Note: As of this writing, TOKOYO: The Tower of Perpetuity is currently not available on the North American Nintendo eShop due to getting re-assessed by the ESRB. Playism is working on this.
TOKOYO: The Tower of Perpetuity is, at its heart, a roguelite. But it’s not a normal roguelite; you, uh, don’t have a normal attack. You have a skill you can use to attack, but then you’re waiting a set amount of time until the gauge at the top-left of the screen refills before you can use it again. And in the meantime, you better be good at the greatest form of platform combat in existence: dodging.
Luckily, there are a number of items in the tower for you that modify things a bit. In addition, every few floors you’ll run into a shop of sorts, where you get your choice of drinks. One recovers a large amount of health, one recovers about 3/5ths of the first drink’s amount while offering a 10 HP boost to maximum health, and the third offers that same 3/5ths, but increases your skill gauge recovery by 1.5% (by the way, that’s the best one). Aside from that, there are items that you can pick up to modify certain parameters; slight recovery when defeating humanoid enemies, HP recovery when changing floors, deployment of a skill for a very short time upon being hit, Jump height increase, and so on. You get a choice of one of a randomized three at the beginning of each run.
There are also several characters to choose from, each with a different skill. These vary wildly in targeting, speed, and range. They all seem to keep to a baseline, or at least, as far as I could tell. Most of the difference is in their skill and not all are made equal. Personally, I found that skills that deployed a range around the character or had homing characteristics were the best. In general, however, the above-mentioned almighty dodge is how you’re going to be dealing with most things.
As far as story goes, you get little snippets for each character when you start a run, but as far as I’ve gotten, that’s about it. The tower itself literally changes every 24 hours, so if there are story beats placed therein, I haven’t reached them; sometime after the first boss, things start to get significantly more hairy. There’s also points set at certain intervals where you make a choice between praying to a white statue or a black statue; they seem to change the next few floors, but the game doesn’t exactly explain anything, so I’m going on instinct for most of this. Also, after your first statue decision, you have a karma countdown, which is a visible version of the time you have in other roguelites to get off a floor or suffer the consequences. It gets set back a certain amount per floor change, but the further you go, the lower the payoff seems to be.
The music and sound effects are serviceable. I’m probably not jamming to any of this in the shower after hearing it, though. The one thing that irks me is that the controls in the menu have a weird fault. Left and right on the dpad work in game, but dpad left doesn’t work in the menus; neither for choices made, or the option screen. If you want to select an option that requires you to press left, you have to do that with the control stick.
Also, since the floors are randomized at least once a day, they can occasionally produce insurmountable challenges to those that aren’t wary. My example would be the one time I jumped up into a vertical shaft, only to find that there were no platforms in it, and the height was too great for me to jump out of it. And you can’t jump down through platforms, either. So I just had to stand there and wait for an enemy to take me out.
At the end of the day TOKOYO: The Tower of Perpetuity may or may not be your cup of tea. It winds up being more of a pick-up-and-play game more than anything else. And a lot of its appeal rests on whether or not you’re a fan of its cutesy anime aesthetic.
Pros:
+ Colorful anime graphics
+Several characters to choose from
+Brisk gameplay with high replayability
Cons:
– Can be somewhat unforgiving
– Your only attack can take a while to recharge
Final Score:
*We were provided a download code for this game for review*
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