Given that this is the Japan-exclusive game Alpha Dream made for Nintendo before they made the first Mario & Luigi game, I went into this game expecting it to be an okay sort of proto-M&L experience. While to a certain degree that is absolutely true, I was nevertheless routinely surprised at how mechanically interesting and narratively clever this game was. It's not super long at only 15-ish hours, but it was still absolutely worth the time and the 700 yen I paid for it on the Wii U Virtual Console.
The story of Tomato Adventure is about Demiru, a little rabbit-like boy in a vegetable/food land of the Tomato Kingdom. While on a search for his girlfriend Pasaran's robot, she's kidnapped by the evil King Abira, who plans to use her energy to turn the kingdom from food into toys. Fighting through his 6 Super Kids one at a time, you aim to save your girlfriend with the help of some wacky friends you meet along the way. The story is fairly self-aware, irreverent, and silly, with a tone that struck me as something between an early 2000's gag anime and a Loony Toons cartoon. It's got a tone more irreverent and less serious than Superstar Saga, for example, and that combined with the relatively short length keep it from getting stale. Being a 2002 JRPG aimed at kids, it doesn't have any sort of serious message to get across, but its protagonists and antagonists were fun and silly enough that it kept the story interesting for me regardless.
The presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. I didn't have as much of a problem with this playing it on a wide-screen TV on my Wii U, but this game must've been a nightmare to play on the original GBA in 2002. Demiru is quite small on the screen, and the environments themselves tend to be very colorful and loud in their presentation. That on top of relatively small text made me routinely thankful to not be playing this on an unlit 3" GBA screen XD . The music is also really nothing to write home about. The boss themes are pretty nice, but there's only one or two, a standard battle theme, and then the final boss has not one but TWO unique tracks. Each area you go to has one or two themes for its main areas and dungeon parts respectively, but nothing really memeorable. The music and sound design sounds much closer to something like Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire than Superstar Saga in terms of quality and style (at least to my ears). Very much Early GBA Chic.
The gameplay is where the ideas that would go onto make Mario & Luigi start to really shine through though. There is no jumping or platforming the way the M&L games have in the overworld, and first strikes on enemies aren't a thing, but there are still environmental puzzles galore and no random encounters (enemies walk around and you touch them to initiate combat). This game has tons of puzzle and action mini-game segments that, while some are pretty pants, all tend to be very different and you'll rarely see something similar more than once. There are some that are so frustrating the game definitely would've benefited from an option to just skip them and move on after you'd failed a bunch, but that's difficult to reasonably expect from a game from 2002.
The combat, like M&L, revolves around fulfilling action commands around the "Gimmick" (literally what they're called) devices you find throughout the game. Demiru meets 3 party members over the course of his journey, and while only one of them can be active at a time (Demiru must always be in your party), each of them has their own gimmicks only they can use, with Demiru having the most as to give him more variety. The gimmicks themselves are subject to power creep pretty badly (really no reason not to at least try out new ones as you get them as they tend to be reasonably more powerful than your old ones), but none of their timed mini-games are the same. Some are quite similar, but no two are exactly alike, even between characters, although the instructions on how to perform their mini-games are sometimes quite annoyingly vaguely explained. The game rolls out the gimmicks pretty slow at the start as well as their related mechanics, and the game has a pretty dang slow and easy start in general, but you'll have dozens of gimmicks by the end of the game and the final boss or two really don't mess around.
Very similar to how Superstar Saga has difficulties for Bro Moves that you can increase to use less BP and deal more damage, you can change the difficulty of gimmick's action commands between battles to deal more damage at the risk of failing the command. It creates a neat risk/reward system that incentives getting really good at the newest gimmicks to do more damage. Additionally, very similar to what would be used for Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story's Bro Badge mechanics, you have "Incredible" points that you can build up by successfully completing gimmick action commands, and you build them up far faster by completing higher difficulty gimmick commands. You only unlock this feature once you get your first party member, but each of the 3 party members has two possible Incredible Actions they can do (one at 3/4ths Incredible bar, one at full bar) for different effects ranging from a full-party heal to massive AOE damage to your enemies. To balance this, each gimmick has a certain number of times you can use it before you need to use other of your 4 equipped gimmicks (you must have as many as you can equipped up to a maximum of 4), which balances out the risk/reward by encouraging you to use gimmicks you can complete reliably, and not just ones that do a lot of damage.
