![]() But then you have adventure game logic which only makes sense to the person designing it. That on top of the simple Japanesiness of it all, referencing old folk tales or plays on words that can’t translate, is bad enough. Expository dialogue must have been made up on the spot because it just simply doesn’t make sense. The logic to any of this is anyone’s guess. Once you have the bag, you find doors hidden in certain areas, walk through them, then beat them in basic, boring boss battles that end in a single hit. The pig-wizards are bosses that, in order to find and defeat, require you to collect magic bags to put them in. You find out later that the pigs are hoarding gold for their evil pig-wizard overlords to give them the strength to cast curses on the land….I think. The “story” has Tomba chasing down the evil pigs who stole his golden bracelet. There are 130 quests like this, most of which are even more obtuse.Ī lot of the confusion comes from bad translation of a very Japanese game. There’s not a hint towards any of this in the game. In order to finish the quest, you have to jump on and eat the brown mushroom which turns you silver, wait a few seconds, then the quest will say it’s completed. Then, a brown mushroom sprouts on the spot. To mix it with a red flower, you have to go into your menu and use the blue powder, hop on it and toss it another red flower enemy (which is fiddly as all merciful fuck). Turns out, and I don’t know how the hell anyone figure d this out without a guide, there’s a very specific flower enemy in a single area that it works on. …” the two” what? The Dwarf vaguely mentions turning a red flower blue, and if you’re lucky you’ll have tripped over blue powder by then, but which flowers, where, how do you mix it with the red one? To highlight what the process of playing this Mad Hatter designed game is like Talking to Identical Dwarf NPC#13 by the broken water fountain at Charity Square unlocks the quest “Red + Blue = ?”, which has the description “ Put the two together for something you’ve never seen before.” You run around, jumping on and throwing pigs and other animals, before talking to every NPC you see in order to unlock quests. They give you a map in the pause menu (or rather, one of the pause menus the one you have to press select rather than start or triangle to open), but it doesn’t line up with the world and the text telling you which area is which is in the wrong places. While it looks like a simple 2D Nes platformer at first, Tomba quickly starts trying to move you around in a 3D overworld, having the level noxiously turn if you press up or down at certain doors and crossroads. The kind of inane, illogical bollox that has you performing some arthouse procession across a convoluted map to collect randomly scattered beads to give to some random character for reasons you’ll never understand. Considering there’s bugger all of anything past the first two areas, it’s not just me.īeyond the walls of the demo, Tomba degenerates into a pubic tangle of woeful point n’ click adventure logic side-quests. I rarely use my own screenshots for these articles due to not having a capture card, just using whatever looks fine from Google Images or random Let’s Plays. Remember the weird ass-plants that farted when you grabbed onto them? Well, so do most people who owned the full game because fuck all bothered to play far beyond areas in the demo. It came with PlayStation Magazine in 1998 and gave us a lengthy chunk of gameplay under the name “ Tombi“, because localisation works in mysterious ways sometimes. A sort of surrogate nostalgia gave me implanted fond memories of Tomba, and when I saw it on the Playstation Store I regressed into a base, childlike mentality and thought “WOO YEAH TOMBA TOMBI IS AWESOME!”.īecause damn near everyone had the demo when they got their first Playstation. So what the hell prompted me to play it in first place?Īfter slogging through Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, which upon a replay was the most dragged out one in the original canon, I wanted a platformer that was more snappy, colourful and bright enough to show me where the hell I was going. ![]() It sent me into a state of video game fatigue that has insured I’ve barely touched games in the weeks since playing. 10 excruciating hours of my life were irreversibly spent on Tomba! due to my compulsion to be a completionist with stupid bullshit.
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