Romance

Romance is the method used in order to breed piñatas in the Viva Piñata series. With only two exceptions, any species can romance, creating an egg to hatch into a baby of the same species.

Since only two members of the same species can join your garden from the wild, romancing is one of the main methods to obtain more members of a species in your garden.

How to Romance

Once you have two of your desired piñata, you can begin the process of romancing them. Every species has different requirements you must fulfill to romance them, such as eating certain foods, having enough of a certain type of terrain, or even wearing certain accessories. No matter what, every species will require their respective piñata house in order to romance, provided by Willy Builder.

Once every requirement has been fulfilled, a pink heart will appear above the piñatas head. The same steps will need to be repeated on the second piñata. Once both piñata have pink hearts, direct one towards the other. Once the two meet, music will play, and you will be brought to the romancing mini-game.

Romance Maze

In order to successfully romance piñata, you will need to complete the Romance Maze. The layout is unique to every species, with rarer piñatas featuring more difficult layouts.

You take control of one of your piñatas, with their partner waiting for them at the other side of the maze. The maze is built with Loathers, bomb-like creatures created by Professor Pester to make romancing more difficult. Hitting a Loather will cause you to lose a life (represented by the piñatas icon. You will begin with 5 lives, but for every piñata of that species present in your garden, you will begin with fewer lives, to a max of 1 life.

To successfully complete the maze, you must navigate around the loathers and reach your partner. Losing all your lives will cause you to fail.

Red Loathers are the standard type, and are the main type that make up the maze. They do not move, and will explode on contact.

Blue Loathers will follow the piñata when they get close, and will keep following if you don't outrun them. They will go to sleep for awhile once they return to their starting position, and won't follow you again until they wake up. Blue Loathers do not explode, and instead electrocute your piñata. Because of this, you can lose multiple lives to the same Blue Loather.

Orange Loathers are asleep, but this doesn't make them any less dangerous. You can move through orange loathers, but only if you go slow enough. If you go too fast, they will wake up and explode.

Sometimes Loathers will be invisible, only visible by some faint sparkles. You may see them by pressing Y, however you cannot move while doing so.

In Viva Piñata, chocolate coins will be scattered around the maze for you to collect. These are optional, and can be ignored while still completing the mini-game.

In Trouble in Paradise, the difficulty of the mazes was increased with the introduction of pink hearts to collect. These replace the coins in the previous game, and a certain amount must be collected before you can meet up with your partner. The amount you need will be indicated by the pink hearts on the left, with the blue hearts representing the total hearts in the level. The number of needed hearts will increase with the number of that species in your garden, similar to your lives decreasing.

Once you have reached the highest difficulty and the number of piñatas needed to obtain the Master Romancer award, these hearts will begin to flash. Collecting every heart in the level while in this state will guarantee the baby born from the egg will be a Wildcard piñata. Completing the mini-game within a certain time limit will reward you with twins.

In Pocket Paradise and TIP’s Just For Fun mode, you do not need to do the maze at all to romance piñatas, and will instead automatically be shown the Romance Dance cutscene.