Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom

Ooopss sorry kids I seemed to have dropped all my notes for this game. Gonna have to improvise on this review. This is a site that previously came from a site of music lovers so tell me dear readers in your infinite wisdom on the subject who is Princess Tomato in relation to Emperor Tomato Ketchup? While you ponder this really important question about the line of succession regarding Tomato royalty, which could result in an endless war over rites of succession whilst oceans of ketchup spill across endless battlefields, let me give the rest of this review which isn't even half as interesting as imagining a Tomato Game of Thrones.

This game is an extremely basic point and click exploration game, even more, basic than other games like it on the system like Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! and Shadowgate. I always had a fascination with titles like this growing up because they seemed like a genre-wide attempt at over ambition regarding a game's presentation and story, in actuality hardly any of them reach the story acumen of even a legitimately bad b-movie. You know Snatcher [スナッチャー] came out around the same time as these titles. I'm not saying these games should feel the same depression and shame Julius Ceaser felt when he remarked on his thirtieth birthday that he still hadn't accomplished as much as Alexander the Great did before his third decade on this earth, but I'm saying they should feel some modicum of shame for even attempting to walk into the shadow of that titles existence.
This game is about as standard of a point and click game as I could imagine, I'll say in its defense it's not as clunky as the previous two mentioned titles, but on the flipside, it doesn't have as interesting of a story or general aesthetic as those. It was a kids game made for kids and it functions on that level and I mildly enjoyed it when I was young lad learning about the ways of the world.
Every one of these point and click games controls and the NES gamepad work about as well together as my shaky hands and a large table saw, but I give credit where credit is due, this is a nice little story about a Tomato man and his quest for romance. I mean isn't that what life is all about? We want to find happiness with someone else before we're too ripe for other people to even pretend to see past our obvious blemishes, off-color areas, and soggy structure. Like a tomato, you're a disgusting sack of cells and you only have a small window of relevance before you rot. So make your life an adventure and damn the rest of the vegetables, it's time to go on a quest to save that beautiful Princess Tomato.

This is a super serious game about how you're pursuing your dream of marrying the titular Princess Tomato in an arranged marriage. It is also Animal Farm, but for even dumber people that can't understand the obvious allegories of that book about how a vegetable resistance is trying to reinstall one monarchy and trounce another under the pretense of happiness and freedom for all. Fuck man when we gonna get ours? Viva Les Legumes Revolucion! So at the start of this game, you save a baby persimmon named Percy who then for some reason travels with you everywhere you go. I guess Persimmons like Wookies rely on a life debt system and now he is just my indentured servant forever. Or maybe he is your legal slave since this is a vegetable feudal system. Maybe persimmons are the lowest ranking in the social order, which I mean they do taste fucking awful. Percy's cuteness hides the fact that he is the clumsiest asshole ever and is constantly losing your extra shit at the end of each chapter after a fall. So a question I have about this game is what kind of a pharmacy is in the back of a nightclub? Some people might not find this to be a suspicious location for a pharmacy, but those people have never nursed a pill addiction. This game is hinting at deeper truths about what it takes to be normal in a social setting. some tomatoes can hide their blemishes and areas of rot, but some of us need a little extra help.

A lot of the extended story of this game is learning about the vegetable revolution and staging it. The romance the whole want for a revolution is based around is almost never hinted at or elaborated on. Why do we want to or should we want to see these two vegetables wed and become military dictators of this land? What benefits do they offer the other vegetables that the supposed villains "the farmies" aren't giving them? This game raises more questions than it answers.

So the music in this game is pretty bland and standard for its era, which is kind of a surprise because in my experience point and clicks usually have pretty good music, to make up for the lack of everything else. It does have a minor villain that is a Sergeant Pepper reference who even goes "red" with rage as he interrogates you about your involvement in the eighteenth of Brumaire coup. I make jokes about this Tomato, but he is a prince and it is a bit telling to me that we don't know what his plans are politically for this kingdom. In fact usually when a politician is omitting their plans for the future that is a sure sign that they have some terrible shit planned that goes against the general will of the people. So I can only imagine what reactionary return to feudalism horrors your reign will bring once you unite with Princess Tomato, a ketchup-stained marriage built on the backs and dreams of working serfs out there waiting to get their stipend of water while you ascend to power. *Crumples paper angrily as his green pepper face turns red.* "What are you hiding you goddamned tomato bastard?!" Don't add that knock against tomatoes to my RSPM's, I was in character and it wasn't intentional. There is one song in this game that sounds like the fucking world is melting and everything is coming apart, it's some Mother tier creep shit at the end of level four. True story I fell asleep in my chair as happens from time to time. Something about my sleep habits that is pertinent here, I drink a lot of coffee. Do you know those extreme stories of people who smoke like sixty cigarettes a day? Well, that's me with those bean drinks. Live fast, hopefully, die faster. I once joked that if I was on a death row my last meal wouldn't contain any food it would be a few barrels of coffee, coffee accessories and three white lines. I've wanted to reenact that scene from Sideways where the guy dumps a pot of spit out wine on himself out of a desperate want to just get some wine, with some coffee but I don't want to waste the shit and coffee stains like a motherfucker. Drinking this much coffee all the time leads you to a highwire strung out feeling when the inevitable comedown happens and when you sleep you sometimes wake up fully lit, like you never really went to sleep, to begin with, but your mind entered some state of hyper hibernation and when you "wake up" it's in a state of bizarre consciousness where it feels like your more awake than awake can fully describe on its own. So this was happening to me in my chair when I woke up, I was hyper-aware of everything happening and right at this moment i clicked on the emulation window and the fucking level 4 music start's blasting loud as fuck and then as if that wasn't enough, a huge bird flew into my window and smacked against it. It was like a rare series of what the fuck coincidences happening all at once to make an exceptionally memorable memory for a not so memorable game.

