i meet the most interesting people while playing this game and I wouldn't ever trade the amount of time I've put into this game for the world
it gets kinda boring but it's very cute and there is a lot to do, i've heard it's faithful to toontown online as well
Took down a 500 person server with some friends by playing Chinese checkers
if you think about it it's kind of like signalis
Best Game Ever
The best multiplayer game ever made! Play it right now!
You know that one game that you just know is not all that good, a game that you would never recommend to anyone because of how tedious and repetitive it can be, yet you yourself just can't bring yourself to hate for some unexplained reason beyond nostalgia and the aesthetic? Well, I have a few of those games, and if I were to make a list of favorite "outdated" games, Toontown would definitely be on the list.
Toontown is a game created by Disney as their first attempt to get into the MMO market using their iconic properties of Mickey Mouse and his friends. The appeal of the game is to be able to create your own character, a "toon" as they call it, and interact with the iconic characters although the truth is that they don't really add up all that much and is mostly there for aesthetic. They get a few lines, but don't really contribute to the premise of the game, and as Toontown Rewritten has proven, you can take them out and nothing would change.
The real core of the game is an ongoing war between toons and machinations known as cogs. These machines seek to take out all the fun from Toontown and its civilians, rendering them unhappy and under their servitude. But they have one major flaw, they cannot take a joke. That's where you come equipped with gags and unleash them to make them explode from all the frustration and annoyance of it. But what are your gags?
Being a turn based RPG, you select your attack amongst what's in your inventory. You start out with Throw and Squirt. Throw consists of pies and cakes that you can hurl at your foes to deal pretty respectable damage although the accuracy won't always be reliable. Squirt consists of spraying your enemies with water which doesn't deal as much damage, but the accuracy is much more reliable, making it a great sure-fire way to finish off low-health cogs.
Along the way, you are able to acquire 5 other gags which include Toon-Up, Trap, Lure, Sound, and Drop each of which having their strengths and weaknesses.
Toon-Up is a very valuable gag as it heals your allies for a respectable amount which can be useful in long lasting battles and especially in Cog Buildings, but it cannot target yourself and sometimes it'll dud which means healing for far less than it should. The Megaphone (the level 2 gag), for example, lets you create a joke which is supposed to clever and get a good chuckle that it would heal for around 15-18 (depending on where you are in the experience points), but sometimes it'll just heal for 2 because the punchline made no sense what so ever. Regardless, it is still very valuable and you should have at least one person who has it readily available for any long battles.
Trap lets you place down a very powerful preemptive attack that activates upon using Lure, and while this sounds great. In solo play it's a risk because you need to take one turn to set it up which will leave up susceptible to attacks, and even then, you have to count on Lure to actually land because unless you have the "organic" variant (more on that later), it is very inaccurate. I'm talking like Zap Cannon and Dynamic Punch in Pokemon levels of inaccuracy (50%) for the first two gags.
Lure does have another benefit beyond being a Trap trigger which is to stun your foes for a few turns and if you can get it to land, you can lock them in place for a few turns perhaps while you flail at another foe or alternatively, hurl pies or spray water for bonus damage. Be wary that Sound does not benefit from this and snaps them back to reality, and Drop will always miss. Note that Throw and Squirt will cause the stun to expire.
Sound is the AoE gag that deals damage to all Cogs, but the damage is even lower than Squirt. In Group Play, this is a great gag to weaken your foes to let your allies potentially finish off multiple cogs at once.
Drop has very high damage and unlike Trap doesn't need assistance from another gag, but it's very inaccurate although landing one is both satisfying and hilarious.
The organic variant of these gags improve the overall potency which may include a boost in damage or even sometimes accuracy boosts, but they are much more difficult to obtain since you need to plant them in a garden at your estate, but it could be very useful to keep in mind if you want to optimize for certain scenarios.
You can level them up by landing a successful hit and as you level up your gags, you get better versions of those gags. So you start out with a Cupcake and a Squirt Flower, but after hitting enemies 10 times with each of those gags you get access to a slice of berry pie and a glass of water which deal more damage although you only carry five of them until you get to the next level. Another thing? The experience rate gets higher and it gets exponentially higher.
Like I said for Throw and Squirt, you need to hit cogs ten times with your first set of gags. Ok. At level 2 you gain 2 points for using level 2 gags and 1 point for using level 1 gags. You get where this is going?
