OMGJeremy

Humpday Gaming: Tobal #1 (PSX)

Tobal #1 is fucking horrible. There, I just wrote this whole review. Even if you say you like Tobal, you know in your heart that the game is a terrible mess of a fighting game. And while you’re at it you may as well admit that the only reason you ever bought it was because it came with a demo of Final Fantasy VII. Don’t even act like you didn’t, because we all did. We are all guilty of making Tobal #1 a mild success, and none of us even wanted or played the fucking game. The shittiest thing about Tobal though? Even after we all spent fifty bucks for a demo and a shitty fighting game, they didn’t even have the heart to release the sequel here, which turned out to be one of the best fighting games on the PSX. Fuck you, Square.

So what is Tobal? It’s a fighting game that Square made during their PSX days of being like, “Well Final Fantasy sure is popular, so why don’t we go ahead and make a game for EVERY GENRE and see what sticks?” So in a few years’ time, Square unleashed game after game into every genre imaginable. They even released a racing game called Driving Emotion. DRIVING EMOTION. Yes it sucked, just like most everything Square did that wasn’t RPG-based (I will however grant Einhander a sufficient passing grade). The phrase “Maybe you should stick with what you do best” never applied more.

Anyway, out of all this shit Square was dropping out of their anal cavity onto store shelves, Tobal #1 took Turd Of The Week status simply for its inclusion of the supremely hyped Jesus game: Final Fantasy VII. When we all heard that a demo of FFVII was finally coming, we damn near spontaneously combusted. Then we saw it was attached to something called Tobal #1. The first thing we asked was, “What the fuck is Tobal #1?” followed quickly with “WHO CARES? FFVII IS IN IT!” So we all spent our money on it, played the awesome FFVII demo thirty times, and then finally reluctantly put in Tobal just to see it was a weird 3D fighting game. If you could hear the sound of thousands of rooms deflating at once, it was the moment Tobal #1 was powered up across the nation.

Everything about Tobal is just stupidly weird. The game looked oddly unique with its unusually clean look, but that’s not much of a compliment. It just meant it looked like a janitor had come in and scrubbed all the art assets and textures out of the game before it was shipped. It didn’t help that a lot of the characters appeared to have been developed from the mind of a ten year-old kid. Featuring dude in a green sweatsuit, dinosaur-looking guy, and the ever-frightening chicken man. I’m not even kidding, there was a fucking chicken man in the game. You could play as him. Oh, and he was blue. BLUE. Fuck this game.

Dude with spiky hair, check. Hot anime girl, check. Giant blue chicken-man with massive tits.... check.

How did it play? Like someone decided to make a 3D fighter just for the Hell of it. Take Virtua Fighter, add a pinch of Tekken, and then throw it all out the window and make your own stupid fighting engine that focuses on pre-made combos and terrible timing-based moves. It was functional, but it was also so fucking stupid/boring to play that even pulling off a seven hit combo with your blue chicken man somehow made you like the game less simply because what you just saw actually happened. So yes, the fighting engine sucked. But why stop there? Why not go the extra torturous mile, and put that same shitty fighting system into a HORRENDOUS third person dungeon crawler? What? You wouldn’t want that at all? Well here it is:

Oh yes. In a moment of supreme insanity/cruelty, Square decided to put in an entire separate adventure from the fighting game. It’s basically a dungeon crawler/adventure game thing. It lets you select a character from the roster of fighters, then lets you run around from a behind the back perspective in a blocky, maze-like dungeon full of traps, enemies, and at least two broken controllers should you attempt to play longer than five minutes. Think that fighting engine was just sort of functional before? Well here it turns into a full on train wreck. Nevermind that the dungeons want you to maneuver around pits, spikes, traps, and all sort of instant kill shit. Now you get to do it with broken assed controls, and a mediocre fighting engine tossed into an adventure game with no regard to whether that would work or not. It was the equivalent of putting a blind man in a room full of spiked walls. It was pure torture that was only fun if you could trick your friend into playing it, and then laughing at his suffering. I would have certainly done that more often if I had friends that hadn’t already bought this turd and knew by now just how shitty it was.

But I could forgive all of the above, ALL OF IT, if Square would have released Tobal #2 here in the states. Why would I ever give a shit about its sequel when this game was so obviously destined for every clearance bin in the country? It’s simple: Tobal #2 was an amazing fighting game. Square somehow took everything they did wrong with the first game, and turned it into a stunning fighting game that could go head to head with the best the genre offered at the time. Hell, even the adventure game mode was way better, and actually playable this time. But no, Square decided that it wasn’t worth it to bring it to the US, leaving all of us with their retarded offspring that no one wanted. Meanwhile, Japan got to see the pure awesomeness of Tobal #2, even if it still had the blue chicken guy. Oh well. You can compare and contrast right here:

That would be it for Tobal though. Square did make one last attempt at a fighting game with the PS2 Erghiez, but it ended up being nowhere near the quality of Tobal #2, and saw a huge collective “meh” from anyone that touched it. Square eventually saw profits tumbling from the sky and decided maybe it was for the best if they stuck with RPG-style games in the future. It just goes to show that maybe you should stick with what you do best. And if you DO want to make games in different genres, then maybe you should go out and let people who know how to make that stuff do it for you. That’s exactly what Square-Enix has done lately, buying up such development teams responsible for Tomb Raider and Batman Arkham Asylum. So far, it seems to be working out. Imagine that.

And hey, they didn’t even need to put a Final Fantasy demo in with them. Good on you, Square.