One of the new additions in Patapon 2 is your own personal hero patapon. In the previous game, you commanded squads. But now you also get a right-hand patapon. And I don't mean that useless little dude who carries the banner. I mean a full-blown fightin' mad patapon who can equip weapons, change classes, fire off special powers, and go on personal quests. You can even name him, but the name is limited to four letters. I wanted to name mine Sancho Panza, but that's more than four letters. So he's Espe. Get it? S.P.?

After the jump, read about Espe's brutal 129th mission.

I've been trying to fight through a wall of ice on the other side of Bryun Snowfield. It's a tough mission for a few reasons. The weather is terrible, so my patapons keep freezing. I've been gradually upgrading them to forms that are resistant to cold, but they still get encased in ice from time to time. It's cold out here. I suppose it doesn't help that we're marching directly into the line of fire from ice cannons carefully situated behind barriers and native soldiers.

The bigger challenge is that we have to fight through closed tunnels in the wall, where there's no overhead space to throw javelins or fire arrows. Archers have been a mainstay for me in nearly every mission. It's always helpful to have them in the rear ranks, showering arrows onto whomever or whatever I'm fighting. But that's not possible in the tunnels. So the archers stay home. After a few failed attempts at getting through the ice wall, I decide to bring along patapons with horns. They attack with large tumbling musical notes. You'd think a musical note could travel through a solid wall, right? Well, sure enough, they can! But my horn patapons, called megapons, weren't upgraded to withstand the weather. They kept freezing. And once we broke out at the far end of the tunnel, they quickly died to enemy arrows from an archers' tower guarding the exit.

It's now my fifth attempt at this mission. I've upgraded the megapons to a 20% freeze resistance. I've upgraded my shield warriors, called tatepons, to an advanced winter fighter called a mofo. Mofos have a 60% freeze resistance. Along with the megapons and tatepons, I've got my beloved cavalry, the kibapons, also kitted out with 20% freeze resistance. You bring three squads into any mission, and these are the three I'm bringing today.

But my ace in the hole is Espe. I give him my best weapon, a thunder sword that increases his damage from 5-17 to 5-32. It also gives him improved chances at critical effects like stunning and knockbacks. I give him my best defensive equipment, a wing shield that nearly doubles the speed of his attacks. But the real treasure is a mask I just found called zugashi. Only heroes can wear masks, and there are varying types and powers of masks. Zugashi is the highest order mask of the stallion, which increases a patapon's hit points. Zugashi nearly doubles Espe's hit points, from 290 to 540. Finally, for Espe's class and type, I set him up as a tatepon mofo. Tell me you don't enjoy saying that out loud. Tatepon mofo. Try it. Tatepon mofo. Yeah? Tatepon mofo. If you play Patapon 2, there's more where that came from.

Before we advance, I hold my patapons back while I build up a beat long enough to invoke the duck and cover juju. In every battle, you can bring along one juju, which is a sort of spell effect you can fire off for a limited time. The duration of the juju is based on how well you play a call-and-response rhythm game with your patapons. The duck and cover juju case raises my patapons' resistance to effects such as freezing. Throughout the battle, I try to make sure it's in effect before I advance to fight under the ice cannons.

We break into the tunnels easily enough. I get past the first ice cannon and its defenders with little problem. Among the things you get from slain enemies in this mission are green flaks that restore my army to full strength. But by the time we reach the middle of the tunnels where I'm hoping to find my first green flask, I've already lost two of my three kibapon. The little guys hit hard when they charge forward on their horses, but they're so brittle that they don't bear up well under counterattacks. I've also somehow lost a third of my tatepons, which is really bad news. When I finally find the healing potions, they patching up the survivors, but they don't replace my casualties. But at least the megapons are working out wonderfully. And best of all, I can see Espe in the jumble of battle, his bright yellow thunder sword wreaking havoc in the tangle of native masks, crashing megapon musical notes, rolling eyes, and wildly swinging weapons.

Pushing towards the exit at the far side of the ice wall, it's slow going trying to make sure I've got the duck and cover juju before advancing into the ice cannons. I miss beats on a few occasions and kill my momentum. Fortunately I can retreat a short distance and the natives don't seem too keen to run me down. But it's not going well. My patapons crash into the solid barriers, tearing them down and then fighting natives while ice cannons bombard them. Sometimes they freeze. Sometimes they die. But as we push on, they prevail.

At the end of the tunnel, we face an elaborately armored general with a hammer that does a massive area attack. Once I've pushed him back - I didn't catch his name, but I'm sure we'll meet again at a later battle - I have no surviving kibapons and only two tatepons alive. My megapons are dangerously exposed and the crazy hammer attack wears them down terribly. At the foot of the archers' tower, it takes only a few volleys of enemy arrows to wipe out my decimated megapon squad. I'm left with Espe and a pair of wounded tatepons to take down a tower that spawns natives and rains down arrow attacks. Should I see it to the bloody end? Or is it time to throw in the towel and come back later after I'm better upgraded for winter fighting?

But I notice that Espe - dear fierce Espe - still has a lot of health left. In fact, he seems pretty impervious to whatever the natives are dishing out. It seems the scary general with his hammer has quit the map, so maybe Espe can hold out. What follows is probably five minutes of me carefully managing the beat, drumming out the duck and cover juju whenever I can, and pressing the attack. Espe camps at the base of the tower and slaps at it with his thunder sword, chipping away at its foundations while the archers on top try to get a good angle down on him. At one point, he even dies, but a single surviving tatepon manages to hold out long enough for Espe to work his way back out onto the field.

By the time the tower is down and the defenders have been killed, Espe is the sole survivor. Well, along with the useless little dude who carries the banner. Everyone else has died. Espe alone survives to tell the tale. The pair of gravediggers at Mater Tree of Life are going to be busy tonight. Luckily, slain patapons pop happily out of the Tree of Life once I get back to Patopolis.

And after five failed attempts, I see how everything came together and played a part in being able to finally push through the wall of ice. The freeze resistance. The megapons' horns. The kibapons clearing the way early on. Espe's mighty zugashi mask. The thunder sword and wind shield. The duck and cover juju. The tatepons' remarkable survivability.

I get a few goodies. Another fire bow and another dream bow. A pair of leather capes for my megapons. A tough horse, which is the first one I've seen. A wind helm and a strength helm. A pair of leather sandals, but I don't seem to have unlocked any patapons who can don footwear. This must mean there are new patapons yet undiscovered. At the fire circle back in where the patapons dance and feast merrily, the priestess Meden proclaims, "That's our Great Tom! Victorious even in the freezing cold!!" It was Espe's 129th mission.

Up tomorrow: the staggering truth
(Click here for the previous game diary entry.)