Ok, at level 2, the exp that it takes to get from 2 to 3 increases to 50 which means you need to hit cogs 25 times with your level 2 gags, bearing in mind you can only carry 5 while at this level. If you used up 10 of your Cupcakes and 5 of your Berry Pies, you would gain 20 exp points without having to restock at the gag shop.
This doesn't seem too bad. But once you get to Level 3, the exp to get to Level 4 becomes 400 which means now you need to hit 116 Cogs with your Level 3 gags alone although now you can hold 10 Berry Pies which means that 3 x 5 is 15 and 2 x 10 is 20. Add them up and its a 35 and 400 divided by 35 means you'll need to make an estimated 11 full trips to the Gag Shop after expending all of your gags.
If that's somehow not tedious enough keep in mind that you won't always get a chance to expend all of your gags in one session in lane as you may need to go back and heal which requires you to scour for and pick up health packs, and also the battles can be kinda slow as it's not like a real time action MMO like World of Warcraft where you take down a mob and quickly move on to the next. You and your opponent has to take turns attacking which plays an animation for both you and the cogs and it can get longer the more cogs you have facing against you as well as if your allies are using different gags with the turn order. Side note, if you are trying to level up Squirt, and if your ally uses Throw to finish off a cog, you won't get a chance to attack and gain experience. The turn order, for the record is Toon-Up, Trap, Lure, Sound, Throw, Squirt, and Drop which will then give Cogs a turn to strike if you haven't taken them down.
Oh and not only do you have to watch you and your allies make their moves, not only do you have to watch the cogs make their moves, not only do you have to watch them explode, you have to watch you and your allies dance while displaying their results including exp gain, the quests they achieve, and it's not just your quest, but the allies quest as well. And in case you didn't think it could get any worse, once you get to Level 4, the exp it takes to get to Level 5 is 2000! That pretty much means having to use your Level 4 gag 450 times! And just know that it gets much worse from here and just remember, that's just one gag out of six gags you need to level up and they don't fare much better and are even more tedious than Throw and Squirt are.
So you're probably wondering why in toon's name would they make something this tedious. Well, the answer lies in what the game used to be. It's a subscription based game that wants the parents of the kids to pay around 10 dollars a month to access the full game. Beforehand you are only given access to Toontown Central which if you know what you're doing, you can knock it out in a few hours flat. For a kid it's more tedious given how they don't have as much game time given school, parental regulations, and just living their normal lives playing other games, playing with friends or siblings, and other interests and kids won't always know the most optimal route.
Of course, they need to drag out the game for all that it's worth, so once you got to Donald's Dock, the game starts to exponentially pick up on its grind and tedious aspect. Like there are points where they'll have you run back and forward to clear a task, then they'll have you clear out a few cogs usually of a specific kind, and then you'll get your reward. This isn't such a big deal since I believe Toontown Rewritten adds a sprint feature to make navigation just a little faster. But once you get to Daisy's Garden, that's where they will do what I call "cop-outs". What I mean is that you think you'll have completed a quest to get your reward, but it turns out, "nah, now you need to do this again or do this again but even harder".
Like for example, I thought I finally got a key from a Mingler which I went through the trouble of hunting because you can only find them in buildings, factories, and invasions. I got one during an invasion, but the invasion ended last minute. I thought "Ok, I got what I need, now to turn it in". Guess what?! They told me that I got the "wrong key" and need to get the "right key" by taking down the Mingler, and when I went through the trouble of hunting another Mingler in a Sellbot building which won't always have them available, they won't have the courteousy to always drop them as I've learned when I finally encountered one again and it didn't drop. It is so bizarre and frustrating. But this isn't just a one time thing. When I went through the trouble of finding a group to do two cog buildings with, I was told to do two more cog buildings, but now they have to be 2+ story. You can really tell the game was trying to drag on the length because of the subscription model that it ran on.
So if the battle system is so unfun, why do I consider the overall game so enjoyable? Well, there is a lot of fun to have through other aspects like the community, the mini-games, and the comedy.
While I haven't quite made any real friends in Toontown, I really enjoy the community of the game. It's really friendly although you may run into the occasional political meme discussions, but that's pretty much to be expected for all online communities really. It even compliments the battle system quite well as there are times where you might be in a bad situation because more cogs came to you when you don't want them to, but a random passerby comes in and helps save the day with a Toon-Up or maybe just contribute to the damage. Now that feels really good, particularly when you're the one doing the saving.
