Video Game / Tokyo Jungle

The time has come. The beagles will have their vengeance.

Tokyo Jungle is a PSN game set After the End in Tokyo, in a world where animals have started becoming more and more aggressive and the humans have mysteriously vanished. You play as various animal species trying to survive in a world without people. You start out with the ability to play as either a Pomeranian or a deer, and can unlock other species like bears, hippos, cats and even dinosaurs as you play.

There are two main modes: "Survival Mode", where you choose an animal you've unlocked and try to survive for as long as you can, and "Story Mode", where you accomplish a series of challenges as a given animal and learn more about how the end of the world came about. Alternating between the two modes is necessary to unlock new Story Mode missions, as you have to collect logs and files in Survival Mode to get more Story missions, but completing Story Mode unlocks new files in the world in Survival.

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Examples

• After the End: The setting. The last few missions of Story Mode focus on showing how this happened.
• Airborne Mook: A few, all of which are non-playable. Pigeons and crows are the most common, and serve little purpose aside from being useful as emergency snacks for predators. Once prehistoric animals start showing up, however, they start getting replaced with Archaeopteryx, which are still not particularly dangerous, and similarly harmless Meganeura start soaring around the skies of Yoyogi Park. Pteranodon, on the other hand, are more than glad to dive-bomb you to oblivion, and their airborne nature makes both killing or fleeing them tricky.
• Animal Is the New Man: The game is set in a world in which there are no humans, the city of Tokyo is falling into disrepair without any maintenance, and a new ecosystem is forming in its ruins where multiple species of herbivores and carnivores compete for survival. The cause of this is eventually revealed to be humans from an apocalyptic future attempting to transplant themselves back to the 21st century with time travel, creating a Time Paradox which causes all present-day humans to vanish.
• Apocalypse How: Planetary scale, species extinction. Specifically, a supposed catastrophic event that causes near human extinction will occur 200 years in the future. The humans in the year 2027 received anonymous emails and messages from the future humans of the year 2215 about the catastrophe. Meanwhile, animals within the 2020-2030 decade became feral and people vanished into thin air, with prehistoric creatures appearing in the present time. The reason for this is due to the humans of the future attempting to save themselves by sending information into the past to accelerate the development of a Time Machine there that would link to the one on their end, and so transport all the people of 2215 to 2027... at the expense of the 2027 population getting shoved to the Bad Future in their place, since the "Law of Conservation of Mass" must be upheld. The screwy things involving dinosaurs are the result of this law's effects during the 2027 time machine's test phases, and the electromagnetic discharges are what sent the modern animals wild.
  • The trope will be played straight as an arrow if you choose to not go to the storage module during the final act. ERC-003 will halt the transportation of the 2215 population to the present day, leaving the present devoid of humans while the 2027 population will eventually die off as well. In short: humanity is doomed in both time periods.
• Apocalyptic Log: The archives found in Survival Mode focus on the events that lead to the humans' disappearance.
• All Dogs Are Purebred: All of the dogs that you can play are purebred including the initial dog you start as in the story, a Pomeranian. This is an odd case as without human intervention pretty much every dog should be a mutt after a few generations.
• Always Male: With the exception the lioness, dairy cow and a scant couple of others, you will always be male, and you will always have a litter of sons. Eventually you've got to wonder where your mates are coming from if male births are so common.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • In Tokyo Jungle, omnivores do not exist. No animal can eat both meat and plants, though this can probably be excused as being necessary for balance reasons.
  • Wolves and hyenas will frequently bark and howl. Real wolves do bark, but only rarely and it's a warning call instead of aggressive like it's portrayed in the game. Hyenas do not bark or howl at all, and they're not even canines (they belong to their own group, which is slightly more related to cat family compared to the dog family.) These are both common mistakes.
  • The hyenas are led by males (and you can only play as a male), which is odd because in real-life female hyenas are larger and more aggressive than males, and dominate them to the point female cubs outrank the highest ranking males. Hyenas are infamous for all this, making this a very bad mistake.
  • The cheetah, while one of the fastest animals in game, still can't compare to its real-life counterpart. You can actually have trouble catching up to some of the herbivores in the game. Its speed is mainly represented stylistically in gameplay by having a very, very, high stamina stat, which you can use to spam the dodge command to get across areas faster. Real cheetahs are the opposite, in that they have bursts of speed but can't maintain it for long.
