(This game was too hard to rate, but if I did it would be 2.75 stars, just below 3 stars.)
Incredibly charming, but incredibly outmoded adventure game that's kind of hard to recommend without a guide.
Well, I'm not sure I've been starting 2024 off on a great foot game-wise, because I've shelved more games then I've actually completed, and for some reason I feel a kind of shame about it. I also want to say sorry to Hudson because my previous attempt with one of their games (Elemental Gimmick Gear) resulted in a similar shelving rather than completing due to mechanical issues within the game itself, although the atmosphere was breathtaking.
While I might not describe Princess Tomato's atmosphere as breathtaking, it did have a sort of quaint almost dreamy feel to it. Even the cover art, where the characters seem to be made of clay has an incredibly vintage feel to it, vegetable and fruit characters in semi-medievalist, fairy tale attire is an oddly comforting kind of surrealism.
Princess Tomato is one where I don't really know what went wrong - because you can say that a lot of it's gameplay is just bound up in the tropes of the early adventure games, part and parcel of a game around its era. The puzzles are just barely solvable without a guide, but I highly recommend using one anyway at parts.
So where do I put the blame? Frankly, I don't know. There was just something tiring here. If Princess Tomato is vintage, it's vintage, but with a slight musty smell. Some might like the smell of an old book for example, maybe because it "brings them back" (but not always). Anyway, I bring that up because I think for people who are nostalgic for this time of gaming and old text adventures (A la Portopia Serial Murder Case and maybe Shadowgate) the jank is almost a part of the fun nostalgic trip. It's a "you had to be there thing", that I think this game kind of suffers from.
To follow the less than perfect metaphor, the smell of an old book might be off putting, especially if one can tell it's pages are filled with labyrinth prose, winding plot threads and such. Not that Princess Tomato is at all a dense tome, but it does have a sense of confusion and you will be lost. There's a painful maze section, it drops you into combat with kind of no explanation on how to actually fight (you do it through rock paper scissors and then a guessing game, it's hard to explain). Then there is the insane amount of menu options: LOOK, CHECK (why aren't look and check the same thing?), FIGHT, PUNCH, etc. that makes me appreciate the sleek interfaces of the modern point-and-clicks.
Yet, like I said, it's quaint, humorous and has some banging chiptune. It's kind of a pick-your-poison with this and equally old text adventures (not that they are all abstrusely designed), where you have to kind of make a trade-off between charm and ease of play. If you have nostalgia for this kind of thing, this might not even faze you. I'm not sure how this game would even translate into a remake, though it would help to modernize it a bit at least graphics wise, although the graphics are charming in an 8-bit interface and look good on the NES (and according to Hardcore Gaming 101 it did get a remake for Japanese mobile phones).
Finally, believe it or not I actually played this game on my dreamcast, using an emulator, so the fact that I had to wait for my boot disc to load, after about 15 tries each time, didn't help with making me want to play it. I'll definitely give it another go... with a different setup.
Incredibly charming, but incredibly outmoded adventure game that's kind of hard to recommend without a guide.
Well, I'm not sure I've been starting 2024 off on a great foot game-wise, because I've shelved more games then I've actually completed, and for some reason I feel a kind of shame about it. I also want to say sorry to Hudson because my previous attempt with one of their games (Elemental Gimmick Gear) resulted in a similar shelving rather than completing due to mechanical issues within the game itself, although the atmosphere was breathtaking.
While I might not describe Princess Tomato's atmosphere as breathtaking, it did have a sort of quaint almost dreamy feel to it. Even the cover art, where the characters seem to be made of clay has an incredibly vintage feel to it, vegetable and fruit characters in semi-medievalist, fairy tale attire is an oddly comforting kind of surrealism.
Princess Tomato is one where I don't really know what went wrong - because you can say that a lot of it's gameplay is just bound up in the tropes of the early adventure games, part and parcel of a game around its era. The puzzles are just barely solvable without a guide, but I highly recommend using one anyway at parts.
So where do I put the blame? Frankly, I don't know. There was just something tiring here. If Princess Tomato is vintage, it's vintage, but with a slight musty smell. Some might like the smell of an old book for example, maybe because it "brings them back" (but not always). Anyway, I bring that up because I think for people who are nostalgic for this time of gaming and old text adventures (A la Portopia Serial Murder Case and maybe Shadowgate) the jank is almost a part of the fun nostalgic trip. It's a "you had to be there thing", that I think this game kind of suffers from.
To follow the less than perfect metaphor, the smell of an old book might be off putting, especially if one can tell it's pages are filled with labyrinth prose, winding plot threads and such. Not that Princess Tomato is at all a dense tome, but it does have a sense of confusion and you will be lost. There's a painful maze section, it drops you into combat with kind of no explanation on how to actually fight (you do it through rock paper scissors and then a guessing game, it's hard to explain). Then there is the insane amount of menu options: LOOK, CHECK (why aren't look and check the same thing?), FIGHT, PUNCH, etc. that makes me appreciate the sleek interfaces of the modern point-and-clicks.
Yet, like I said, it's quaint, humorous and has some banging chiptune. It's kind of a pick-your-poison with this and equally old text adventures (not that they are all abstrusely designed), where you have to kind of make a trade-off between charm and ease of play. If you have nostalgia for this kind of thing, this might not even faze you. I'm not sure how this game would even translate into a remake, though it would help to modernize it a bit at least graphics wise, although the graphics are charming in an 8-bit interface and look good on the NES (and according to Hardcore Gaming 101 it did get a remake for Japanese mobile phones).
Finally, believe it or not I actually played this game on my dreamcast, using an emulator, so the fact that I had to wait for my boot disc to load, after about 15 tries each time, didn't help with making me want to play it. I'll definitely give it another go... with a different setup.