The mini-games are pretty enjoyable too. You have fishing which is a simple aiming game which could be useful for farming jelly beans. You have trolley mini-games which can have a variety of minigames as well as difficulties depending on where you ride the Trolley. You can race which is not that fluid compared to Mario Kart or other racing games even from the 90s, but hey, for 2003 it must have been cool to just race it out online. Lastly, you have mini-golf which works pretty well and definitely a favorite for me.
And really, the game is just really funny. Even if the battle system is just not that exciting, just something about flinging pies, telling jokes whether they're clever or nonsensical, and dropping weights is just so amusing. Even the community can make up their own comedy like that one dude who wanted to run a campaign for mayor while having a bunch of multiboxers (or just really well-coordinated people) and briefly for one second mentioning he was going to eat your soul. It was so wild.
At the end of the day, it's the nostalgia that keeps me coming back. Not necessarily reminiscing the "good ol days", but the desire to get back online and finish what I started all those years ago. I still haven't cleared a Sellbot Tower attack at the time of writing this and I'm still not even in a position to do the Factory, but I figured I write this review now because spirits knows how long it'll be before I get to the end and do everything. I may go on a few hiatus from the game just to focus on the multitude of other games and even books and TV shows I have on my backlog, but as my mantra goes, I don't always finish things on time, but I'll always eventually finish it.
Toontown is a game created by Disney as their first attempt to get into the MMO market using their iconic properties of Mickey Mouse and his friends. The appeal of the game is to be able to create your own character, a "toon" as they call it, and interact with the iconic characters although the truth is that they don't really add up all that much and is mostly there for aesthetic. They get a few lines, but don't really contribute to the premise of the game, and as Toontown Rewritten has proven, you can take them out and nothing would change.
The real core of the game is an ongoing war between toons and machinations known as cogs. These machines seek to take out all the fun from Toontown and its civilians, rendering them unhappy and under their servitude. But they have one major flaw, they cannot take a joke. That's where you come equipped with gags and unleash them to make them explode from all the frustration and annoyance of it. But what are your gags?
Being a turn based RPG, you select your attack amongst what's in your inventory. You start out with Throw and Squirt. Throw consists of pies and cakes that you can hurl at your foes to deal pretty respectable damage although the accuracy won't always be reliable. Squirt consists of spraying your enemies with water which doesn't deal as much damage, but the accuracy is much more reliable, making it a great sure-fire way to finish off low-health cogs.
Along the way, you are able to acquire 5 other gags which include Toon-Up, Trap, Lure, Sound, and Drop each of which having their strengths and weaknesses.
Toon-Up is a very valuable gag as it heals your allies for a respectable amount which can be useful in long lasting battles and especially in Cog Buildings, but it cannot target yourself and sometimes it'll dud which means healing for far less than it should. The Megaphone (the level 2 gag), for example, lets you create a joke which is supposed to clever and get a good chuckle that it would heal for around 15-18 (depending on where you are in the experience points), but sometimes it'll just heal for 2 because the punchline made no sense what so ever. Regardless, it is still very valuable and you should have at least one person who has it readily available for any long battles.
Trap lets you place down a very powerful preemptive attack that activates upon using Lure, and while this sounds great. In solo play it's a risk because you need to take one turn to set it up which will leave up susceptible to attacks, and even then, you have to count on Lure to actually land because unless you have the "organic" variant (more on that later), it is very inaccurate. I'm talking like Zap Cannon and Dynamic Punch in Pokemon levels of inaccuracy (50%) for the first two gags.
Lure does have another benefit beyond being a Trap trigger which is to stun your foes for a few turns and if you can get it to land, you can lock them in place for a few turns perhaps while you flail at another foe or alternatively, hurl pies or spray water for bonus damage. Be wary that Sound does not benefit from this and snaps them back to reality, and Drop will always miss. Note that Throw and Squirt will cause the stun to expire.
Sound is the AoE gag that deals damage to all Cogs, but the damage is even lower than Squirt. In Group Play, this is a great gag to weaken your foes to let your allies potentially finish off multiple cogs at once.
Drop has very high damage and unlike Trap doesn't need assistance from another gag, but it's very inaccurate although landing one is both satisfying and hilarious.
The organic variant of these gags improve the overall potency which may include a boost in damage or even sometimes accuracy boosts, but they are much more difficult to obtain since you need to plant them in a garden at your estate, but it could be very useful to keep in mind if you want to optimize for certain scenarios.
