Tokyo Jungle drops you into a Tokyo with no people in it. The streets are empty of commuters and full of lions, tigers, chickens and Pomeranians. Sony published it for the PlayStation 3, Crispy’s! and Japan Studio developed it, and the whole thing runs on one idea: everything is the enemy, and only the strongest survive.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Fifty Breeds, Eighty Types
The roster is the pitch. Tokyo Jungle gives you 50 breeds and 80 types of animal, and it does not stop at the obvious ones.
- Pomeranians, beagles and a Tosa Inu
- Lions, cheetahs, hyenas and tigers
- Crocodiles, giraffes, hippos and chimpanzees
- Chickens, gazelles and Sika deer
- De-extinct Dilophosaurus, Deinonychus, moas and woolly mammoths
More animals unlock as you play. Others cost money: an Australian Silky Terrier, a Smilodon, a robot dog, a Peking Man, an office worker, a cat, a panda and a kangaroo all came as downloadable content from the PlayStation Store.
The Pomeranian Runs Out of Food
Story mode hands you missions built around different animals, and it eventually explains what happened to humankind. The Pomeranian is the spine of it. He runs out of pet food and fends for himself, and the source lists the bosses he faces as fat cats, though one of them is fought by his children. He ends his story with a small pack of his own.
Cold Trails and a Dead End
The Sika deer fawns search for their mother. One is killed by a cheetah, and the other’s story ends on cold trails and a dead end. A beagle builds an army of pups to overthrow a tyrannical Tosa Inu, then is killed by a hyena. The Tosa, wounded, trains with a bear, confronts the entire army of the Nomad Pack and kills them all, then duels the pack’s leader, the hyena, and kills him. He takes back his position.
Survival Mode and the Leaderboards
Survival mode is the better half. You pick an animal and last as long as you can, with local multiplayer and online leaderboards to compare runs. Small animals fight in groups, and a pack wins against something larger as long as one member lives. Herbivores build packs more easily, so a weak pick is not automatically a lost one.
The Pomeranian Problem
The tone is the point and also the trap. A Pomeranian squaring off against a lion is funny for an hour. The survival systems underneath are thinner than the joke, and Story mode’s missions lean on the same forage-and-fight loop until the reveals land.
What the Roster Actually Buys
The variety is real, not cosmetic. A chicken and a woolly mammoth do not play the same way, and unlocking the stranger picks is the strongest reason to keep going. The Dilophosaurus and the moas are worth the grind.
Where It Sits
Tokyo Jungle released in Japan on June 7, 2012, on disc and as a download. North America got it on PSN on September 25, 2012, the PAL region on September 26, and it later rode the Best of PlayStation Network Vol. 1 disc on June 18, 2013. Tokyo Jungle Mobile, a grid-based version, hit PlayStation Mobile for the Vita on July 10, 2013.
That is a lot of second chances for a game this strange, and it earned them. Fourteen years on, the premise is still a stunt. The pack mechanics and the leaderboards are the craft.
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