However, this is where that mechanic stumbles a bit. If you fail an action command JUST one time, your entire stock of Incredible points drops to 0, meaning you are punished pretty hard for not succeeding at an action command. There's also no way to practice action commands outside of real combat, meaning there's no way to tell for sure what a new gimmick's action command will be, let alone exactly how upping the difficulty of a certain gimmick will affect the possibility of its completion. One or two gimmicks (including Demiru's 4th acquired one) are entirely down to luck, which can make building up Incredible points super irritating if you lose your entire bar because you guessed wrong. Some have higher difficulties that are absurdly difficult and bordering on impossible to complete on purpose, and there were many I found I had no chance to complete even by accident on power levels past 4 (each has 7 levels of difficulty). This is further complicated by the strange way this game decides to do character leveling.
Leveling your actual character through combat only ups their speed and maximum health. Your defense is tied to the armor you're wearing, and you'll rarely find new armor outside of buying it at the new town's shop (although money is basically never an issue if you just fight everything you see like I did). And your attack power is tied entirely to the gimmick you're using, and gimmick power level is decided by 3 things: the specific gimmick (some are simply more powerful than others as their base power rating), the 1-7 action command difficulty you've chosen for that gimmick, and finally how much you've increased that gimmick's power through batteries.
There are 4 types of gimmicks and their action commands revolve around the theme of their type: Timing, Renda (button mashing), Speed (do commands within a time limit), and Dokidoki (basically an "Other" category, usually revolving around memorization and/or abject luck). You can find in chests and from enemy drops (and in the much later game, outright buy for large sums of money) batteries that will increase the power level of a gimmick. It can't be done infinitely, but it's a good way to make a gimmick you like continue its usefulness even when other newer gimmicks have higher base power levels. This also smartly incentivizes spreading out the types of gimmicks across the characters you use, as while you may be able to very reliably do the action commands for most button mashing gimmicks and speed ones, that means you'll have a ton of unused timing and dokidoki batteries and relatively underpowered overall gimmick strength. Ultimately, all this means that while you can't necessarily grind levels for more power, you can grind money to power up your favorite gimmicks for the end-game (and the final boss is a proper blighter, so you'll need them at max power, lemee tell ya). It also fortunately means that you aren't really punished that much for avoiding combat, since levels don't affect your overall power level that significantly (compared to traditional JRPGs at least).
Verdict: Highly Recommended. I was very pleasantly and regularly surprised by the quality of this game. The slow and very easy start had me a bit worried it'd be pretty boring, but I hit a stride around the first boss of the game that really had me hooked. While the last two dungeons go on for a bit too long, the game otherwise has really nice signposting and good overall pacing, and a nice difficulty curve to boot (although the highest spots of it are a bit weirdly high for a game that says its geared towards kids). This is now one of my favorite games Alpha Dream has done, and one of the Japan-exclusive games I've most enjoyed playing. It's absolutely worth your time with a fan translation or to help practice your Japanese ^w^
The story of Tomato Adventure is about Demiru, a little rabbit-like boy in a vegetable/food land of the Tomato Kingdom. While on a search for his girlfriend Pasaran's robot, she's kidnapped by the evil King Abira, who plans to use her energy to turn the kingdom from food into toys. Fighting through his 6 Super Kids one at a time, you aim to save your girlfriend with the help of some wacky friends you meet along the way. The story is fairly self-aware, irreverent, and silly, with a tone that struck me as something between an early 2000's gag anime and a Loony Toons cartoon. It's got a tone more irreverent and less serious than Superstar Saga, for example, and that combined with the relatively short length keep it from getting stale. Being a 2002 JRPG aimed at kids, it doesn't have any sort of serious message to get across, but its protagonists and antagonists were fun and silly enough that it kept the story interesting for me regardless.
The presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. I didn't have as much of a problem with this playing it on a wide-screen TV on my Wii U, but this game must've been a nightmare to play on the original GBA in 2002. Demiru is quite small on the screen, and the environments themselves tend to be very colorful and loud in their presentation. That on top of relatively small text made me routinely thankful to not be playing this on an unlit 3" GBA screen XD . The music is also really nothing to write home about. The boss themes are pretty nice, but there's only one or two, a standard battle theme, and then the final boss has not one but TWO unique tracks. Each area you go to has one or two themes for its main areas and dungeon parts respectively, but nothing really memeorable. The music and sound design sounds much closer to something like Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire than Superstar Saga in terms of quality and style (at least to my ears). Very much Early GBA Chic.
The gameplay is where the ideas that would go onto make Mario & Luigi start to really shine through though. There is no jumping or platforming the way the M&L games have in the overworld, and first strikes on enemies aren't a thing, but there are still environmental puzzles galore and no random encounters (enemies walk around and you touch them to initiate combat). This game has tons of puzzle and action mini-game segments that, while some are pretty pants, all tend to be very different and you'll rarely see something similar more than once. There are some that are so frustrating the game definitely would've benefited from an option to just skip them and move on after you'd failed a bunch, but that's difficult to reasonably expect from a game from 2002.