  • The panther is basically just a cheetah reskin with some minor stat differences. It's portrayed as just as fast as the cheetah with a comparable amount of stamina. Obviously, real panthers (which are black jaguars or leopards) are not near as fast as a cheetah.
  • Rabbits scream when killed. This is actually something real rabbits sometimes do, despite being thought to be always silent.
  • You can get fleas even when playing as the crocodile or the two dinosaurs (Deinonychus and Dilophosaurus). In real life, reptiles can't get fleas. Interestingly, said dinosaurs could get fleas due to being feathered in real life (or at least Deinonychus; it's debatable whether Dilophosaurus had protofeathers or not), but the game still depicts them as scaly.
  • The elephants/mammoths can jump like the other playable animals despite the fact that these animals are incapable of jumping due to their body structure and their weights.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: As the world started to end, animals started becoming extremely violent, even housepets. John Hodgman tried to warn us!
• Badass Adorable: Some of the animals, like the Pomeranian. Watching the adorably modeled Poms tear the throats out of their prey is just downright hilarious.
• Badass Bandolier: The Guard Dog Uniform has them. Rule of Cool is in full effect since they're obviously useless.
• Badass Normal: Despite being a Joke Character, the office worker can live for decades, surviving in a broken down city crawling with ferocious wild animals and eating nothing but wild plants.
• Bears Are Bad News: Especially if you play an herbivore. On the other hand, you can be the bad news bear if you so choose. And if you're an animal relatively more powerful than a bear, like a Crocodile, then Bears really are merely slightly distressing news.
  • Inverted in Act 10 of the story mode. There, the bear acts as an Old Master to a displaced Tosa.
• Beating A Dead Player: When you die, if whatever killed you was a carnivore, it will eat your corpse.
• Beef Gate: Provided you manage to survive toxicity, hunger, and other animals, Homo Erectus show up to ruin your day, and will have completely taken over Tokyo starting roughly around year 100. Though if you're good enough, you're still able to play your way around them them and continue surviving (good luck if you're a predator as they WILL beat you to what little prey remains and the Homo Erectus themselves are inedible). In an odd way, it makes this trope a form of Battle Royale Game since Homo Erectus is an early species of human being.
• Bland-Name Product: Chemy, the company behind the robot dogs, is a parody of Sony. The dogs themselves are references to Sony's line of AIBO robot dogs, both in appearance and their ERC-XXX serial numbers (AIBO use ERS-XXX serial numbers).
• Boxing Kangaroo: One exists as a boss fight.
• Cats Are Mean: Everything from ordinary housecats to Smilodons are present in the game and all can be your enemies. In the story mode one mission pits you against "Fat Cat" who is particularly testy. Lions are especially nasty, as they come in large groups, and the cubs summon more lions if they are not killed/ran away from quickly.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic: An important part of the game is breeding. Some challenges (including unlocking more animals) require you to change generations a certain number of times, and your animal also loses stats and eventually dies when it reaches old age, so you must breed periodically. When you do mate, you pass on some of your stats (these stat gains are also added on to the species in general for whenever you play as one again), and take control of one of your offspring, and the litter mates serve as extra "lives" in the sense that if the one you are controlling dies, you switch over to one of the others while retaining your stats gained. The percentage of stats passed down and the number of litter mates is determined by the quality of the female (or male for a few animals). Average and Prime females/males require you to be a certain rank to mate with them, whereas Desperate females/males will always accept you but will always give you fleas while your trying to make it to the nest to actually mate (fleas cause your animal to periodically stop and scratch, even when in a battle) and a small litter.
• Character Customization: All of the equippable items appear on your selected animal. It can be pretty amusing to see, say, a bear in a straw hat.
• Competitive Balance: Most of the predators fall into this, due to their dependency on fighting. Ultimately all the animals are balanced by point multipliers which are higher on harder to play animals, but you can expect animals with the same bonus to be balanced via their stats.
• Cursed with Awesome: Equipping the Trash/Rubbish Bag item causes your toxicity gauge to gradually go up as long as you're wearing it. However, it also allows you to eat spoiled food and drink polluted water without any ill effects, which arguably more than makes up for its downsides, especially in late game where unspoiled food is few and far between. You can also mostly nullify the negative side effects by only wearing it when eating/drinking spoiled things and then immediately taking it off afterwards.
