YMMV / Tomba!

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • A miner in the second game says "You've got some good stuff! Let me have some of it!". He's talking about the Power Coal, but out of context it can sound like he's talking about drugs or something.
  • An early mission in Tomba! 2 requires you to find Santa Claus's Big Sack. Obviously this is referring to his sack of toys, but the game doesn't make that part clear until you find it.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Real Evil Pig in the first game. Despite being the final boss and having all of the other Evil Pigs' attacks, multiple things conspire to make him very easy anyway. The arena itself has no hazards and the lowest level is flat ground with a few humps, allowing you to easily get in a good position to jump on the Real Evil Pig; the Evil Pig Bag only moves up and down at the right side of the arena and doesn't rotate at all, unlike some of the bags before it, making it very simple to line up your throw; and the Real Evil Pig still goes down after being thrown into his bag once, just like all of the other Evil Pigs. The sequel does a much better job with its final boss.
• Awesome Music: Both games have some good music, such as the boss fight theme in both games.
• Breather Level: Among the Events required to get the Golden Items in Tomba! 2, "Tiny Mouse's Berry Nuts" (#70) and "Berry Nuts Harvest" (#72) stand out as much easier than doing 10 rounds of Kujara washing and the trolley duology. Both of them simply put you atop a mouse, have you both enter a room filled with Berry Nuts, and give you a minute to run around in a 3D space and collect 100 of them. #72 isn't any harder than the already fairly easy #70, and all you need to access it is a key item that's very easy to find at the beginning of the game. Even outside of the Golden Items, these quests are only unlocked at the tail end of the game, and are very simple and fun.
• Common Knowledge: The status of Sony's ownership of the Tomba! series. Several fans for years simply thought Sony owned this IP. In truth, its developer Whoopee Camp and in turn, said company's president Tokuro Fujiwara was always the IP owner of the series. However, before it became defunct in 2000, Whoopee Camp only existed in Japan and in order to publish the Tomba! games overseas, they needed to hand over the licensing rights to another company. In turn, they partnered with Sony Computer Entertainment for that task. The Tomba! games had officially only been playable on Sony consoles and because of the licensing deal with Fujiwara, Sony had partial rights to the series. In the 2010s, Fujiwara had partnered with GungHo Online Entertainment (in Japan) and MonkeyPaw Games (outside of Japan) to negotiate acquiring the licensing rights from Sony to port the games digitally on the PS Store. Since 2021, The games had been removed from the PS Store and their ownership status had been up in the air for awhile. However, as of 2023, Limited Run Games announced that it partnered up with Fujiwara to release an remaster of the first Tomba! game. It will return on the PS4, PS5, and surprisingly, the Nintendo Switch and Steam. Its release on the Switch and Steam finally showcased that not only did Sony never have the intellectual rights to the series (much like they do with Parappa The Rapper, Jak and Daxter, God of War, etc), they also no longer have licensing rights for the series to remain exclusive on their consoles.
• Cult Classic: Both games were made by the very unknown company Whoopee Camp, which folded after the second game, and the games themselves tend to be about as unknown. People that played the duology will almost always have good things to say about both games, though.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Charles, Yan, Mizuno, and the Mermaid in the first game.
• First Installment Wins: While the sequel is still well liked, fan opinion overall favors the first game for its graphics and being arguably more charming.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Golden Bowl in the first game, which doubles your health from eight hit points to sixteen.
  • Also the final pants Tomba could wear, that significantly increased his speed and abilities.
  • The second game has the Golden Powder, which only requires you to defeat one Evil Pig (the Evil Ice Pig, specifically) and can be obtained as soon as you reach the Water Temple, if you know what to do. It makes Tomba completely invulnerable to ALL kinds of damage, and it NEVER runs out. The only drawback? You have to complete two very difficult Events ("Turbo Trolley" and "A Kujara Washing Expert") and the Guide Dang It! Towers in order to obtain the items necessary to get it.
  • The Hot Powder and Cold Powder in Tomba! 2 are a minor example of this too - they stop all hot/cold-based damage, never run out, and can be obtained as soon as you get to Donglin Forest. And unlike the Golden Powder, they don't require completing any tricky Events in order to obtain.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you owned a disc of Tomba! 2 and played it on your PS3, the music would bug out and fail to loop, instead playing a somewhat distorted version of a song from a different area (for example, in Circus Village, after completing the song in full, it would play a distorted version of the Water Temple's theme after the curse had been lifted). This is the reason why Tomba! 2 took so long to be put on the Play Station Network, but if you listen, the game will still play a second of the distorted song before looping.
