Tapir is a main character from the 1991 famicon platformer game Cocoron and also a character i really enjoy!! Cocoron is a very very delightful game i reccomend it very much if you are a fan of famicon platformers and also i will be spoiling the game a bit? tapir is very vital to the story and why i like him so much so if you don't want spoilers for the story or about him just watch out! its a simple story but it surprised me a bit!
like i mentioned earlier, Cocoron is a famicon platformer! it was devolped by Takeru and published by Sur Dé Wave, being released in 1991 and fan translated to english in 1999! Cocoron is a game all about dreams and going through a wonderful dream to save Princess Rua! a really stand out feature for cocoron is that has character customization!!! you can assemble a character out of a lot of different pieces which have unique health, weight which changes how high you jump and even sometimes unique abilities! its one of my favorite games ever and i love it a lot, but its time to get to what this page is about...
Tapir describes himself at the start of the game as a wizard of the dream world and acts as a sort of helper or guide through most of the game, giving you new characters everytime you defeat a boss and helping around! he has a very upbeat and silly feeling to his design and tone and is very very charming i think! however, during the game after beating one of the bosses they bring up the existence of a strange wizard, which begins to put a bit of suspicion towards Tapir... when you do save princess rua from an egg (very egg focused game) she reveals that tapir was who trapped her and also the fairy cocoron (him and his sister cocorin are important! name of the game...!) and that he is truly a baku!! i wasn't thinking very hard about the idea of tapir being evil when i first played since i just liked him too much so i was surprised! even though tapir is revealed to be the bad guy at this point, he still keeps up the silly and upbeat feeling to him which i think is just great that hes! just like this. tapir being the villian of cocoron makes him so so much fun to me i think, he doesn't have the most depth or a lot of dialogue i just think hes! wonderfully charming and a whole lot of fun!
cocoron was only released for the famicon in japan, but 2 whole ports/sequel games were planned for the pc engine and sega cd! both of them were seemingly finished but neither were released sadly in any form... the two games are PC Cocoron and Pop'n Land which earlier in devolpment was actually just called cocoron 2! if you wanna know more about it these two pages have quite a bit of info! the first one linked is in japanese you might need to machine translate it but its still very helpful!
with these other 2 cocoron games existing its interesting to think about how tapir might've appeared in them and if anything had changed! there a lot more screenshots available from PC Cocoron then from Pop'n land and a couple do feature tapir, a couple even of his boss fights! he definitly still played a sort of villian role in both games but i'd still love to see what more they had to offer if they ever surface someday..! some reports of Pop'n land state that it did have animated cutscenes and i've seen a couple of photos of them but none of the available photos feature tapir... i imagine he appears in at least one! an interesting thing about his portayal in Pop'n land is that i think he doesn't have a real twist moment from what i can figure out! from the few pictures of that one it looks like you're guided by Cocorin and Cocoron throughout and tapir might just play more of a normal villian role! its hard to know because of it never releasing but its interesting to wonder about...
since tapir is a very central character to cocoron, there are quite a few pictures out there of him! click on a picture to open a full view of it and hover over it for more info!
also another extremely cool thing is this Cocoron Promotional video! its a really cool piece of the game and shows it off a bit but also tapir narrates the whole thing!! his voice is really really good..!
hope you enjoyed reading this page! i just have a lot of love for cocoron and tapir and wanted to try and get the word out about it but also just to have fun and write about a character i enjoy!
Until next time!
Song: Pop'n land- Pleasant Companions
(just to clarify this is a song from the unreleased cocoron port i mentioned earlier in the page! this is actually i think the only remnant of it that isnt pictures! very cool to hear)