Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition review — Not so special

Tomba! Special Edition was a fairly minimal package. It had extra goodies like interviews with the developers, concept art, and a music player, but at the end of the day it was basically just the original PS1 game wrapped in an emulator with save states, rewind, and some button icons changed. That’s not a bad thing. The game didn’t need much changing and you could tell the people making Special Edition loved and appreciated the 1997 classic. In my review, I even called the game a masterpiece ahead of its time, showing a different evolution of the Metroidvania or Search Action genre that’s smaller and much more dense with wonder. I also said I always preferred Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return as a kid, and after replaying it to 100% earlier this year that remains true. You’d think just wrapping that game in the same light dressings would be enough, but playing through Tomba! 2 Special Edition can feel like a slap in the face.

Let’s talk about the game itself first. Despite everything surrounding this version, it’s still a masterpiece. One day, Tomba receives a letter in the mail from his girlfriend, Tabby, saying she’s been kidnapped. By whom or why the letter doesn’t say, so Tomba, Charles, and newcommer Zippo all jump into the ocean and swim to the continent Tabby calls home to look for her. You eventually find out that the Evil Pigs are behind it all, and have cursed the various regions you visit, so it’s up to Tomba to catch them all again, uncurse the land, and find Tabby. It’s all a fun excuse to meet charming characters, pick up tons of items and side quests, and explore every nook and cranny of the continent. 

While the original Tomba! was in 2.5D with 2D characters able to move into the back or foreground of 3D environments, Tomba! 2 is all 3D. You still move on 2D planes, but the ability for the camera to move around more freely makes for some much more interesting level design such as the Pipe Area with steam pipes criss-crossing each other that you can walk on. Levels here are also less focused on platforming and more on exploration. You won’t be jumping over so many bottomless pits as in the first game, but instead revisiting each of these small zones again and again with more tools and information at your disposal each time. Every loop of the game world slowly uncovers more secrets, and these loops never feel like a chore thanks to the easy availability of fast travel and just how small these areas are. If you were to just run from the Starting Beach all the way to the Water Temple, it would probably only take about 10 minutes. But that’s part of what makes Tomba! so unique and interesting, as it favors density over breadth. 

I really love this game, as you can probably tell, which makes it all the more disappointing to find that Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition is so low effort I don’t know if anyone on the project even cared. I never want to call game developers lazy. Making a game, any game, is incredibly difficult, but I’m struggling to find any other explanation as to why this game has so many problems. 

First, booting up the game you’ll find that the new main menu looks exactly like that of last year’s Tomba! Special Edition. It’s got the same font, the same grassy borders to menus, and pretty much the same scrolling logo background but with a 2 on the bottom. There are some renders of Tomba! 2 Tomba to accompany each option, which is nice at least. Going into the Museum there’s some nice art to look at including concept art, character renders, some merchandise, and more. There’s not a ton here, and no interviews disappointingly, but maybe Whoopee Camp just didn’t make or save much from their original production.

Heading into the Music Player was my first big clue that something was wrong here, as it fully reuses the singing flowers from the first Special Edition. These flowers do not appear anywhere in Tomba! 2, and really clash with this game’s art style; Tomba! 2 was leaning more into the tough and cool late 90s or early 2000s style. While still retaining most of the original game’s whimsy; it wasn't as cartoony. You also start here with the Japanese Soundtrack by default, and even after playing this game so many times I had no idea the Japanese version had a totally different OST. Pretty neat to include both, though I can definitely see why the localization changed things so drastically. The JP soundtrack is pretty bad.

Getting into the main attraction here, the game itself, and- Oh. Oh no. They’re using the JP soundtrack. And there’s no option to toggle between the two. Except… wait, cutscenes still use the US tracks? I guess that’s something, as those are easily the worst parts of the JP soundtrack. Having this mix really clashes though, especially with the instrumentation and sound quality. 

