Review #213: Tomba!

 For some reason, I wanna eat some ham...

 Tomba! is one of those quirky PS1 games that are considered to be really good, but few people talk about it. It's also one of those games that had their price skyrocket due to how rare it has become.

 In Tomba! you play as the eponymous Tomba, a jungle boy that lives, seemingly, alone on a rather large Island. 7 Evil Pigs have banded together to cure the Island in its entirety, and after a run-in with Tomba, they steal his grandfather's bracelet. Now Tomba is out for blood, and the pigs will pay in blood. Or not. Turns out there are 7 different 'Pig Bags' in which Tomba must seal these Pigs, save the Island and recover his bracelet. Simple enough, the story is but a set-up for the adventure, so it really doesn't matter that it ain't particularly original, it never meant to. As with most games of the era, it's about the gameplay, not about telling a story. You'll come across NPCs and other weird folk that inhabit the Island, but none are particularly memorable or deep, not that they need to.

 Tomba! is a very interesting game, and it's a bit complicated to label under any genre, but I guess the best way to describe it is as a 2.5D Metroidvania with heavy Adventure elements. The Island is made up of many interconnected areas, and as with any good Metroidvania, you'll come across obstacles that you can't yet interact with until you get another ability, or as with Adventure games, people that need help, but you haven't found the item that you need yet. Most of these 'sidequests' are called 'Events' and can be triggered in many different ways, some you get automatically after clearing another one, some are triggered by talking with NPCs and some just by interacting with something, be it touching a bonfire or coming across a locked door. There's 130 Events in the game, which includes both Story and optional Events, although just how many of these are 'optional' I'm not sure, as many rewards from seemingly optional sidequests became necessities to clear the game. That said, there's a lot of variety in these, from getting a Jar to collect Tears from a Flower(On which you must use a special Powder to make it cry), to simply capturing an Evil Pig, you can always expect something new. And I really appreciated the creativity in the game,  take the Mushroom Mountain, which has Laughing and Crying fungi, if eaten, it will make Tomba cry or laugh, which will affect the behavior of the enemy flowers and the background flower, which will raise or lower the platforms in the area! That said, there's a tiny little issue I had with Events... when triggering them, most of the time, particularly when they aren't triggered by talking with an NPC, the only hint that you get is the name of the Event and nothing else, so, y'know, it might be hard to figure out what to do on your own sometimes.

 Being a Metroidvania, it means that backtracking is pretty much mandatory, but the game gives you multiple ways to make it less tedious. For instance, 'Charity Wings', items that can teleport you to any place you've already set foot onto, are in abundance, and finishing the Puppy's Event grants you an usable that acts as Charity Wings, but with limitless uses, then there's the four Bells of the old wise men that teleport you to their abodes. Basically, there are many ways to make the trips shorter. That said, there are some events that can boil down to tedium... for instance, there's three different 'experience bars' that, even when maxed at 10, do nothing for Tomba, but you need to get them to 10 if you want to collect three different Gems(Which make up 3 different Events, by the by), and in order to raise them you must defeat enemies by jumping onto them... and it takes about 100 enemies for each Experience bar. There's usually one or two areas filled with enemies that give a particular type of experience, but the fact is that you will, probably, have to grind. There's also an 'AP' counter, that is raised by killing enemies(In any way) or completing events, and these are used to open a couple of 'AP boxes'. It feels as something that they came up with at the last minute, as there's only two of these, that said, if you are like me and go for completion, you won't really have to go out of your way for these.

 Interestingly for a console game of this era, there's kind of a lot of leeway in how you complete objectives. For instance, the first Evil Pig you defeat has to be the green one, as far as I know, but there's a lot of Events that you can complete, or skip, if you so want. Afterwards, which pigs you defeat are pretty much up to you, minus the Navy Blue one, that has to be the last one. There's a lot of freedom in how you tackle most of the game, and that's pretty cool. However, sometimes it can be a bit hard to know where you have to go next, sometimes one of these seemingly Optional Events might be just the quest that holds the item that you need to open up more of the game. It bears mentioning that the game can get kinda challenging at times, some zones more than others. The Stormy Mountain is an absolute nightmare and it comes pretty early in the game, the Mushroom Mountain can get very frustrating, and let's just not talk about the Race.... While the game gives you plenty of lives, most of the times I chose just to 'Reload' my file, just in case, and I'm pretty sure I could've lost all of my lives had I not resorted to it.

 Tomba's main form of defense is to jump on top of enemies and then throw them below him or to the sides(Throwing an enemy onto another will kill both of them), but you can also find weapons in order to aid you. Honestly, weapons are kind of useless. For starters, killing an enemy with weapons doesn't grant you Experience for the Experience gauges, and secondly, killing an enemy with the BlackJack takes 3 hits, while jump-and-throw kills them instantly. There's really only two weapons that you'll use, the Grappling hook, to grapple around, and the GrappleJack, a fusion of the BlackJack and the Grapple that kills most enemies in one hit, but you get it fairly late in the game, kinda. Every Boss in the game is fairly easy, and while the obstacles and attacks change, you just need to jump on top of the Evil Pig and throw him into the rotating or moving bag, and you are done. Even the last boss is beaten in this manner.

 As far as the presentation goes, I was left fairly unimpressed. There's not a whole lot of variety in the jungle, as far as colors go, with mostly colorful greens and browns. I wasn't particularly fond of the 2D sprites either, they are not bad by any means, but they lacked a certain... punch? Or maybe more creativity in the enemies themselves? I can't quite put my finger on it, but the spritework in the game leaves a bit to be desired. The music wasn't very good, there were a couple of tunes that actually annoyed me a bit.

 As much as I didn't care for the presentation, the gameplay is solid, and the game itself is very entertaining, it does feel like an adventure. I liked its twist on the Metroidvania genre, and while some things could've used better hints, fumbling around trying to clear Events was pretty dang fun, to the point that I would often walk all the way through the entire Island on foot every time I got a new ability or Key. Is it 100$ worth of fun? Probably not, but if you don't mind the inflated price, it's a blast.
 8.5 out of 10.