Toontown Online

Toontown is my only experience with MMOs. I played it as a kid, and I played it really poorly at that! I only had the actual membership for a couple months for the understandable reason that my parents didn't want to spend $10 a month on one single video game. In those months, I managed to get up to The Brrrgh (the second to last area in the game). After the membership ran out, I was quarantined to the first area in the game (Toontown Central) with all the other free-to-plays.

Disney's non-membership limitations were, as expected from Disney, extremely cruel. For starters, you were locked to the first area of the game, unless you managed to walk through the other neighborhoods during the time you had membership. Once you entered any area that wasn't the starter area, you would no longer be able to enter any buildings, nor would you even be able to do small extras like fishing or playing minigames on the trolley. Because of this, F2Ps had to rely on the very rare chance of an enemy building spawning in Toontown Central if they wanted to experience one, or god forbid, clear a task that involves taking one down. Whenever a building spawned in the starter area, there would be a guaranteed crowd standing around it, hoping the team currently inside of it will fail so that they will get their chance.

If that wasn't bad enough, you couldn't even use all of the weapons you unlocked once your membership ran out. The weapons in this game span 7 different categories with 7 levels of strength each. Being a f2p means that the game would only let you use the 2 starter categories up to level 4, even if you had all the others unlocked, which eliminates any possible strategy you could come up with. Needless to say, you couldn't experience much without paying money. At least, until it closed down, anyways. Disney did not send off Toontown with much love. At the end of its life, Toontown was littered with hackers, and the servers couldn't handle the beatings. Once the game was finally shut down, Disney changed the colorful Toontown web page into a black and white nothing with the note that it's gone. This was hilariously ironic considering the main themes of the game. In another strange PR move, it was noted in the announcement of the game's closure that they wanted to work on Club Penguin instead, which would also be closed a few years later.

The themes of Toontown aren't complicated. Toons just wanna have fun, but the enemies of this game (the cogs) want to turn everything into a colorless, corporate robot hellscape. There's no deep story behind this. Scrooge McDuck tries to use the robots to make money, and then those robots become sentient and try to take over the world. The toons use gags (this game's name for weapons) to destroy them. You continue through the game's map from neighborhood to neighborhood completing tasks, unlocking new gags in the process. These tasks aren't complicated either. Almost all of them involve destroying cogs, or taking down cog buildings.

Even with this simple premise, 'maxing out' your character is a monumental, time-consuming task. When you use a gag, you will get skill points based on what level it is. Using a level 2 gag once will give you 2 experience points. In order to reach the top tier, level 7, you need a total of ten thousand skill points, and you need to do this for each of the 6 different gags you have. This is especially annoying for the Trap gags, which require you to also use a Lure for each one (please don't ever choose Trap, it's not worth it). It's also annoying for people using Toon-Up (the game's healing gag) which requires you to always have a partner to level it up on. There are of course ways to shorten this process, including using cog buildings and keeping track of 'invasions' to double your xp gain. Even once you have a level 7 gag, you have to grind out another 500 xp points after each use if you want to use it again. Keep in mind that you need to constantly run back to each neighborhood's 'playground' to refill your gags every time they run out. It's a long process, and that's just for the gags! If you want to fully reach maximum Toon, you also need to become a god of fishing, gardening, racing, and golfing, alongside doing all of the tasks in the game.

Fishing helps you gain the game's currency, jellybeans. You use these beans to buy gags, or buy accessories for your toon or your toon's house. You can also use the trolley in a playground to collect jellybeans from minigames, though fishing is usually the quickest method. The house customization is neat, as it lets you move all the furnature wherever you want, as well as changing the wall colors and floor colors. It adds a lot of personality to the game! Though the only practical reason you'd need to go to your house is to train your pet, water your garden, or change your clothes.

The simple gameplay allows for some interesting strategies to eliminate cogs when working with a team. Though generally, somebody needs to lure the cogs in while the others focus on destroying them one at a time. In easier cases, the players only need to stack up their gags together to do enough damage. When the going gets desperate, the level 7 gags serve as a 'nuke' that will wipe out the enemies standing in front of you. As you might expect, a game with a primary neverending mission to Kill All Cogs leads the playerbase to get heavily optimized. Because of this, there is more to this game's enemy than just the normal combat. There are also four 'boss' areas in the game that are centered around each of the game's 4 different types of robots. These boss areas range from 'factory' runs, to full-fledged boss battles. They usually involve having to complete tricky minigames on top of battling cogs, or risk dying in the process.
By the way! When you 'die' in this game, you get sent back to the nearest playground, where you're forced to watch your toon stand around, doing nothing for a whole 30 seconds until you're allowed to move around again.

