In 1999, various game developers from Square helped build a new video game division at the AlphaStar construction company. By June of next year, the team had rebranded themselves as "Alpha Dream," intentionally comparing themselves as the "first dream" compared to their origins working within "Final Fantasy." In 2003, they released the game "Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga." In three years, they had sold one million copies in the US alone, earning around $30 million in profits. The success quickly ingratiated themselves within the Nintendo company. While developing smaller titles such as Hamtaro or PostPet DS, AlphaDream would firmly dedicate itself to the Mario and Luigi rpg franchise. One year prior to its grand success as a company, however, came Tomato Adventure.

Its hard not to compare Tomato Adventure to AlphaDream's later works. TA is just proto-Superstar Saga from top to bottom. Vegetable themed kingdom, strange nonsensical villains, a funny bandit, the occasional deliciously mean gag designed to tease the player, a few less delicious and more just mean fat jokes... All the pieces are here. Its a clear proof of concept piece more than anything. The team has a gameplay idea with these action commands and they're showing off to prospective companies like Nintendo to illustrate how it can work. Its a necessary stepping stone if they're gonna get the funding and direction towards a project like Superstar Saga.

Trying to hold it on its own merits is... hard. This version of action commands abandons the idea of MP or any special move system in favor of "Gimmicks." Gimmicks are the tools necessary to make your attacks. There's dozens of gimmicks to assign to each character, but the pcs can only hold four at a time. Each gimmick has limited uses, but they'll recharge if your character has used ALL the gimmick uses currently assigned to them. Shorter version: you better only pick attacks you like doing, because you'll be required to do them a lot. Its a great way to ensure the player tries out all the moves they have at their disposal, but its also exhausting to figure out the perfect set-up in terms of attacks and general enjoyment.

The M&L characters weren't exactly complex, but the TA crew doesn't have much going for them either. They have one goal and that'll be their focus for the whole game. And it doesn't even need to be more complex than that. But it just leaves the core story pretty lacking and its hard to keep the story engaging with the basic "collect all the toy parts" storyline. I was already kind of worn out by the half-way point of the game and that's only seven hours into the game. You can really see the advantage of Mario and Luigi as protagonists in comparison. They're company icons, they don't have characters that need to be established. They were born to make silly noises and if they had to deliver exposition or react verbally to gags, the appeal is gone.
DeMille has too many "well THAT just happened" Chris Pratt-esque lines that dilute the jokes that M&L would have to leave hanging just by the nature of M&L as relatively silent heroes.

Honestly, the most interesting parts of the game are when its child-like tone gives way to darker ideas they want to play with. It manages to carry that perfect innocent cruelty that comes to childhood. One level involves a mirror gimmick, where you go through reflections of the same museum. On side one, a bird resists getting plucked before finally relenting so it can just go back to sleep.. On side two, the other bird stays stubborn and becomes a miniboss. It dies from the battle. The museum host informs you "well, both sides need to be equal. Better go defeat the other bird." Half expected the guy to give me a knife and whisper a Thanos line.

Still, even if I didn't love the story, incredible credit has to be given to the translation team that created TA's fan translation. Even with all its problems, its a miracle to even be able to play this game at all. Part of the problems in this game's very mechanics makes it a difficult game to translate at all, much less as a fan group outside the company. All the puns and jokes are coherent and consistent in tone and that's what really matters in a localization.

AlphaDream went bankrupt in 2019. There's a number of places to put blame, but it just seems to me like it had nowhere else to grow. It already perfected its format in M&L franchise and it just never quite branched out further. But you can see that potential for growth here. How its ambitions and goofy sense of humor started and the places it could grow towards from there. It makes me want to revisit and chart the path of AlphaDream over the decade to see if you can a consistent improvement tragically cut short, or if it just ran out of steam.