• Deadly Gas: A purple miasma will move from district to district, poisoning animals, plants and water sources.
• Deconstruction Game: Of Time Travel.
• Defeat Means Playable: You start off with a sika deer and the Pomeranian unlocked. You unlock more animals by completing a special challenge as another specific animal, which can be the following- defeat a boss animal, take over the animal's territory, or touch a special animal. For example, the Pomeranian has to take over the cat's territory, the cat has to kill a beagle, and so forth.
• Delicious Distraction: While most predators are of the incredibly persistent variety, a few^note hyenas, lycaons, jackals, cheetahs, panthers, crocodiles, saber-toothed tigers, and both species of dinosaur are programmed to actually prefer dead animals over live prey (not that the game ever actually tells you this). You can use this to your advantage either by placing a carcass in their path before they see you, allowing you to run past them unnoticed while they dig into it, or by dropping a carcass while they're already chasing you, causing them to drop pursuit and eat the carcass instead.
• Double Unlock: In order to unlock the different playable animals, you must first clear the appropriate challenge in Survival mode, then pay Survival Points to make them playable.
• Downer Ending: Both of the possible endings are this, but in slightly different ways. If you choose to go into the storage module, the human population of 2215 is saved, but at the cost of them exterminating all the animals living in Tokyo. If you refuse, you end up dooming the entire human race, and on top of that, ERC-003 succumbs to his wounds right after making it out of the secret facility.
• Early Game Hell: Since your only opponents at the start of a new game are small and fast, large carnivores can struggle with finding enough prey to level up, but the process gets easier once bigger and stronger animals start spawning. Conversely, small carnivores can easily rank up even with weaker prey, but they can have trouble finding prey that they can actually kill after enough years have passed.
• Eating Machine: ERC-003, ERC-2000, and ERC-X are carnivores.
• Endless Game: Survival mode will continue until you die, although most predators will be forced out when the other animals all turn into homo erectus which cannot be eaten.
• Enemy Summoner:
  • Some animals can summon more of their species to help them beat up on you. Lion cub are especially nasty about this, as they often already have other lions around before they summon even more, and lions are Demonic Spiders. The cub itself is capable of fighting despite being so young, but they are fortunately weak and easy to deal with unless you're playing as a weak animal in the early game.
  • Hyenas and wolves can also summon more of their kind.
• Fragile Speedster: The Cheetah, Panther and the two dinosaurs are a combination of this and Glass Cannon. They hit hard and move very fast, but they aren't that much more durable then the higher tier dog species.
• Futureshadowing: ERC-003's broken body, now overgrown with grass and flowers, is right next to the final Archive, which you have to collect before you can play the Story Mode act where he dies.
• Heroic Sacrifice: ERC-003 can choose to stop ERC-X from bringing the future humans to the past, but is badly damaged in the process and "dies".
• Gang Up on the Human: While you will occasionally see computer-controlled animals fighting each other, they can just as easily all decide to work together to eat you. A beagle being chased by hyenas, tigers, and a crocodile, who couldn't care less about attacking each other? It happens.
• Gas Mask Mooks: You unlock the Gas Mask item, which makes you immune to toxicity buildup from smog, by defeating a gas mask-wearing lycaon during the "A very thorough lycaon has appeared" random event.
• Gold Fever: Defeating the lion boss of the "gang of hooligan hyenas" random event rewards you with the Diamond Collar, which is apparently so desired by every creature in existence that wearing it causes all animals to attack you on sight. This includes herbivores with little to no fighting ability, so predators can use the collar to spare them the trouble of having to chase down their food.
• Guide Dang It!: As described in Delicious Distraction, certain predators prefer eating dead food over killing nearby live animals. You can use this to your advantage by carrying an animal corpse and strategically placing it near a predator to sneak past it. The food preference and the ability to carry dead animals is never told to the player.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Well, to other herbivores, at least. Barring challenges where you have to capture another species' territory, herbivorous animals don't really react to a player herbivore in any way unless provoked. Even if you're playing as a predator, most herbivores prefer running away the second they see you, even if they're larger and stronger than you, though a few, like the wild boar, will fight back instead.
