For my inaugural weekly WiiWare Wednesday weview review, I took a crack at Toki Tori, a puzzle-platformer developed and published by Two Tribes. The game is actually an re-imagining of Toki Tori for the Game Boy Color, Two Tribes’ first game ever released. The original version sold poorly, perhaps due to its release coming after gamers were already migrating to the Game Boy Advance, but the developer’s blog claims that they’ve “always felt that Toki Tori is a quality title that deserves a bigger audience, hence the decision to create a version for WiiWare.” Now, seven years, 1000 Wii Points, and 290 memory blocks later, is it true? Does Toki Tori hold up as worth the purchase?
Toki Tori is short on plot, yet big on character. The basic premise of the game is that Toki Tori, a wide-eyed, fuzzy yellow chick, is traversing several worlds in order to recover his semi-hatched bretheren. Scattered throughout each of roughly 70 levels are several eggs with feet poking out of them, which are collected simply by passing through them. The trick, of course, lies in the levels’ design: Toki will need to figure out a safe route through each level which will not see him dropped onto spikes or lava, nailed by baddies, or irrevocably trapped en route to his goal. The adventure starts as a basic exercise in route planning, but the difficulty and complexity increases as the levels pass by; soon, Toki has access to a number of gadgets which can generate new platforms, teleport him a short distance, move certain blocks, and so on. The player is never given more than a few gadgets at once, and more often than not, they come with only a limited number of uses, teasing one’s brain as the player experiments and discovers the optimal (and often, only) path through each level.
My initial impression of Toki Tori was, “Holy hell, this is a cheerful game.” Launching the game will assail your senses with bright colors, bouncy and hyperactive music, and dozens of adorable eggs-with-legs flying about the screen. From there, it was on to the first of four themed worlds, Forest Falls, to be followed later by Creepy Castle, Slimy Sewer, and Bubble Barrage. New visuals and music await in each of the four areas, and each world introduces a new gadget or two, but the mood remains consistent. The gameplay does introduce some interesting new mechanics in Bubble Barrage — which takes place entirely underwater — but by that point in the game, players will be more than ready for it.
The gameplay is extremely familiar to veterans of the puzzle-platformer; players who are well-versed in Professor Fizzwizzle, Boulder Dash, Adventures of Lolo, or even Zack & Wiki, will be able to leap right in and demolish the first couple of worlds. The comparisons to Zack & Wiki are especially relevant in Toki Tori’s control scheme, allowing players to point-and-click their way through the levels if they so choose: Aiming the Wiimote at a point on the screen and pressing the A button will send Toki speeding off to the indicated destination. Toki Tori can also be guided via the Nunchuk or the Classic Controller, and this is a blessing — as cute and casual-accessible as the point-and-click scheme is, it quickly becomes impractical in later levels, where pointing slightly to one side can send Toki sprinting to his demise, or where reflex and time constraints demand a more direct level of control. Attaching the Nunchuk allows players to guide Toki with the thumbstick, much as one would expect from any other platformer, and anyone who plays Toki Tori for more than five or so levels will undoubtedly opt for this choice.
Also similar to Zack & Wiki is the inclusion of a second-player drawing mechanism. If you have a like-minded puzzle fiend to play with you, they can take up their own Wiimote and sketch their hints on the screen in two different colors (the lines are actually made up of dozens of interconnected chicks). It sounds like a needless add-on which would be primarily used to doodle obscenities on the screen, but trust me: If you’re playing with someone who’s genuinely trying to help you, it’s a massive step upwards from just yelling “Put the block there. No, there!”
From my own experience, I’m glad to report that Toki Tori’s puzzles get tricky enough that having two players isn’t a bad idea, yet they never reach into the ridiculous realm of FAQ-required. I consider myself a puzzle-game connoisseur, and as I’ve said before, the mark of a puzzle that stumps you in a good way is the kind where, once you realize the solution, you slap your forehead because it was so obvious! Why didn’t you think of that? The bad kind, on the other hand, is the sort where, after the solution is revealed, you sigh and grumble and wonder how anyone is supposed to think of that. Before writing this review, I made my way through 50 of Toki Tori’s 70-odd puzzles, and not once did the latter scenario occur. The game, as mentioned, starts off nice and simple, though as you move from one world to the next, the challenge ramps up. Eggs become harder to reach, resources get scarce, and hazards litter the landscape. If a player gets stumped, Toki Tori won’t come to a screeching halt, either; a single-use “wildcard” item allows you to skip the current level so you can try some others. You can’t have another wildcard, however, until you come back and solve the skipped level. In addition, beating the 10 standard levels in any of the four worlds will unlock several more “hard” levels for that area — definite headscratchers, all. But, with experimentation and careful planning (and a forgivingly infinite number of lives), players will eventually find their way through Toki Tori’s puzzles and perils, and feel the appropriate satisfaction for having done so.
Toki Tori is definitely a short but sweet game, relying on elegance through simplicity to provide its fun. Its primary drawback, as such, is an almost total lack of replay value. Such is the primary caveat of the puzzle game: Any design which does not rely on randomly-generated content or time-based objectives is only good for one playthrough, beyond that, you’re merely going through the motions with little or no challenge. Toki Tori will unlock a few cute little letters (and photos) from Toki Tori himself, which appear on the Wii message board, and there’s the aforementioned “hard” levels, but once you’ve been through those, Toki Tori will only be fun once you’ve stopped playing long enough to forget the puzzle solutions. A puzzle game of this type, relying on clever combinations of familiar setpieces for new variety and challenges, is absolutely begging for a level editor, but, sadly, there is none to be found here.
The ultimate question, then, as always, is whether Toki Tori is worth the purchase. If longevity is your defining criteria, the answer is no — as mentioned, the game will sustain itself for one playthrough. That first playthrough, however, will last you a good while: Solving 50 of Toki Tori’s puzzles — 38 “normal” and 12 “hard” — took me a good 7 hours, and I had someone smart helping me. I believe a good estimate for the full roster is 8-12 hours, especially given how rough the “hard” levels can be. From a pure time/money ratio, as such, at $10, you’re looking at around $1 per hour of game.
For those of you who don’t meticulously analyze the cash value of your time, however — that is to say, those of you who judge an experience by whether you enjoyed it — Toki Tori is fun. It’s cheery, safe for all ages, and I found the challenge to be just right. You could do a lot worse for $10 than this, and I recommend going out and saving some eggs if you enjoy a good puzzler. As for the game’s footprint, well, it does take up 289 blocks — over 10% of the Wii’s flash memory space. On the other hand, Toki Tori is the kind of no-replay game you’re not likely to miss if you need to remove it from your console. Beat it once, shuffle it off to an SD card, and keep it there until you’ve forgotten the puzzles.
See? We got through the whole review without a cheap/cheep pun.
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August 7th, 2008 at 6:02 am
[...] love it. From my meager understanding of the title, I was hoping for a game which would play like Toki Tori meets Chronotron, and found that and so much more contained within its quirky and curious confines. [...]
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