Speaking of the sound quality, somehow that’s been screwed up too! Tomba! 2 has full voice acting in English (not Japanese as far as I can tell, and the European version only has some voiced lines in each supported language). While the quality wasn’t perfect on PS1, at least in terms of acting (most of the female characters are voiced by men, for some reason), but the audio quality was shockingly clear for the era. Having played this game so many times, I could immediately tell something was wrong with the voices here. They sound super compressed and some even have a weird buzzing noise accompanying them. But even this is inconsistent, as you can hear lines from the same character have wildly different sound qualities. 

The sound mixing is all off too, with the music often drowning out the voices - something that you could fix in the original by turning the BGM down a few notches. For whatever reason, Special Edition removes access to the options menu, so you can’t do any of the following: adjust message speed, turn off voices, adjust the volume of music and sound effects, or swap to the other button layout. The options you do have are as follows: screen resolution, Full Screen or Windowed modes, six language options, toggle vibration (the only returning option), and change the background color of the main menu. In-game pressing R3 will bring up the emulation menu, which is exactly the same from Tomba! Special Edition. You have various screen sizes including 4:3, Downsampled which mimics the original resolution, 16:9 to stretch things if you hate art and your eyes, and native for the unscaled image size. You can turn on a CRT filter, though it’s not a very good one, switch between various screen borders, toggle vibration, and reset, load, save, or quit the game. You can also bring up rewind by pressing both triggers simultaneously. It’s all serviceable, sure, but I personally would have loved an option to properly render the game in widescreen, given this one is full 3D. Making that actually work would take a lot of effort, but I’d be fine with a mode that comes with a warning that the game won’t render things properly outside of the 4:3 aspect ratio. As an additional note, some visual effects straight up don’t work here, like the transition when you enter an Evil Pig’s boss arena. 

Like Tomba! Special Edition, these new menus outright replace all other in-game menus save for the inventory and journal. I’ve already discussed why that’s a problem with the options, but it’s an even bigger problem with the save and game over menus. For one, Tomba! 2 has some killer save/loading songs, but late in the game you can talk to a squirrel who will import your completed Tomba! 1 save to add additional quests and characters to the game based on what you did in the previous title. It’s a pretty cool feature, but for some reason Tomba! 2 Special Edition just adds in all of these characters and quests right from the start. (Once you unlock the save transfer, you simply cannot interact with it.) The reason it takes so long to unlock them is because there are some things on the critical path that you’re supposed to do beforehand. Now, for example, when you enter the chimney on the Kujara Ranch you’ll see two dwarves from Tomba! 1 clipping right through Santa Claus, making it difficult to talk to him as their hitboxes overlap. It feels less like a convenience feature and more like turning on a cheat code. It’s janky and shouldn’t be like that. 

The game over menu is a much bigger issue, however. In the PS1 version, you have three options upon death after the game asks if you want to save: Continue, Load data, or Quit game. Continue will simply place you at the current area’s starting point, while load and quit are self explanatory. As you only have one life in this game, the Continue option is pretty dang useful, especially with getting certain collectables it’s pretty much impossible not to die after grabbing.  In Special Edition, you still have three options, but they’re way less useful: Reset Game, which starts a new game, Load Game, and Quit Game. You’ll notice Continue is missing, and that having both Reset and Quit is pretty redundant. You can’t access rewind here either, so I hope you saved recently. The background of this menu also simply reuses the Game Over artwork from Tomba! 1. 

This all comes together to form a package that, as the self described world’s biggest Tomba! fan, feels genuinely insulting. I had a much better experience playing my original disc on Duckstation just a few months ago. Heck, I think breaking out my PlayStation would be a better experience than this. I could live with some of the oddities of Tomba! Special Edition because it was a convenient way to play the game and made it much more digestible with rewind, the ability to save anywhere, and those great interviews with the developers. Tomba! 1 and 2 Special Editions are like those plushies of Tomba and the Koma Pig Limited Run put out this year. One feels like it had so much love and care put into it, and the other feels like it exists because it has to - and even it’s not happy about it.