Tomba! Special Edition Review
Tokuro Fujiwara’s games can be best described as the games that built Capcom, but after producing Resident Evil which he anointed Shinji Mikami as its shepherd, he left Capcom to pursue games that he wished to make without oversight. His first game after establishing his funnily named studio, Whoopee Camp, was Tomba!; a 1997 PlayStation cult classic.
At the time, Tomba!‘s innovations in 2D game design were not recognized due to the obsession with 3D gameplay that raged on in the 90s. As years passed, 2D adventure games regained popularity, and Tomba! became highly sought-after due to its appealing visuals and engrossing gameplay. It did get a rerelease on PlayStation 3’s PSN as a PS1 Classic, but god help the poor devil who dares to hellscape of seventh gen PSN.
If you tried to get a physical copy of Tomba! on PlayStation, expect to pay absurd amounts of money. Thankfully, Limited Run Games has scooped it up and intends to make it available and affordable in a new Special Edition. How special is this rerelease of one of the best 2D action platformers on PlayStation? How does it fare on Nintendo Switch? Was Tomba! good in the first place? Find out in our Tomba! Special Edition review!
Tomba! Special Edition
Developer: Whoopee Camp, Limited Run Games
Publisher: Limited Run Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment, MonkeyPaw Games, GungHo Online
Platforms: Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation (as Tomba!), PlayStation 3 (via PSN Classics), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: August 1, 2024
Price: $19.99
Tokuro Fujiwara was one of the best talents at Capcom during the 1980s and throughout the mid-90s. During his tenure, he was the producer and director of many of Capcom’s greatest hits and established several franchises that are still going strong today. Titles like Bionic Commando, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, multiple spin-offs, Mega Man games, and many Disney games were his projects, as well as creating Resident Evil.
If there was any way to describe his game design signature, is that they usually could be pretty hardcore. Most of his games were unbelievably brutal but with Tomba!, he aimed to make a more easy-going adventure but still would challenge players by incorporating free-roaming and adventure game elements. Instead of relentless enemy spawning and pixel-perfect platforming, Tomba! invited gamers to explore and interact with the world to progress.
The story is about what you would expect for a 90s-era Japanese action platformer starring a spikey pink-haired who grapples with evil pigs. Tomba is almost Sonic-like in his design and has punk flair. He is a simple guy who enjoys ham and getting into brawls and swings a spiked flail. In his stark charming simplicity, he is a perfect video game character.
What makes Tomba! such an enjoyable experience is how it melds adventure gameplay with metroidvania elements. For a title from 1997, it is surprisingly efficient and has no fluff. The game does offer a lot of freedom to play at your own pace and room to bypass certain sequences entirely.
Tomba can climb on walls, swing on branches, and most importantly, he can jump into the background if there is a wall. This is important because the level design is more three-dimensional than most 2.5D platformers and will feature our punky wild child exploring multiple angles of a stage.
There are moments where Tomba! doesn’t even look like a platformer at all and the POV will switch to an overhead RPG view with prerendered backgrounds. There are even classic JRPG-style towns with NPCs, sidequests, and enterable houses. The way the game constantly throws ideas at the player keeps it feeling fresh and interesting.
Like in other Fujiwara games, there is some key-item hunting where Tomba has to find a thing and put it in a thing. He might have to seek out some switches that will activate something else in another part of the world. Other times he might have to go ride on a pig car through a dirt track like a hillbilly. The sheer variety packed into the game always keeps players on their toes and guessing what will they come across next.
Tomba! has RPG elements where he can grow and learn new abilities like swimming and even learning languages. He learns some abilities through some actions by progressing through the game, but some are learned through gaining AP. Completing “Events”, earns points which can lead to gaining other abilities. AP can also be earned from defeating foes and bosses, but the most efficient method is to play naturally.
Unless you had the instruction manual, the way Tomba earns AP to gain abilities will seem confusing. While playing through the tutorial area, there is no explanation and the start of Tomba! Special Edition only explains the controller layout. Thankfully, Limited Run Games thought to include a museum section that includes scans of the English manual. It would have been more convenient if there was an explanation during the main game.
The core game in Tomba! Special Edition is superb, but the “special edition” subtitle is grossly overselling what you get. This is a very safe and bare-bones port that does come with two music options, a production art gallery, and interviews with Fujiwara and composer, Harumi Fujita. Don’t expect any cut or added content, visual updates, or graphical enhancements; this is Tomba! as it looked like in 1997 for the most part.
There aren’t any widescreen options; the aspect ratio is 4:3 and choice for stretching the image if you are a sicko. The load times are still present and accounted for, but they are exactly as they were on PlayStation. It would have been nice if there were CRT filter options to better capture the 1997 look and feel of analog picture quality, but thankfully, Tomba! still looks awesome with a raw image.
The most notable additions are the QOL features like the ability to save anywhere and the rewinding function which can be handy for scrubs who refuse to learn how to play. The drop menu for some of the emulation features is questionably designed though since it is almost impossible to tell what you’re highlighting.
The anime cutscenes appear to have been fed through an AI to clean them up and most of the results look pretty good. The thing is that they did not do this for all the cutscenes and you end up with some that have some brutal compression artifacts. It is an unfortunate situation since the original negatives for the animation are probably lost and long gone and this is probably the best we can hope for.
The biggest knock against Tomba! Special Edition is its inconsistent use of confirm and cancel buttons. The main menu and save screen adhere to the standard Nintendo Switch configuration of A to accept and B to cancel. However, during gameplay, this is reversed, as A becomes cancel and B becomes accept. This inconsistency stems from the original PlayStation controls, where cross was confirm and circle was cancel, which are swapped on the Nintendo Switch controller.
This can be annoying since you will have to rethink what you’re pressing and will make mistakes as you get accustomed to which layout is being used. Tomba! does have some inventory screens which will inevitably lead you to cancel out selections you did not intend to. It is a weird oversight that should have committed to one or the other, not both.
Tomba! Special Edition is not so much a special edition, as it is just a solid port/emulation that comes with an optional remastered soundtrack that is a legitimate improvement over the original. If you always wanted to play Tomba! but could never afford the outrageously gouged PlayStation disc or missed your chance on PlayStation 3, Tomba! Special Edition