• Humans Are Bastards: What kicks off the plot of the game. In 2215, humans have made Earth all but uninhabitable and the global population has gone down to 10000. The only way to get out of this mess they've themselves made is to transport the entire human population back a thousand years - a move which requires transporting the entire population of that year to the doomed future in exchange.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Mostly averted, as you can't eat other members of your own species, but the different dog breeds can eat one another. Also averted in a more literal sense, as the homo erectus that start hounding you after surviving for 100 years cannot be eaten by any animal.
• Interface Screw: Pollution and heavy rain prevent you from seeing plants and other animals on the minimap, while nighttime severely limits your field of vision. Pollution or heavy rain during nighttime combines the two effects, making it almost impossible to see where you're going.
• Jack of All Stats: The Dogs, both pets and wild, are this being relatively durable with decent attack and movement speeds.
• Joke Character: You can purchase a wimpy, clumsy salaryman as DLC. He's classified as an herbivore, it's probably a play on the Japanese phrase "Herbivore men".
  • There's also the Homo Erectus, which is also DLC. They're strong carnivores...but can't mate and start suffering from old age once they hit 55, at which point even Pomeranians or Chicks can become stronger than them. Averted with the AI-controlled ones, as 55 years is more than enough for them to hunt you down and kill you.
• Killer Rabbit: All of the pet-type and grazer animals qualify as long as you level grind, have good equipment or both. Played straight in one story mission when you actually get ganged up on by rabbits with boxing gloves and they can kick your ass pretty easily. It' worth mentioning that you play as a lion in this level.
• Lamarck Was Right: When you mate, your offspring will inherit a portion of any stats increased through challenges.
• Late to the Tragedy: Humanity has already been wiped out by centuries when the game starts.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • The pomeranian is weaker then even a cat and completely adorable. That doesn't stop it from killing wolves with an ambush attack.
  • You can construct your own lethal joke character by obsessively buffing one of the weaker animals. The baby chick in particular is fun because it even gets a powersuit it can wear to augment its health.
• Level Grinding: While not strictly necessary to enjoy the game, grinding up animals' stats makes it easier to survive in survival mode. This game has a very unconventional way of doing this: you complete challenges to up your animal's stats, and when you mate, a portion of these upgraded stats are passed on to your offspring and permanently added to the species, and the rest is discarded. The exact percentage passed on depends on the quality of your mate, with Prime mates giving 50%, Desperate mates giving 10%, and Average mates giving 25%.
• Lightning Bruiser: The tiger and lions, especially the old, scarred one. They aren't as good as the specialists in any area, but they are often the 2nd best at absolutely everything making them extremely adept at surviving.
• Macrogame: Stats gained through inheritance will stay with an animal for subsequent playthroughs. In fact, the character select screen will display the current generation of the selected animal and just how much its stats have improved.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Chick is barely able to move at all, until you mark all the areas in a zone and sleep in a bed. Then it matures into a fast-moving chicken. (until you mate again, d'oh!)
  • The same can be said of herbivores in general. Most of them are slow, only have one attack (as to a carnivore's 3 or more) and only have speed and stamina going for them. And some don't even have that... Then you get things like a hippo, or an elephant and...
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Crocodiles are very dangerously strong and durable. They mainly stay near water such as in the sewer, but one is programed to spawn hidden around the corner in Shibuya Woods early on, and it tends to kill a lot of novice players.
• Nintendo Hard: One of the most frequent complaints with the game is this, and it can be extremely frustrating at times. You can get all the way to the Suburbs, only for the toxicity to rise like crazy, and when you try to leave to escape the toxicity the only way out has become full of angry hippos who can kill you in just a few hits. And about Year 70 almost all animals in any given area spawn as packs of lions and dinosaurs.
• NPC: There are several animals that appear that cannot be selected by the player, mostly because they can fly. These include Pigeons, Crows, Pteranodons, Archeopteryx, and Meganeura (Giant Prehistoric Dragonflies).
• One-Hit Kill: If you're within a size rank or two of your target, you can take out just about anything with a Clean Kill attack.
  • However, if you're NOT within a size or two of your target and the "Critical" you'll instead get doesn't seem to have done very much damage... well, better run, as the one-hit kill is likely to be YOUR fate if your now-alerted and angry target gets his paws on you.
• Ornamental Weapon/Weapon for Intimidation: The Guard Dog Uniform comes complete with four bandoliers full of small daggers, they are completely decorative, you can't use them. Justified in that all of the animals who can wear it lack the thumbs that would be required to use them.