The combat, like M&L, revolves around fulfilling action commands around the "Gimmick" (literally what they're called) devices you find throughout the game. Demiru meets 3 party members over the course of his journey, and while only one of them can be active at a time (Demiru must always be in your party), each of them has their own gimmicks only they can use, with Demiru having the most as to give him more variety. The gimmicks themselves are subject to power creep pretty badly (really no reason not to at least try out new ones as you get them as they tend to be reasonably more powerful than your old ones), but none of their timed mini-games are the same. Some are quite similar, but no two are exactly alike, even between characters, although the instructions on how to perform their mini-games are sometimes quite annoyingly vaguely explained. The game rolls out the gimmicks pretty slow at the start as well as their related mechanics, and the game has a pretty dang slow and easy start in general, but you'll have dozens of gimmicks by the end of the game and the final boss or two really don't mess around.
Very similar to how Superstar Saga has difficulties for Bro Moves that you can increase to use less BP and deal more damage, you can change the difficulty of gimmick's action commands between battles to deal more damage at the risk of failing the command. It creates a neat risk/reward system that incentives getting really good at the newest gimmicks to do more damage. Additionally, very similar to what would be used for Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story's Bro Badge mechanics, you have "Incredible" points that you can build up by successfully completing gimmick action commands, and you build them up far faster by completing higher difficulty gimmick commands. You only unlock this feature once you get your first party member, but each of the 3 party members has two possible Incredible Actions they can do (one at 3/4ths Incredible bar, one at full bar) for different effects ranging from a full-party heal to massive AOE damage to your enemies. To balance this, each gimmick has a certain number of times you can use it before you need to use other of your 4 equipped gimmicks (you must have as many as you can equipped up to a maximum of 4), which balances out the risk/reward by encouraging you to use gimmicks you can complete reliably, and not just ones that do a lot of damage.
However, this is where that mechanic stumbles a bit. If you fail an action command JUST one time, your entire stock of Incredible points drops to 0, meaning you are punished pretty hard for not succeeding at an action command. There's also no way to practice action commands outside of real combat, meaning there's no way to tell for sure what a new gimmick's action command will be, let alone exactly how upping the difficulty of a certain gimmick will affect the possibility of its completion. One or two gimmicks (including Demiru's 4th acquired one) are entirely down to luck, which can make building up Incredible points super irritating if you lose your entire bar because you guessed wrong. Some have higher difficulties that are absurdly difficult and bordering on impossible to complete on purpose, and there were many I found I had no chance to complete even by accident on power levels past 4 (each has 7 levels of difficulty). This is further complicated by the strange way this game decides to do character leveling.
Leveling your actual character through combat only ups their speed and maximum health. Your defense is tied to the armor you're wearing, and you'll rarely find new armor outside of buying it at the new town's shop (although money is basically never an issue if you just fight everything you see like I did). And your attack power is tied entirely to the gimmick you're using, and gimmick power level is decided by 3 things: the specific gimmick (some are simply more powerful than others as their base power rating), the 1-7 action command difficulty you've chosen for that gimmick, and finally how much you've increased that gimmick's power through batteries.
There are 4 types of gimmicks and their action commands revolve around the theme of their type: Timing, Renda (button mashing), Speed (do commands within a time limit), and Dokidoki (basically an "Other" category, usually revolving around memorization and/or abject luck). You can find in chests and from enemy drops (and in the much later game, outright buy for large sums of money) batteries that will increase the power level of a gimmick. It can't be done infinitely, but it's a good way to make a gimmick you like continue its usefulness even when other newer gimmicks have higher base power levels. This also smartly incentivizes spreading out the types of gimmicks across the characters you use, as while you may be able to very reliably do the action commands for most button mashing gimmicks and speed ones, that means you'll have a ton of unused timing and dokidoki batteries and relatively underpowered overall gimmick strength. Ultimately, all this means that while you can't necessarily grind levels for more power, you can grind money to power up your favorite gimmicks for the end-game (and the final boss is a proper blighter, so you'll need them at max power, lemee tell ya). It also fortunately means that you aren't really punished that much for avoiding combat, since levels don't affect your overall power level that significantly (compared to traditional JRPGs at least).
Verdict: Highly Recommended. I was very pleasantly and regularly surprised by the quality of this game. The slow and very easy start had me a bit worried it'd be pretty boring, but I hit a stride around the first boss of the game that really had me hooked. While the last two dungeons go on for a bit too long, the game otherwise has really nice signposting and good overall pacing, and a nice difficulty curve to boot (although the highest spots of it are a bit weirdly high for a game that says its geared towards kids). This is now one of my favorite games Alpha Dream has done, and one of the Japan-exclusive games I've most enjoyed playing. It's absolutely worth your time with a fan translation or to help practice your Japanese ^w^