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.