• Post-Apunkalyptic Armor: The Guard Dog Uniform definitely qualifies. It looks like something Mad Max would wear if he was a dog.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: The game attempts to avert this by giving extra stat boosts for matching sets, but finding all the items in a set is a LOT easier said than done. So early in the game, you'll be decked out like a Rummage Sale Reject if you want any stat boosts whatsoever.
• Raised by Wolves: Wolf cubs, duh. Oh, and there's also ERC-003.
• Raptor Attack: The Deinonychus, one of the only two playable dinosaurs, are depicted as featherless. The Archaeopteryx mostly avert this, aside from the yellow coloring of their plumage.
• Roguelike: It has certain elements of this; the heavy focus on trying to survive and eat as long as you can before you inevitably die and lose a chunk of progress, for example.
• Sailor Fuku: Yes, really, you can collect entire school girl uniforms and then dress your animals up in them.
• Secret A.I. Moves: Some computer-controlled animals have access to charged, pouncing, or projectile attacks that you can't use. Unusually, you may actually WANT the enemies to use the attacks in question as they tend to slow them down or outright force them to stand still for a bit, giving you a chance to either escape, reposition yourself for a counterattack, or take care of other enemies while they're busy with the windup or cooldown.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Mating is an important part of gameplay, and for some reason the game feels the need to show your animal sniffing the female's rear and mounting her, but (fortunately) it doesn't show any private parts and fades to black before the actual act.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Most of the time, it's on the serious end, particularly during Survival Mode, but it pops over towards the silly end at times. And it's not just the sight of badass animals wearing clothing, it's also the story suddenly giving you a ridiculing rabbit, a Boxing Kangaroo, and, at one point, a bear that stands on his hind legs and crosses his arms while delivering a speech before giving you an accessory. And then there's the very thought of animals taking over Tokyo.
• Stripped to the Bone: After you've finished Eating the Enemy, its bones will be left behind for a few seconds before disappearing.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Occasionally an animal with no chance of victory attempts to fight you. This can result in hilarious situations such as a dinosaur fending off a huge pack of house cats or a lion staring dumb-founded at a rabbit that wants to go mano-a-mano.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Zig-zagged. The herbivores' special ability causes a member of the pack to stay behind and draw your pursuers' attention long enough to let you escape, which can be very helpful in getting you out of sticky situations. However, if you're playing as another predator, expect other predators to chase you to hell and back, especially if you're too slow to get out of their sight, even if you run them right past perfectly edible animal corpses on the way.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The room in which the final boss fight of Story Mode takes place contains four presents, containing a pet food and three doses of pet medicine.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Not only do the A.I. animals have the ability to call a pack and use Secret A.I. Moves they also move faster then they would in your hands.
• Time Paradox: What happened to humanity.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: If you're attempting to land a Clean Kill on an enemy that's significantly larger than you, it will instead land a "Critical" that will not one-shot your enemy and isn't even guaranteed to do significant damage... Come on, did you really think a Pomeranian would just bowl over an elephant and get anywhere near its vitals with its tiny teeth? Oh, and for a double-dose of reality, you are in all likelihood going to get ripped to shreds from your now pissed-off would-be prey.
• Video-Game Lives: When you mate and start a new generation, you take control of the next litter, and all the extras count as an extra "life" if something bad happens to the one you're controlling. Of course, your packmates can also die first if you're careless or reckless.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The clothing system. You get four different spots you can place equipment and all of it is visible while you play, so you can mix and match for adorable or funny animals. The chimpanzee is particularly great in this regard.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Your animal needs to eat to replenish their hunger meter. Grazers eat plants, predators eat other animals. If your hunger bar runs out you start taking damage to your health, and once you go past a certain age, your maximum hunger starts going down - yes, your max hunger can reach zero, and yes, that means you will die in short order if you don't mate very, very quickly once that happens.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Lots of animals will call for backup leading to situations where the player will get swarmed. This happens most often with pack animals like the dogs and lions.
  • Once the player hits 100 years in survival mode, Homo Erectus arrives, and they've replaced pretty much every other animal on the map. They're deceptively strong, often appear in groups, and you can't eat them. They're basically made to screw over the player and all but force a Game Over.

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