it to enter.
With that out of the way, let's move on to the graphics. Simply put, the graphics are absolutely stunning, in spite of how cartoon-like they are; every Pinata is varied in one way or another, and it's easy right from the get-go to figure out which is which. Many aspects of a garden are simple, but far from bland, and if your television screen doesn't practically explode from just how vivid everything is, you've got it set to black-and-white. Everything is given a Pinata-like pattern, from fruits to trees, and each object is uniform - even two polar-opposite Pinatas can blend together quite nicely in any garden.
The game itself is divided into three sections: The main garden, where everything happens, the Dessert Desert, and the Pinarctic. The two regions aside from the main garden allow you to catch Pinatas that you couldn't obtain otherwise, including vultures and lemmings, and while there's not much to be done except cart the trapped Pinatas back and forth, there wouldn't be much of a point to having more than one garden anyway, as all savegames on one account are conjoined - chocolate coins (the game's currency) are shared, gardens are equally-sized in every save, all Pinatas registered in one garden are still registered in the other, and so on and so forth.
The voice-acting in the game isn't much - characters are occasionally irritating, but not terribly distracting - but the voice-acting and the sound quality as a whole are two different creatures. Simply put, hearing occasional squeaks, chitters, chirps, and grunts from Pinatas can almost be considered soothing, and the music sounds perfect for gardening or sleeping, depending on whether or not night has fallen. Most other sounds are simple, ranging from a small 'ding' sound when you properly fertilize a plant to a harsh, discordant pair of notes on a synthesizer to announce the presence of a Pinata-diseasing sour candy.
Even after you're done obtaining every Pinata, there's more to be done - every so often, a 'variant Pinata' will appear, sporting an unusually unique mutation, and feeding some Pinatas certain foods or flowerheads will reward you with a new color for that Pinata. An accessory shop will be open long before you finish, and Pinatas can be dressed up in almost any way you can think of, ranging from a football getup to a princess outfit to a Banjo-Kazooie ripoff. Gardens have truckloads of customization options aside from basics like lakes, grass, trees, and so on and so forth, as a general store is also opened before you reach garden level five. The store proper holds everything imaginable, from balls of wool to disco floor panels to a statue of Banjo and Kazooie to several other in-jokes based upon other Rare titles.
To sum the game up, it's easy to let hours whiz by and just watch everything, but it's even easier to design the most insane garden imaginable, with pink cats wearing Banjo backpacks and a golden dinosaur busily observing the outskirts. It has more than enough content to fill up 100 hours of your life, and it's got an undeniably soothing feeling to it. Simply put, Trouble in Paradise is definitely a game I'd recommend, whether you're ten or fifty-eight years old.