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"The perfect game for pink-haired weirdoes everywhere."

Whoopee Camp’s Tomba! is not the game I thought it would be, which is probably a good thing, since it’s usually nice to be surprised by a game that looks easy enough to pigeonhole. On the face of it, Tomba! is simply a 2D platformer with a few 3D tricks thrown in to convince Sony and the gaming public at large that there’s more than meets the eye here. That would be the case even without the pseudo 3D stuff. What Tomba! really turns out to be is a sort of platformer-RPG hybrid, and it’s a refreshing change of pace from the norm.

The opening movie for Tomba! lets you know right away what sort of madness you’re in for in this game. It’s a terrific looking bit of anime that boils down the theme of the game very nicely: Tomba good, Pigs bad. Apparently, all was well in Tomba’s land until the Evil Pigs came along and started messing up the place. It’s pretty clear from the intro that Tomba is just a wild, pink-haired idiot, and the only reason he’s interested in clobbering these guys is to get back his golden bracelet, which the pigs have stolen. Still, he’s a good person at heart, and he travels across the land helping people who’ve been victimized by the Evil Pigs, with the ultimate goal being to get back what’s his. He meets up with a variety of odd characters, including some very very very old guys who know all about these Evil Pigs.

Tomba’s modus operandi for tackling his enemies is the standard side-scrolling hop-and-bop action that’s been done in platformers for many years. He can take out most of the opposition by jumping on top of them, biting them, and then throwing them away like a sack of garbage. Tomba’s got a lot of different moves other than that, though; he’s a very good climber, and he can cling to most of the walls and other surfaces he runs into in the game. He can also swing from branches like a gymnast, though he’s not exactly graceful. During the course of the game, Tomba picks up a variety of weapons and items that can also be used to take out the baddies.

All in all, he’s got a great mix of actions, but it can be rather difficult to get used to controlling Tomba. Every time he jumps, he automatically goes into his horizontal biting position, and the arc of his descent is kind of funny. It took me a while to figure out how to get him to land where I wanted him to consistently. My only other beef with the controls is that Tomba is a grabby fellow, and he loves to latch himself onto absolutely anything he can, which can be a problem when you’re in an area filled with walls and branches; there are a couple of areas where’s he pretty unmanageable.

Well, the hop-and-bop stuff is only part of the game in Tomba! Tomba! also takes the best, and some of the worst, elements from RPGs, and incorporates them in the action. Most of it revolves around the Events in the game: Events are the quests in Tomba!, and many times you can’t proceed until you’ve fulfilled the requirements for an Event. Most of the Events are rather simple to grasp, since the names of Events often tell you exactly what you’ve got to do. You learn about most Events by talking to people and learning about their problems, and the game keeps track of all the Events you’ve uncovered, which is a big help (there are 130 of them). Of course, it isn’t always so obvious what it is you’ve got to do when faced with an Event, and you’ll often have a large hoard of unfinished Events at once, making it difficult to determine how you should proceed. There are plenty of times while playing Tomba! that I was just wandering around trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, especially when faced with a particularly vague Event; that’s the sort of aimlessness I associate with some open-ended RPGs. The whole Events thing is a neat concept, but it would have been nice if the designers had reigned it in a bit.

Tomba! also features some more traditional RPG elements, such as experience points (here known as Adventure Points). For every enemy that Tomba clobbers, and for every Event he learns of or completes, he picks up Adventure Points. Some areas of the game cannot be accessed until you’ve gotten enough AP under your belt, but unless you’re running away from every enemy and ignoring the Events completely, that’s not going to be much of a problem. It keeps you honest, I suppose. Tomba also has three separate experience meters, and each one corresponds to a certain type of enemy; beating those enemies increases that meter, up to a maximum of 10. This part of the game doesn’t seem fully realized somehow, though maxing out these meters is important for being able to use certain special weapons Tomba finds on his journeys, so filling them up early is a good idea.

Overall, I was really pleased with the mix of gaming elements in Tomba! The world in which they’re used is surprisingly small, but the designers made excellent use of the limited space. The levels are well-constructed, so the inevitable backtracking isn’t as bad as it could have been. The designers did a very good job incorporating background and foreground areas in the game, which seems to be a prerequisite for platformers of the late 90s. There were only a couple of times when it wasn’t obvious that I could venture forward or backward, an improvement over most games (though I feel compelled to point out that I never encountered that problem in Klonoa: Door to Phantomile).

Tomba! is a pretty challenging game, mainly because 1-ups aren’t terribly abundant at the beginning of the game. Most of the setbacks I endured were during the first half of the game; after that, it was pretty much smooth sailing. One interesting thing about Tomba! is that the bad guys aren’t ever waiting at the end of some linear path; instead, they’re hiding somewhere, not always in a terribly logical place, either, and it’s up to you to find them. First, you have to find an Evil Pig Bag that matches the color of the pig you’re after, and that will make their hideout visible when you’re near it. Let me tell you, finding these guys is harder than beating them, and that’s not to say that finding them is all that complicated. Tomba! features some of the wimpiest boss battles I’ve ever seen. For me, the battle with the last Evil Pig lasted a matter of seconds, hardly the sort of finish I was expecting.

The graphics in Tomba! are one of the game’s strongest assets. The game is very rich and colorful, filled with imaginative locales and characters. The in-game graphics don’t match the quality of the animated sequences, but they’re not that far off. The Koma pigs, even though they’re just the grunts for the main bad guys, steal the show. The music in Tomba! wasn’t quite as captivating, though. It’s rather standard fare, and most of it didn’t make any sort of impression on me at all, although some tunes were so annoying that they had me reaching for the volume controls. The sound effects are a little better, with plenty of pig squeals and assorted cartoon noises. Tomba’s got a great laugh, by the way.

Tomba! is a great game that I’d definitely recommend getting if you’re looking for something different. The game is somewhat cutesy, which might turn off some people, but that shouldn’t be a deterrent for serious gamers.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/18/01, Updated 03/18/01