Review #214: Tomba! 2 - The Evil Swine Return

 Why won't these pigs play nice?!

 Y'know which game is even rarer and more expensive than Tomba!? Tomba! 2. Released about two years after the first game, Tomba! 2 is a bit 'by the numbers' as far as sequels go, it doesn't shake the formula too much, not that it needed to.

 The story has Tomba! and his companion Zippo the Fly, remember him from the first game in which he didn't appear nor was mentioned in the first one? Yeah, that Zippo, as they embark on a quest to save Tomba's girlfriend, y'know, the one that didn't appear nor was mentioned in the first one, from the Evil Pigs. Yes, it's basically the same story from the last game, Evil Pigs invade the Island, curse different parts of it, and steal(In this case, Kidnap) something of Tomba's, and now he must collect the different Pig Bags and challenge the five Evil Pigs. Yeah, we lost two Pigs, but never fear, as Tomba 2 is a bigger game than its predecessor. It's easy to tell that this time around they tried to have a better story, but both the script and voice acting are fairly terrible, and the translation's quality is quite... dubious. On the flip-side, you don't play games like Tomba for the story, so it's no real loss here, plus, the ending was so corny that I kept alternating between laughs and cringes!

 The game plays just like Tomba! 1 but with more bells and whistles. For the uninitiated, Tomba! is a 2.5 D Metroidvania-like Adventure game, in which you travel around an Island searching for items and abilities that will let you progress or interact with previously inaccessible areas or items. Remember how the last game had 130 quests? Tomba has 133, and an extra 4 if you have a cleared Tomba! 1 save file on the memory card. And here comes my first issue with the game... it does little to fix or polish Tomba! 1's shortcomings. While it is true that you get better hints as to how to complete most quests, it also has more quests that will require a guide than Tomba! 1. There's absolutely no way to tell where the 3 hidden Towers are, and the place in which they hid the Water Pig's Plate is just mean, protip: head for Circus village and travel underground to the Water Temple, you are welcome. That said, there's a lot more variety in the Events themselves, and some will have you travelling across the entire Island, which could be seen as a detriment if you really aren't digging the game enough to enjoy the backtracking. In my case, I didn't mind it, I went through the entire Island(Or what I had explored to the point) every time I got a new Key or ability-granting item, and I never got tired of doing it, a testament to how much fun the game can be.

 While it kept the last game's shortcomings, the developers instead opted on adding more stuff. There's more weapons, even though they are almost as useless as they were in the first one, almost, since now they have uses on the environment or to defeat elemental enemies that hurt you if you try to jump on them. Tomba also gets to equip different costumes this time around that grant him different abilities, like the Pig Suit that lets him talk with pigs or the Squirrel suit that let's him glide. I spent most of the game as Squirrel Tomba, since it's the most useful, but it's a nice idea non the less and some might prefer the swiftness of the Flying Suit, or would rather fall faster as normal Tomba. The laughing and crying mechanics from the previous games return, this time in the form of fruits as opposed to mushrooms, but they behave in the exact same way, and you can eventually get the same 'Mystery' and 'Normal' fruits so that you can change your state as will. And this is something that bothered me a bit, it revisits a lot of ideas from Tomba! 1, to the point of almost feeling slightly tacky. The four different keys for the four different chests returns, Tomba needs to get the swimming ability again, the grappling hook returns, the pig bags/evil pig dynamic, a frustrating on-wheels event. It is mostly a nitpick, as it's not a dealbreaker, but this being a sequel, I expected it to borrow only the basics, and then build as much as new things as possible. I though the Laughing/Crying mechanics were very interesting in the last game, but they really didn't need to return.

 It's not all bad though. I enjoyed the new Island, and it offers a lot more variety in environments than the first game. There's the initial beach, an underground city, a jungle, an ice-covered town and the Water Temple to name a few, and they all feature vastly different structures and color schemes, which makes traversing through the Island very appealing. It also does away with the life system from the previous game, instead opting for unlimited lives, and while you do see the 'Game Over' screen, you don't lose any progress. Boss Fights have been slightly revamped, for the worse I feel, as most of the time you'll be throwing the pigs towards the bag on the foreground, which works as well as you expect. They are not hard, but they can last a bit longer than they need to.

 While the last game used 2D sprites for characters, Tomba 2! only uses sprites for the items. The new 3D models look great, and the environments look just as good. It doesn't just look good for an old PS1 game, it simply is a good looking game. The music is delightful, with a lot of tunes that are still stuck in my head. The game also employs voice acting and it's.... it goes from passable to terrible depending on the character, but hey, at least it's fully voiced.

 I know that I ragged on the game a lot, but I actually really really liked it. It could've done plenty of things better, but what it excels in what it does well. Finding and clearing Events is as satisfying as ever, and sure, you may need some outside help, but I wasn't too bothered by it. It's probably not good as a sequel, since it's a bit too samey to it, but looking at it without the comparison, it's a great game, in fact, I liked it slightly better than the first one. It's definitely not worth the price that it commands now, but hey, if you can get it by other means(PSN, Emulation), it's a great PS1 game that deserves a go.
 9.0 out of 10.