Tomba 2: Evil Swine Return is an awesome PlayStation 1 game. Tomba, the Tarzan-like main protagonist, is trying to save his friend from the Evil Swines, while saving the world in the process. Beware as this writing will include a lot of spoilers to the game.

The gameplay is a side scroller in 3D space (barring some areas which have a top down gameplay and the minigames): Tomba's movement is limited to left right up down but occasionally you will find junction where you can change Tomba's plane of movement (maybe you can call it 2.5D space?). There are platforming elements in the game that will slowly be available as the game progresses when Tomba unlocks equipments or skills.

Tomba has many weapons that have different properties for situational use, such as ice boomerang and fire hammer for the different enemy elements, or grappler that enables Tomba to stick to ceilings like Spider-man. Tomba also has different clothes which activate different skills such as gliding, swimming, etc to be used in different levels. At certain point in the game, Tomba will also unlock magic skills which are generally have wide area impact.

The game is very well designed. It is one of the most fascinating game design that can't be compared to many modern games, such as grinding to unlock that special weapons or items or over explorating for secret doors or walls. The natural progression of the game will let you unlock secret areas by Tomba's new skills and unlocking those special weapons or items requires you to "git gud".

The very core of Tomba 2 game mechanic is collection. In everything that you do, be it killing enemies, helping someone, finishing the minigames, it will boil down to collecting something. Some examples:

• Hitting the enemy with your weapons will make it stunned. You will need to jump on top of it to "collect" the enemy: grabbing them and throwing them away. This includes the boss fights!
• Helping needy folks around the game requires you to collect something, be it collecting water with a bucket equipped, collecting fishes for the chef, collecting fish hook for the fisherman, collecting crabs to enable a machinary that will unlock the next stage.

• The minigames all involve collection:

  • Helping the mice needs you to collect strawberries while you are riding a mouse.
  • Helping cement delivery involves collecting of items for use in another quest.
  • Helping the rancher requires you to "collect" the chicks by grabbing them and throwing them to the laundry machine.

While the game mechanics itself is already amazing by having a single consistent theme, the more impressive feat Tomba 2 has which I have not seen in any other games and am still impressed to this day is its level design.

There are 6 areas in Tomba 2, each having its own element/theme - neutral area for the start, fire/heat, ice, ghost, circus, and water.

When you just started the game, that first few minutes of the game would have introduced you to the different ways you interact in the world without explicitly being a tutorial. This includes how to talk to people to learn more about things, how to change plane, how to enter a building, how the environment can react to your action, how to hit and get hit by enemies, what kind of items you can collect throughout the game, etc. This assumes you have played a platforming game previously - for first time gamer, a tutorial would still be required in the first few minutes, but randomly pressing the buttons for experiment would have given the clues.

When you reach the last area available in the game - the water area - you will be surprised to find that it is connected to the first neutral area! And you could have seen that last water area even when you just start the game! (If you accidentally goes into a high point near the end of the first area, it would trigger a quest to figure out where's the room/cave behind the big waterfall which is at the water area). While there are certain teleport systems in the game, the levels themselves have shortcuts for Tomba to traverse from one area to another without that teleport system.

When you just enter an area, there will be places that Tomba can't reach or you will question why there is a peculiar setup (fish inside a blue blob that you cannot collect although the other fishes on the puddle can be collected easily). Amazingly, you will be surprised when along the way you get a new equipment or skill that allows you to explore those things. Even better, you will get hint of what to do with those peculiar things when quests are triggered so you don't have to overly try out different things (although the game will not stop you from doing so). The natural progression of the game would allow you to explore this extra quests if you wish to, or skip it entirely if you want to focus on the main story line. Unlike the new modern games, these are not explicitly marked as main quest or side quest, but if you follow the story of the game, you can figure out which ones are main story and which ones are not.

The different areas are also intertwined. Many of the "side" quests will require an item to be found in a different area: An angel statue in the circus area requires items from a minigame in the fire area, the chef in the fire area requires fishes from neutral area, many doors in the different areas require status-inflicting item (laughing, crying, ghost) from the ghost area. Those quests flow very nicely with the game story and the area themes to the point that you do not realize all of these were actually thought through in the game design for you to explore the world.

Finally, for those who like to complete the game, Tomba 2 throws a lot of challenge side quests that require you to "git gud". These quests are not necessary for you to end the game, and you will not have any difficulty in fighting the bosses if you don't finish these quests. Completing them requires you to improve your own skill in playing the minigames, and usually will give you certain items to make life easier such as an item to invoke status effect from the ghost area so you don't have to go back and forth to discover what lies behind the special doors in the other areas, or a buff item to make your attack/defense stronger.

A modern game that's closest to this design is Legend of Zelda: Breaths of the Wild, in the sense that it allows the player to explore the world on their own and "git good" on the side quests. The difference would be those side quests tend to be self-contained hence not intertwined with many of the game mechanics or other areas. Of course, Zelda BotW has a much bigger, more massive world which also includes physics simulation engine that gives much more freedom for player to figure things out. Tomba 2 took a different direction: create a self-contained world with more exact game physics but making the world feels richer by connecting one part to another.