This game ends and it actually says your villains the farmies were free to become "honest carnivores." Which is a really weird statement to make. I don't eat meat, but I understand that a lot of people do. This seems to be the one piece of media I have ever seen that makes the eating of vegetables with their storied lives, dreams, and fables seem more evil than eating an animal. It didn't exactly make me second guess my diet since mine again mostly consists of coffee anyway, but I guess this is something to think about. Although really animals aren't upholding feudal values with lettuce and persimmon serfdom, so maybe I'm saving the planet by eating evil vegetables with their backward economic systems and social customs. As propaganda in favor of continued vegetable feudalism, this failed to bring me to the side of the legume ancien regime.
It really makes me think if a piece of lettuce could talk and I could ask it to make an argument for it's continued existence and then a gigantic being from beyond the solar system came and did the same for me, what arguments could we make in favor of our own continued existence? Reviewing games like this would probably be the first check mark against my continued existence and the first sign that the human race ought not to exist by principle. As sad as I am here writing it, you're reading it. You might want to ask yourself why, but while you ponder that, read the rest of this review, because like the game it's short enough that you don't feel like you have wasted your time, but just long enough that you question your life decisions when you remark upon the generally wasteful activities you engage in.

In a twist more shocking than that of the Samus reveal in the same generation, it is shown that you're in fact not a Tomato prince and in fact are a Cucumber man. Which is probably good for the princess because it means you will have length and girth, but it also raises a lot of questions about this monarchy. Can mixed race monarchies be progressive? Are these vegetables holding onto what's golden? These might sound like dumb questions for dumb people but I heard them actually being asked about Prince Harry and his wife. My answer is that as long as even one persimmon lives in chains due to political and economic inequality it doesn't matter how many female tomato CEO's and gay pepper drone strike enthusiasts you have your society is still shit. Compost this disgusting heap built on lies and economic contradictions and start over.

Maybe this is shallow of me to say, but after seeing Princess Tomato, I'm not sure risking my life and going through a revolution was worth consummating this marriage. I mean I'm sure I the prince ain't no catch either, but sacrificing what was no doubt hundreds of thousands of lives to fulfill this prearranged marriage and then to marry a woman that looks like that... It makes me think to have thousands of grape children skewered and hundreds of squash people diced on my way to the top seem feudal, I mean futile. How many times can I make the same joke about the implied war taking place in this game that we never see? Well as you can see the review ends shortly, so I guess I couldn't think of too many more ways to keep this going. I guess like the feudal system, my shitty jokes eventually have to come to an end.

How many times can a point and click game present you with the same puzzle and have the conceit be interesting? I guess the answer varies from game to game and series to series. I could probably be Ace Attorney for a lifetime, but I'm not sure this games conceit could even last another hour or so without feeling tired. Like Monarchies, it overstayed it's welcome and like my life, it will probably come to a violent end when I the superheated coffee bean am garotted in a bathtub. Justifying my extreme life time fear of bathrooms in Calvinistic hindsight.

You could say I was preparing to do some athletics with this review, because I was stretching. There really isn't a whole lot to say about this game. Given what it was going for in concept and it's execution I would say it's above average. Despite its support of feudal monarchies and arranged marriages, which I guess was still a thing in the 80's I think one can look past the political implications of this game and just enjoy it on a dumb level, but I guess you can say that about any piece of media. Alright, it's passable if you want to waste two hours one day, I guess there are worst ways to waste it than this. It's more of a history lesson at this point, I like it as an early attempt for games looking at romance, even if it is only a little more complex than Mario and Peaches relationship, it was a fairy tale I imbibed and took to heart and I remembered it when I wanted to look into this subject, however small it's contribution might be. It's about tomatoes, but this game is fucking small potatoes in the grand scheme of games.