PaRappa is a two-dimensional dog-like thing in a three-dimensional world with a problem. He’s got a date with some two-dimensional flower-thing. But he doesn’t have any money. Or a car. Or a cake. So what does he do? He sings a lot of songs of course!
Now it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for him to just belt out a song and get a driver’s license or whatever. What he has to do is find a teacher who sings a song to him in little snippets that he has sing back to them with style and panache. Doing that will somehow give him the skills to cut in line to use a port-a-potty, along with the other nearly insane tasks you have to make him do.
I guess the ridiculous story kind of makes sense in its own universe, but that doesn’t really make much less insane.
I’ll admit, though, that I was pretty awful at this game. Mostly because I only played the store demo and then played it one time on my sister’s PlayStation. I’ll attribute the fact that I was pretty awful to my lack of familiarity with the PlayStation buttons. The controller sure felt like a Super NES controller, and I was real familiar with those, but the PlayStation controller is not a Super NES controller. Instead of A, B, X, and Y, we get a circle, a cross, a square, and a triangle. And I never could remember which ones were where. So after I failed spectacularly at the first couple of stages, I just decided to let my sister play through the game while I watched.
Which is way less creepy than I just made it sound.