You can level them up by landing a successful hit and as you level up your gags, you get better versions of those gags. So you start out with a Cupcake and a Squirt Flower, but after hitting enemies 10 times with each of those gags you get access to a slice of berry pie and a glass of water which deal more damage although you only carry five of them until you get to the next level. Another thing? The experience rate gets higher and it gets exponentially higher.
Like I said for Throw and Squirt, you need to hit cogs ten times with your first set of gags. Ok. At level 2 you gain 2 points for using level 2 gags and 1 point for using level 1 gags. You get where this is going?
Ok, at level 2, the exp that it takes to get from 2 to 3 increases to 50 which means you need to hit cogs 25 times with your level 2 gags, bearing in mind you can only carry 5 while at this level. If you used up 10 of your Cupcakes and 5 of your Berry Pies, you would gain 20 exp points without having to restock at the gag shop.
This doesn't seem too bad. But once you get to Level 3, the exp to get to Level 4 becomes 400 which means now you need to hit 116 Cogs with your Level 3 gags alone although now you can hold 10 Berry Pies which means that 3 x 5 is 15 and 2 x 10 is 20. Add them up and its a 35 and 400 divided by 35 means you'll need to make an estimated 11 full trips to the Gag Shop after expending all of your gags.
If that's somehow not tedious enough keep in mind that you won't always get a chance to expend all of your gags in one session in lane as you may need to go back and heal which requires you to scour for and pick up health packs, and also the battles can be kinda slow as it's not like a real time action MMO like World of Warcraft where you take down a mob and quickly move on to the next. You and your opponent has to take turns attacking which plays an animation for both you and the cogs and it can get longer the more cogs you have facing against you as well as if your allies are using different gags with the turn order. Side note, if you are trying to level up Squirt, and if your ally uses Throw to finish off a cog, you won't get a chance to attack and gain experience. The turn order, for the record is Toon-Up, Trap, Lure, Sound, Throw, Squirt, and Drop which will then give Cogs a turn to strike if you haven't taken them down.
Oh and not only do you have to watch you and your allies make their moves, not only do you have to watch the cogs make their moves, not only do you have to watch them explode, you have to watch you and your allies dance while displaying their results including exp gain, the quests they achieve, and it's not just your quest, but the allies quest as well. And in case you didn't think it could get any worse, once you get to Level 4, the exp it takes to get to Level 5 is 2000! That pretty much means having to use your Level 4 gag 450 times! And just know that it gets much worse from here and just remember, that's just one gag out of six gags you need to level up and they don't fare much better and are even more tedious than Throw and Squirt are.
So you're probably wondering why in toon's name would they make something this tedious. Well, the answer lies in what the game used to be. It's a subscription based game that wants the parents of the kids to pay around 10 dollars a month to access the full game. Beforehand you are only given access to Toontown Central which if you know what you're doing, you can knock it out in a few hours flat. For a kid it's more tedious given how they don't have as much game time given school, parental regulations, and just living their normal lives playing other games, playing with friends or siblings, and other interests and kids won't always know the most optimal route.
Of course, they need to drag out the game for all that it's worth, so once you got to Donald's Dock, the game starts to exponentially pick up on its grind and tedious aspect. Like there are points where they'll have you run back and forward to clear a task, then they'll have you clear out a few cogs usually of a specific kind, and then you'll get your reward. This isn't such a big deal since I believe Toontown Rewritten adds a sprint feature to make navigation just a little faster. But once you get to Daisy's Garden, that's where they will do what I call "cop-outs". What I mean is that you think you'll have completed a quest to get your reward, but it turns out, "nah, now you need to do this again or do this again but even harder".
Like for example, I thought I finally got a key from a Mingler which I went through the trouble of hunting because you can only find them in buildings, factories, and invasions. I got one during an invasion, but the invasion ended last minute. I thought "Ok, I got what I need, now to turn it in". Guess what?! They told me that I got the "wrong key" and need to get the "right key" by taking down the Mingler, and when I went through the trouble of hunting another Mingler in a Sellbot building which won't always have them available, they won't have the courteousy to always drop them as I've learned when I finally encountered one again and it didn't drop. It is so bizarre and frustrating. But this isn't just a one time thing. When I went through the trouble of finding a group to do two cog buildings with, I was told to do two more cog buildings, but now they have to be 2+ story. You can really tell the game was trying to drag on the length because of the subscription model that it ran on.
So if the battle system is so unfun, why do I consider the overall game so enjoyable? Well, there is a lot of fun to have through other aspects like the community, the mini-games, and the comedy.
