Tokyo Jungle Mobile (PS Vita)

 The original Tokyo Jungle on PS3 is one of the unsung heroes of videogames in the 2010s, being a cool and original concept realised into a fun and compelling game that I still regularly play a decade later. It's also a poster child for a problem that's been plagueing the world of videogames in recent years: console manufacturers and their fervent antipathy towards backwards compatibility and enthusiasm for abandoning and closing shopfronts. Tokyo Jungle is, like so many other great games of that time, trapped on its host hardware. If you want to play it, you need a PS3. There have been no sequels, rereleases, or ports to anything else. Its handheld spin-off Tokyo Jungle Mobile is in an even worse situation!

 

It was part of the Playstation Mobile shopfront, which delivered smaller games to the PS Vita and a small range of specially certified mobile phones. This shopfront closed in 2016, when the PS Vita had a good few years of commercial life left in it, and, in a frustrating case of personal bad luck, a week before I was able to get one. So, like some of the 3DS games I've covered in the past (and will cover in the future), there is no legal way to get ahold of this game at all. 

 

But is it actually any good? Yes! When I first saw screenshots of it before release, it looked to me like some kind of turn-based strategy variation on the original game's concept. (In case you don't know, the original was a semi-roguelike (before that concept had become so over-exposed and diluted) action game where you played as a selection of wild animals, surviving as long as you could in post-apocalyptic Tokyo) It wasn't the handheld port I would have liked, but I was willing to give it a try. Now that I've actually been able to play it, I can say that it's not turn-based at all, but instead it's a streamlined and simplified version of the original game. The movement is grid-based, but real time, as is the combat. The graphics are also massively simplified: there's no longer any walk animations, and the animals all kind of bounce around like they're plastic toys being moved around by a little kid.

 

Most of the simplifications are positive! You're now only given one mission at a time, and when one mission ends (whether through success or failure), the next starts a few seconds later. There's no waiting around for the start of the next decade with nothing to do like in the original. Hiding in the grass works in a much clearer way, whereby if you're in the grass, other animals won't know you're there unless they saw you go in. And for carnivores, killing and eating animals are now the same action. You kill an animal, you immediately get the hunger points and calories. Finally, it's now a lot more obvious that you've got to regularly refresh the map's supply of food by using the nests.

 

There are a couple of changes that aren't so great, though they're definitely not game-ruiners. The first is a change to the way you get new playable animals. In the original, there was a kind of chain, where each animal would receive a special mission that unlocked the next animal. In mobile, all you have to do to unlock an animal is see it in-game. I'm usually against having characters and similar things locked at all, but there's exceptions to almost every rule in game design, and I think it really worked in Tokyo Jungle's favour. In Mobile, though, I'd unlocked late-game species like Dilophosaurus and Homo Erectus on my second or third game. One positive, though, is that there's no species for which you're expected to pay real money like there was in the original game.

 

The second negative change is a much less important one: the lack of rooftop exploration. It's only a little thing, but I really liked running around the rooftops in the original. It also points towards the main reason why I can't say that one game is better than the other. I think Tokyo Jungle Mobile is a lot more pure in its game design, and if we look at it purely mechanically, I think the changes it makes are positive enough that it's easily the better game of the two. Being playable on a handheld just adds a cherry on top of that, too. However, the original game just feels better. It's more atmospheric, immersive, and exciting.

 

Honestly, I would unreservedly recommend both games. They're both excellent games in very slightly different ways. I think you can still buy the original if you have a PS3 (and you can track down a disc copy from Japan for not too much an investment), but for Tokyo Jungle Mobile, piracy is the only way to get it. But since the Vita is an abandoned console, and PS Mobile games doubly so, where's the moral quandary here?