• Narm: The voice acting in the second game leaves a bit to be desired. Some characters suffer from serious Vocal Dissonance (Mizuno, a young Cute Witch, sounds really old, while the female Water Pig sounds like a male), and other times, the delivery sounds very unfitting.
  • A particular case occurs in the PAL release of Tombi! 2, where Zippo's voice inexplicably changes to a Mickey Mouse-like voice for a single line. Even more strangely, this doesn't happen in the NTSC Tomba! 2, where Zippo says the same line in his normal voice.
• Narm Charm: If you don't mind Tomba! 2's voice acting, it can very easily come off as So Bad, It's Good, especially when you know that there's about two voice actors for all of the non-story-related NPCs.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Don't eat those mushrooms. Everyone will laugh. Or cry.
  • The Ghost Pig in the sequel is quite creepy compared to the others who are at least goofy.
  • The sequel's endgame sequence where the final Evil Pig freezes time. Everything's in black and white, the world is pitch black outside of your immediate surroundings, and everyone else has just up and vanished. To top it all off, it's all accompanied by this wonderful "music"!
• That One Boss:
  • Tomba! 1:
    • The Red Pig is considered the most difficult, with his arena covered in spikes (which his whirlwind attacks are expressly designed to blow you into) and the Pig Bag rotating around erratically at the center of the stage, making it extremely difficult to throw him in. To make things worse, due to how early the Red Pig Bag is found and its corresponding Gate's location in an even earlier area, it's highly likely this will be the first Evil Pig most players fight.
    • The Orange Pig in the jungle is also pretty bad due to the fight being in a tall and vertical room and the bag was rotating at the top of a series of tiny platforms.
    • The fight with the Yellow Pig has the entire fight take place underwater, which limits your movement and ability to attack. To make things worse, you will likely be stuck in the whirlpool for most of the fight while the boss is constantly moving around and attacking you.
  • The second game has the Earth Pig, who likes to hover just higher than you can jump normally half of the time, forcing you to use the pegs situated above a pit of rushing water that not even the Swimming Pig Suit can save you from. His main attack, shooting his spear into the ceiling, makes stalactites fall, which land exactly on your location and make swinging on the pegs a practice in precision. Additionally, he's so fat that he can obscure the view of the bag you're supposed to be throwing him into.
• That One Level:
  • The cursed version of Phoenix Mountain in Tomba!. In particular, the second section of the mountain where you need to jump across a bottomless pit using three extremely narrow platforms spaced really far apart without messing up and falling into the bottomless pit. It's also not made any easier by the wind making it impossible to time your jumps carefully. It gets even worse when you're inside the mountain and have to carefully jump onto a series of small platforms to avoid the pits of fire on the bottom.
  • Two words from the first game that make everyone flinch, "Seven Friends". This is one of the last mandatory quests in the game. The required friends are in random places all over the world, and when you find the first six, you might go crazy looking for the last friend, only to find out that it's actually Baron.
• That One Sidequest:
  • In the race minigame in the first game, the Bronze and Silver medals are easy enough to attain, but the amount of precision and timing needed to get the Gold is insane. Completionists looking to get the ultimate buff item (which you need the gold medal for) and thereby beat the game 100%, will require likely require dozens of attempts. And each of those attempts forces you to warp to the Village of All Beginnings, go through the same few screens, and use the Fuel Bar on the go-kart. At least the trolley from 2 lets you instantly restart when you fail! It's even lampshaded by the mermaid at the end of the racetrack when you do finally get it, as she says that the developers are going to be disappointed with themselves. (Although it becomes much easier if you know to avoid jumping as much as possible unless there's a direct obstacle, and stay on the ground as long as you can, letting you stay at top speed which would allow you to finish the race quickly.)
  • The trolley in Tomba! 2. If you brake for even a millisecond longer than you should, you'll miss the time limit. And you do it twice, with an even worse time limit the second time. That assumes the ridiculous speed the trolley moves doesn't throw you off the rails beforehand. And to add salt to your wounds, the game gives you a condescending "Awww, you failed!" every time you lose. Tips and Tricks magazine, asked why the quest was so hard, answered that Whoopie Camp were sadists.
  • From the second game, the Secret Towers. All three of them require a pair of Guide Dang It! sidequests to even get the key to open. Then you have to find the door to each, which is also a Guide Dang It!, as the game gives no hint as to where the doors are, and they're invisible.
  • Also from the second game, we have the "Precious Ring/Miner's Ring". To find it, you have to go to the Pipe Area, which is built over a massive bottomless pit, and drop into that pit in a very specific spot. Falling in anywhere else gives you a Game Over. This would be bad enough, but on top of that, the spot is so hard to get into that it's just being mean.

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