While I haven't quite made any real friends in Toontown, I really enjoy the community of the game. It's really friendly although you may run into the occasional political meme discussions, but that's pretty much to be expected for all online communities really. It even compliments the battle system quite well as there are times where you might be in a bad situation because more cogs came to you when you don't want them to, but a random passerby comes in and helps save the day with a Toon-Up or maybe just contribute to the damage. Now that feels really good, particularly when you're the one doing the saving.
The mini-games are pretty enjoyable too. You have fishing which is a simple aiming game which could be useful for farming jelly beans. You have trolley mini-games which can have a variety of minigames as well as difficulties depending on where you ride the Trolley. You can race which is not that fluid compared to Mario Kart or other racing games even from the 90s, but hey, for 2003 it must have been cool to just race it out online. Lastly, you have mini-golf which works pretty well and definitely a favorite for me.
And really, the game is just really funny. Even if the battle system is just not that exciting, just something about flinging pies, telling jokes whether they're clever or nonsensical, and dropping weights is just so amusing. Even the community can make up their own comedy like that one dude who wanted to run a campaign for mayor while having a bunch of multiboxers (or just really well-coordinated people) and briefly for one second mentioning he was going to eat your soul. It was so wild.
At the end of the day, it's the nostalgia that keeps me coming back. Not necessarily reminiscing the "good ol days", but the desire to get back online and finish what I started all those years ago. I still haven't cleared a Sellbot Tower attack at the time of writing this and I'm still not even in a position to do the Factory, but I figured I write this review now because spirits knows how long it'll be before I get to the end and do everything. I may go on a few hiatus from the game just to focus on the multitude of other games and even books and TV shows I have on my backlog, but as my mantra goes, I don't always finish things on time, but I'll always eventually finish it.
Lock down classic
Great when you are just screwing around in the playgrounds or playing minigames!
Great when you are finished with your main tasks and can access the Cog headquarters!
Fucking miserable when you are actually trying to finish your main tasks!
I copy-pasted the above sentences from my log of the original Toontown because this version barely does anything to change my stance!
Great when you are finished with your main tasks and can access the Cog headquarters!
Fucking miserable when you are actually trying to finish your main tasks!
I copy-pasted the above sentences from my log of the original Toontown because this version barely does anything to change my stance!
Toontown Rewritten is a great game in terms of the passion and art put into it. The communal aspect and gameplay loop is addicting, but tiring. It's one of those games where its a chore to play but you don't know why you keep going back to it. No one ever quits Toontown, they take breaks.
Review in progress:
Essentially Toontown Online with a small handful of changes and no subscription fee. Extremely dated by today's standards and unlikely to appeal to anyone that didn't play the original as a kid.
Essentially Toontown Online with a small handful of changes and no subscription fee. Extremely dated by today's standards and unlikely to appeal to anyone that didn't play the original as a kid.
one time someone flirted with me and it scared me
anyway its fun and i enjoy grinding jellybeans until my fingers fall off so i can buy a silly hat for my duck character
anyway its fun and i enjoy grinding jellybeans until my fingers fall off so i can buy a silly hat for my duck character
Beautiful to see the fans kept this classic alive. Even with the fact that the Disney references had to be removed, the game is just as fun as ever.
This game is ruining my life
this game has everrything i hate about games in it and yet it the trolley went so hard it was crazy. And who could forget about gags
nostalgia or not idc even if this game is grindy the vibes and the community r so good
fun with friends, a real grindfest tho
peak
keeps everything jank about the game. play if you need a feel of how ~2003 toontown played and looked.
Sometimes it gets boring but it's fun to keep coming back to.
the grind just gets boring
JUST KIDDING THIS IS THE BEST MMO EAT MY BOOGERS
dogshit
You know that image of the Steam review that had a negative score and it said it was one of their favorite games? Yeah that's how I feel about this game. There's so much I love about it but also a lot I'm very mixed on. This is not the kind of game you quit, you just take a break from it.
Engraçadão e bobo. Divertido com amigos.
I NLOVE PLAYING TOONTOWN WITH ME BUDS
i love grinding for an entire year to get a new gag
Amazing revival that allowed me to finally complete the main task line while adding in a ton of new content that stays true to the original vision.
u can never do what club penguin did
I played this for two days as a meme (having never played the original growing up) and while it absolutely was not my thing, I have to give props to the passionate fanbase for keeping Toontown alive years after the original servers closed.