tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210652001825992189.post3397609031134854913..comments2024-02-07T03:41:46.421-05:00Comments on Wobble Reviews - Bob Surlaw's Words of Mouth: Review - Tokyo Junglesurlawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04490601640733928562noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210652001825992189.post-90413935617419003072012-11-12T10:55:08.371-05:002012-11-12T10:55:08.371-05:00How long would you say it takes to unlock the uppe...How long would you say it takes to unlock the upper tier animals? I don't expect to ever really like this game, but your post does make me want to give it one or two more shots.surlawhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04490601640733928562noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210652001825992189.post-8112246378865494792012-11-12T10:50:05.742-05:002012-11-12T10:50:05.742-05:00The animals do get faster as you climb the ladder,...The animals do get faster as you climb the ladder, but if you find it excruciating to put in the hours required to climb it.. yeah.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210652001825992189.post-88015829896435956402012-11-12T09:19:47.938-05:002012-11-12T09:19:47.938-05:00"You can reroll the current weather condition..."You can reroll the current weather condition / spawns by sleeping, not just mating." This is actually really useful to know and should have been mentioned in the tutorial.<br /><br />I think I'd enjoy it more if there was some sort of fast movement across empty areas. Show me how much hunger/HP/time I'll lose and just let me skip the part where I spend five minutes walking through completely empty areas. I appreciate the whole scheduling idea, but everything from getting around to fighting just felt so slow that I didn't want to keep trying. It's really not too different from Dead Rising relying so heavily on scheduling where you have to be and when, and those games have terrible combat and lots of long walking scenes too, but Dead Rising clicks with me better somehow. Maybe Tokyo Jungle needs skateboards for its dogs.surlawhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04490601640733928562noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210652001825992189.post-53946502271260928262012-11-12T00:16:29.417-05:002012-11-12T00:16:29.417-05:00Tokyo Jungle is a real weird thing. Its core compo...Tokyo Jungle is a real weird thing. Its core components are so simple that they can be mistaken for shoddy on cursory glance, and the game makes it really easy to play it in such a way that it becomes stupid boring. If a person somehow gets past all of that, the gameplay is fundamentally slow paced with lots of walking back and forth. So let me try to explain how this complete mess is fun for people (I suspect this won't much change your opinion, but I've been chewing on why this game is fun anyway so it's nice to get it off my chest):<br /><br />There's two big things that elevate the game to being interesting:<br />1. Learning its more obscure rules. This is basically the part of the game makes it roguelikeish. There are tons, and tons of pieces of random knowledge that will make your survival vastly more effective that you only really learn from messing around. Such as:<br />-Carnivores can survive toxic areas easily by quickly eating a body immediately after it dies since there's a brief period before it becomes toxic. Eating non-toxic food lowers your own toxicity, so as long as there's food you can safely survive in such an area.<br />-You can reroll the current weather condition / spawns by sleeping, not just mating.<br />-You can cancel out of clean kill animations with the right stick<br />And several others. Lots of people might hate the learn-by-playing approach, but I think it's one of the funnest parts of getting started in the game and becoming more effective. What looks like pure luck eventually turns into several clear techniques to survive horrible, terrifying conditions.<br /><br />2. You HAVE to be aiming to 100% the challenge goals and survive as long as possible<br />On first glance the challenges are a bunch of dumb simplistic goals with no depth to them.<br />Most people will probably proceed to focus entirely on the animal challenges to climb the evolution ladder as fast as possible or on getting the journals to unlock the next story mission. This is dumb because eventually things take too many points to unlock if you aren't gaining it from survival, and because it's a really boring grind compared to the later years of survival.<br /><br />By themselves this is true, in fact they're actually randomly generated each session. It's when you aim for S-rank by doing every single one of them in one session that the true nature of the game begins to reveal itself: scheduling. <br /><br />The challenge goals begin to contradict each other and your own survival. They'll direct you to places where the worst predators are or there's no food at all. They'll force you to mate more times than is actually a good strategy. They put you into uncomfortable positions. And eventually, you begin to understand that planning around them is key. Since I need to go to a district 4 zones to the left of here in the next generation, I should do the challenge to go 2 zones to the right of here first, and then fulfill the calorie and mating challenges on the way back. etc.<br /><br />Once you get past the challenge years the game morphs into a much more desperate struggle for survival which is enthralling to experience when you've already sunk like 2 hours into a single session. <br /><br />So in short, Tokyo Jungle is a scheduling survival simulator roguelike. I really appreciate its harder slant towards survival rather than pure RPG leveling like EVO or Cubivore. It's also slow as hell and I sometimes wonder why I'm still playing it when I'm running between districts for the fifth time. A little later I'm staving to death, surrounded entirely by animals that can kill me, suffering from old age, and use my last litter mate's corpse to distract a predator long enough to get the last bite needed for the necessary calories to breed and manage to keep the species alive for one more generation and I remember exactly why. That and sneaking by bears in the middle of the night with the pouring rain and a pulsing beat.<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com