Card Captor Sakura: Sakura Card de Mini Game (Game Boy Advance)

 This isn't the first Card Captor Sakura game I've covered, and it definitely won't be the last. One interesting quality it has, though, is the amount of unique graphics it uses for each stage. I think it's worth mentioning up here in the first paragraph because the show itself is well known for Sakura wearing a different costume in every episode, preventing the producers from saving money by reusing animatons and requiring new reference sheets for every episode. Kind of like how here, it requires a whole new set of sprites for every stage, which is pretty inefficient, especially on a cartridge-based system like the GBA.

 

The game's set during the second season, when Sakura's already tamed all of the Clow cards, and is then using her own power to turn them into her own Sakura cards. That's not really important, though. The game's format follows that of the show, where rather than engaging every card's spirit in battle, Sakura has to best them in some kind of challenge. As such, every stage is, like the title suggests, a different mini-game. They're generally about  a minute long each, and they're pretty varied.

 

There's a rhythm game stage, a Bubble Bobble-like single screen platformer, a racing game where you have to rhythmically tap the A button to build up speed on your rollerblades, a stage where you use the sword card to cut chains that are trying to capture Xiaolang, and a bunch more. Some of them are moderately fun, some of them are tedious, none of them particularly stand out as being especially bad
or good, though. That's a problem in itself, but it's not the biggest problem the game has.

 

The biggest problem is for almost all of the mini-games, there's no score, they play the same every time, and a lot of them will even last the exact same amount of time every time you play them. So once you've played a mini-game once and performed well enough to get past it in the story mode, there isn't really anything driving you to go back and play it ever again (and none of them are exciting enough to lure you back intrinsically, either). Since they're about a minute long each, that means that even including the cutscenes (told using text boxes and very tiny screenshots of the TV show), the game's about an hour long, and you're unlikely to ever go back and replay it, unless you happen to be in the target audience of a very young child with very indiscriminating tastes and a small library of games to play. There is also a pretty pointless paint program included too, I guess in an attempt to address that problem.

 

Though none of them ever got released outside of Japan (despite the show being pretty popular in the UK and North America), there were quite a few Card Captor Sakura games released during the time the show was on the air, and out of the ones I've played so far, this is definitely the worst. You really aren't missing out if you pass this one by. The best things I can say about it are that it looks okay and the language barrier isn't going to be a problem.

Small Games #9!

 It's been three years since the last small games post, but I was recently playing random MSX games and discovered two platform games that were cute, fun, and interesting, but not really complex enough to carry posts of their own. The first is the oddly-titled Rise Out From Dungeon, and it's a little bit of a Lode Runner knock off, with gold bars, pursuing guards, and the ability to temporarily destroy the blocks that make up the platforms.

 

The way the guards move in particular is very similar to Lode Runner: they'll try to match your position horizontally before trying to match it vertically. They'll follow this pattern even if it means getting themselves trapped or falling to their deaths! It's the differences that really make it worthwhile, though. Firstly, your digging tool is very different to the one in Lode Runner. Rather than diffing a hole in one of the blocks next to the one on which you're standing, you instead have a gun that lets you shoot away blocks on the same height as you, even from across the screen. 

 

The other big difference is that you don't have to collect every gold bar before exiting the stage. Some stages have locked doors, and one of the bars will contain a key that you have to find before you can open the door, but otherwise, you can just rush to the exit if you aren't bothered about score. I really like the way this game looks, with your character represented by a little white stickman, and the enemies are red stickmen. It's all very tiny and cute, almost the bare minimum amount of pixels used to represent each object in the game.

 

The other game I'll talk about today is Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, in which you play as a lagomorph dockworker, trying to get crate to a ship while being chased and harassed by villainous white blobs. It's a platform game with stages that are only one screen wide, but they scroll vertically. You start at the top of each stage, and there's crates littered about (but not randomly!). When you walk past a crate, it drops down to the platform below. 

 

At the bottom of the stage, there's a cargo ship sailing back and forth, and you've got to get all of the crates onto it. Or at least, as many of them as you can. There's no penalty for just dropping crates into the ocean, but getting them on the ship is essential for getting a good score. There are also blocks that can be hit from below to reveal power ups, like in Mario, though it's slightly awkward in that they don't move, so you've got to descend, hit the block, then climb back up to get the item. It's usually worth it, though, as there's a common carrot item that temporarily makes you invincible, and a rarer yellow smiley face that just immediately ends the stage (good for progress, but very bad for scoring). Both these games are great, and I definitely recommend you give them a try, and it feels like a great bit of luck that I found them both consecutively.