Tokyo Crash Mobs (3DS)

With how easy it is for color-matching puzzle games to blend into the crowd it’s important to find a way to stand out. For Tokyo Crash Mobs, its chosen method is to have those colorful pieces you’re matching actually be a crowd of people, digitized live action actors lining up to be matched and dismissed in a few different formats. The live action look already helps the game draw some eyes towards it better than basic colored pieces, but Tokyo Crash Mobs commits to its use of real actors even more, having full-motion video scenes kick off and conclude levels. While it already might seem odd to have real footage woven through a puzzle game, the game ups the ante on the oddity with what actually happens in those brief interstitials.

 

In Tokyo Crash Mobs you will be playing as Grace as Savannah, two ladies in Tokyo who are living through a few weeks but experiencing them quite differently. Grace finds herself standing in long lines at events she wishes to attend, so every now and then she retreats into her own mind to imagine she had the ability to clear the people away so she could reach the front. Savannah on the other hand has to repeat a year at university and finds her studies repeatedly interrupted by people who press a certain type of button to send her tumbling through dimensions. While the load screens in the game often refer to things as delusions, the digital manual seems to present this button situation as a true concern rather than a flight of fancy, but it’s very likely this strange situation is meant to be seen as absurd. Tokyo Crash Mobs feels inexplicable by design with elements like each week finishing with the two girls teaming up to fight ninjas and the Movie Maze. Rather than making it easy to view the rather odd and wordless cutscenes again, the Movie Maze places the footage on a chart where scenes are grouped together haphazardly rather than placed in chronological order. Some have a theme to justify their grouping, but the Movie Maze clearly isn’t going to help you better understand what the odd plot is going for and being baffled by it feels like it’s meant to be part of the appeal. The absurdity doesn’t quite reach fascinating levels though because it repeats a lot of similar set-ups and doesn’t seem to be working towards anything particularly interesting, but it’s still hard not to wonder what weird scenes will crop up to sandwich a level of play.

After navigating the game’s touch screen menus that also have some peculiarities like angling the two girls to point towards the selection you desire, you can start playing Tokyo Crash Mobs. In the Story Mode there are 21 levels sorted into three weeks, and depending on which girl is being focused on, the color-matching gameplay will be quite different. On days where Grace is standing in line, the goal is to help her get close enough to the entrance of a building, the player given some useful wiggle room since she can be up to ten spots away from the door when time runs out and you will still win. There are medal rankings to consider to motivate you to score better, but most stages in the story only need to be beaten successfully to unlock more content with no extra rewards for doing particularly well. In Grace’s levels she is at the very back of a line filled with people known as Scenesters who are all wearing colorful outfits. Luckily, Grace can create Scenesters and throw them at the line ahead, able to clear groups of people so long as she can get more than three people in the same outfit in a row. Her throwing ability lets her toss over twisting queues to reach different parts of it based on where you’re tapping the touch screen, but oftentimes she can’t see the full line unless she’s starting to near the end. To complicate Grace’s play, new factors become concerns in later levels. The line itself might start changing shape during the action so a mistimed throw might place a person where you didn’t want them, people try to start cutting in line unless you hit them with a tossed human to discourage them, and objects in the environment or in people’s hands start blocking your throws so you can’t always make the matches you want. These throwing levels are reasonably enjoyable and the shake-ups aren’t too difficult to deal with, the player feeling in control but challenged as the lines grow more complicated and a few additional considerations arise.

 

Savannah’s rolling levels are a bit rougher though. Savannah still has Scenesters appear in lines and the rules are rather similar, but there’s sometimes more than one line to manage and their goal is now to reach a button at the end of their track. If one person reaches that button and presses it, it’s an instant loss, but there is no actual timer in play. Instead it will be the speed of the now moving lines, and while your goal is still to clear Scenesters away by making matches, here doing so will also often slow a line down or even make it fall back a little to earn you some more time. Unfortunately, Savannah cannot throw people over the lines, instead having to bowl them towards the incoming lines. You can hold the direction on the touch screen you wish to roll a person to have people in your path leap up, but they won’t stay up long and will keep moving forward while doing so. You can lose a lot of time waiting to try and bowl someone towards an obstructed part of the winding lines and still mess up if the leaping Scenesters come down too quickly. Adding more people to the line without making a match will shove them forward some so making matches only with people close to you is not always a winning idea. To make things a little rougher, one of the complications added in later levels is that the person at the front of one of the lines can be inspired to pick up the pace heavily, sending the line near the button to add quick pressure that is difficult to deal with. Savannah’s levels are still manageable although prone to sudden failures because of things like the speed up or difficulty in rolling to back parts of the line, but they aren’t outright deal breakers since quick action can still keep you alive and levels are short enough that retrying them until you succeed isn’t too frustrating.