This game feels like its own world, even though its physical scale seems normal for 2003 standards. Thankfully, Disney's actual presence in this game is kept somewhat minimal. Each playground has a different Disney character walking around it, but that's about as far as it goes. Every street, building, minigame, and song is an original creation. The entire soundtrack is MIDI with a default soundfont. ALL of it, and it's wonderful. Every neighborhood is colorful and decorated in a unique way with its own soundtrack. By the time you get to the tasks in Donald's Dreamland (the final neighborhood in the game), you've basically unlocked an entire new game in itself, with three whole new boss areas to tackle.

Even though the gameplay is simple and repetitive, it makes for a relaxing grinding game. And of course, thanks to the efforts of fans, you can find versions of this game still running today that you can play for free.

I'm pretty sure that we all have nostalgia for this game as it was fun, easy, and it allowed for easy communication and mingling between friends over the internet while playing a game. It was a fun experience and it's a shame that ToonTown closed in 2013. However, ToonTown Rewritten is still up after nearly eight years after the original toontown closed, so I'll talk about that instead.

ToonTown Rewritten is worth playing if you want some good nostalgia and easy and innocent fun. However, the game is not nearly as fun when you get to above 100 laff (the health system in the game) and you are better off without playing the game past 112 or so laff as the gameplay at that point can get old extremely quickly as the majority of cog battles you are in will use the exact same strategy over and over again, the strategy being: "Spam the sound gag track until all cogs are dead" and the players of the game never steer away from that formula unless there is a toon in their group that has chosen to progress through the game without sound (pro tip: don't go soundless) and the reason why sound is used the most is because it hits all cogs and if used by all toons can easily do massive damage to cogs. The same formula is used for nearly every battle in ToonTown Rewritten and the only time that anybody uses any other strategies is when toons are either: soundless (as I said earlier), low on laff, or are out of powerful sound gags to use which only really happens in one battle. The game is also very grindy and that's because the original game was membership based and the grindy nature of the game was used to milk the players for all that they were worth. I have played ToonTown Rewritten to the point where I am not going to play it ever again unless there are new updates because of how grindy it is. Speaking of new updates, the developers are extremely slow. The game has been in development for nearly eight years and there have been very few new features that have been added to the game since release.

You may ask now: "Why is this game worth playing if it's so bad and why did I rate this a 9/10?" Well, to answer your questions, the game is worth playing because of the social interactions that you get from the game and the satisfaction of completing the task line/story mode that the game gives you. The task line is very fun to play through and will give you a fun time if you go through it with a friend or two when you play. The game will still be a little grindy but not nearly as much as after you finish all the tasks. The boss battles can be fun in small doses and you can easily have a lot of fun when facing them with your friends too.

However, I recommend that you do not play through ToonTown Rewritten at all if you've already played ToonTown Online. "Why?" You may ask? Because ToonTown Corporate Clash exists. Corporate Clash is the best version of toontown that I have ever played and is much more fun to play through than ToonTown Rewritten as the game is harder, there is more content, there are more frequent large updates, there is a new gag track, there are more quality of life changes, there are more bosses, there are more tasks, and finally, it is much less grindy. The quality of life changes to the game alone make it superior to Rewritten as instead of walking everywhere at a snails pace, you can run faster and instead of having to remember everything anybody said in a conversation, you can just check a chatlog and scroll up. There are also more options to make the game look better as well. Apart from that, you get much more satisfaction out of completing a task as the game is much harder and sound combos aren't as present in the game as most cogs are too high level to destroy with sound. I do have a couple of criticisms of the game though. First, the developers sometimes make bad decisions that make the game worse and they never seem to reverse those changes even if there is a lot of backlash from the community, and second, the game is very buggy. This is most evident in the mini-golf subgame where the ball that you use seems to have a mind of its own and never stays consistent with your shots which adds a luck factor into a game that should be skill-based. I can't tell you how many times that I've fell behind or lost or seen someone else fall behind or lose during a golf game because of bad luck.

Despite all its flaws, ToonTown is still a great game and very much worth playing through, especially with your friends.