Grace and Savannah alternate levels for the most part, both of them also able to acquire items mid-stage to use to try and even the odds. Grabbing a UFO will let you abduct every Scenester of a certain color so that the lines shrink considerably, barriers can bring the lines in Savannah’s stages to a stop for a bit, and the umbrella power has certain Scenesters open up umbrellas that change their colors so they’re potentially easier to match than the current batch was before. To activate an item you acquired though involves holding the stylus down on the girl you’re playing as, and in Savannah’s stages with lines on either side that sometimes get very close, sometimes an accidental item activation can crop up. Luckily the third mode that happens on each Sunday in the game’s three week story doesn’t bother much with items, the player able to hit a UFO for a clear of some colored ninjas but not much else. In Sunday’s game, Grace and Savannah work together and the action is now controlled by the 3DS’s motion sensing gyroscope. A ninja in black will make colored ninjas appear to his side, the player still doing similar matches to the Scenester focused levels but now throwing ninjas towards other ninjas to try and clear them away and make the main ninja retreat. The girls are at risk during these stages though, the ninjas sometimes approaching to attack or tossing giant smoke balls towards them. Take too much damage and the level is failed, but the motion controls can also be used to move away from incoming attacks if you can’t clear them away with a rolled ninja in time. These levels are definitely the simplest and never get too difficult, although that’s a bit of a blessing because eventually the motion controls get a little loose. This is more an issue with the 3DS system since it starts losing calibration and it becomes harder to aim at the ninjas you want over the course of a level, but pausing to reset the positioning will fix it. It is a shame you might do this fairly often since hitting the big line of ninjas in front of you will have you turning a lot to try and see or avoid them, but this is still a nice breather at the end of a week and still engaging enough to pose a bit of a challenge.

 

Outside of the 21 level story there is a Black Book version of the game unlocked afterwards that retools those stages into more difficult versions, but Tokyo Crash Mobs doesn’t feel like it sustains high difficulty too much as it starts to put a bit too much pressure on things like the rough controls of Savannah’s rolling stages. The Challenge mode is at least a reasonable extra mode, the three different forms of play now having much longer versions to tackle. Grace will have to clear an ever growing line of people to try and stay alive, this survival challenge ending if you can clear 1000 Scenesters before they push her back too far. It is certainly a daunting goal, but the challenge feels more like it’s meant to see how close you can get to that rather than it being about actually achieving it. Savannah’s play style is still an endurance test but it segments its play by having you actually clear lines and then getting new ones to appear after, the ninja game doing something similar as it’s more about clearing a bunch of increasingly difficult stages back to back rather than having a true new twist like Grace’s game. These challenge modes do add some longevity and a way to play the game casually, Tokyo Crash Mobs a more rounded experience because you don’t just have to throw yourself at the difficult Black Book levels once you clear the quick but quite challenging normal story stages.

THE VERDICT: Tokyo Crash Mobs is deliberately unusual in its presentation, but the absurdity doesn’t quite give the color-matching gameplay the extra life it needs to rise above being average. Grace’s stages have the most potential with tossing people over lines and racing the clock to make your matches, the format mixing well with new obstacles and feeling like an occasionally tense challenge while being achievable. Savannah’s rolling levels on the other hand don’t control the best and push a bit too hard, clearing them less about satisfaction and more a relief as you can move onto another puzzle type next. The ninja stages are easy fun despite some motion control hiccups and the challenges give the game a bit more longevity, but mostly Tokyo Crash Mobs tried to set itself apart with its live action characters while providing puzzle gameplay that doesn’t quite stand out.

 

And so, I give Tokyo Crash Mobs for Nintendo 3DS…

An OKAY rating. The ninja days would probably be too basic if they were the only focus but they break away from the other game types well for an entertaining enough diversion and Grace’s stages have a concept that works well much of the time, but Savannah’s stages definitely feel rough and can grow frustrating as they start straining things with dual lines and the line leaders picking up the pace. Savannah electing to roll instead of throw doesn’t really feel like it is a necessary change in getting Scenesters where you need to go since Savannah’s stages already crank up the difficulty much more, and even if being able to throw them where you’d like might make them simpler, the complications found in this format currently aren’t quite as creative as Grace’s queue-focuses stages anyway so some more unique ideas could help this weaker mode stand out. A little more direction to the live action scenes could also help make the quirky video footage feel less like set dressing and more something actually working towards a conclusion. That’s not even a request to make it less weird, but more a desire to keep it consistently interesting and linking things together since some stages are bookended by rather plain revisits of Tokyo scenery or scene ideas from before that don’t even give you a slight chuckle at their absurdity anymore.

 

The good news is of course that for the most part Tokyo Crash Mobs is quite playable, the Grace levels providing a solid challenge and Savannah’s usually coming together to the point they’re not too bothersome. Committing to any one gameplay type instead of doing all three could have helped the game better explore how to advance them in interesting ways or might have helped the development team notice how rough certain elements get, but having all three styles here also offsets some of the issues since you are able to pop over and play in a different way that will be mostly effective at what it is attempting. This gameplay mix isn’t quite successful enough that it helps the game stand out though, so Tokyo Crash Mobs will still probably be best known for its strange use of digitized actors and live action cutscenes despite those also not coming together as cleanly as they could have either.