Jurassic Park Institute Tour: Dinosaur Rescue (GBA)

 This is a notable game for a few reasons. Firstly, it was developed by KaZe, a company known for their excellent Saturn pinball games Last Gladiators and Necronomicon, and their more experimental pinball games  Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Battle Pinball on Playstation, and Akira Psycho Ball on PS2. Secondly, it's a Japan-only release based on a western property, which is mildly interesting itself, but on top of that, it seems to have only been available to buy in one place: the gift shop at Jurassic Park Institute Tour, an edicational interactive museum exhibit thing.

 

That's where the interest stops, though, as the game itself is about what you'd expect from some cheap knocked-out crap sold in a tourist attraction gift shop. It's a collection of mini-games, which aren't even original, just Jurassic Park-themed knock offs of existing games. There's Cross Dinosaur, which is just Frogger, except you're a little safari man running across a valley while trying not to get trampled by triceratops. Next is Danger Zone, which has you playing as a parasaurolophus who has to repeatedly get from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen while avoiding volcanic rocks falling from the 'bove.

 

Egg Guard is the old Game and Watch game Egg, except there's six channels instead of four, and it's a lot slower. It's themed as you being a pteranodon sat in your nest at the centre of the screen protecting your eggs from poachers who come slowly walking down the six channels. I actually had to lose all my lives on purpose in this game, since even when they get to your nest, the poachers will just stand there for several seconds before taking an egg. Rexcercise is another Game and Watch game, this time being Flagman, one of the worst G&W games, which isn't made any better by the presence of a T-Rex.

 

The final game is Take Meat, which is a slightly more complex and interesting version of Danger Zone (relatively speaking). You now go back and forth across the screen instead of repeatedly going from left to right, and when you're at the right edge of the screen, you can pick up multiple pieces of meat before returning, which gets you more points while slowing down your movement. Also, you're know avoiding mortars being fire by a little man atop a nearby cliff instead of volcanic rocks. There's also a gallery mode, where high scores are rewarded by tiny, very low resolution screenshots from the first three Jurassic Park movies.

 

The curiosity is all this game has going for it, really. It's not worth your time, and the unusualy circumstances of its release mean that it's definitely not worth the ridiculous prices a real copy fetches online, either. The Game Boy Color and Advance are two systems reknowned for low quality licensed games, and Jurassic Park Institute Tour: Dinosaur Rescue lives up to that stereotype every step of the way.

Dokapon - Monster Hunter (GBA)

 You look at this game's logo, and the western boxart, and it's easy enough to tell that it owes its western release to a superficial resemblence to the Pokemon games. Though there is a monster recruiting mechanic in Dokapon, it's entirely optional, and the items needed to do it are pretty rare. Personally, I didn't bother with it at all, but the game has enough of its own charm and ideas that it doesn't need to be a Pokemon mockbuster.

 

I'll address the most obvious quality first: the way the game looks. Though there's not much in the way of animation, the spritework in the game is beautiful. The overworld sprites look as if someone took the typical blobby pre-rendered sprites seen in so many GBA games and drew over them to make them look good, but the in-battle sprites are the jewel in the game's visual crown. Every enemy monster is a very charming, well drawn creature or humanoid, and your own character's sprite is not only their equal in terms of being well drawn, but there's a unique sprite for every sword and shield you can obtain in-game. That's two hundred all together!

 

The dungeons aren't particularly interesting. There's a slight bit of roguelike-ness, with procedurally generated floor layouts, but the battles are all more traditional RPG turn-based battles, and you don't recover health while you walk around, nor is there a hunger mechanic. You also get to keep your level when you die, but not your items, equipment, or money. The equipment is the biggest loss, to be honest, as it levels up as you use it, so a sword and shield that have lasted at least one dungeon are going to be significantly stronger than anything on sale in the town shop. I've played up to the third boss so far, and I do like the game enough that I'll probably play it all the way through eventually, and I do like that after the first two dungeons taking the standard settings of mine and forest, the third takes place in a circus.

 

Another misconception you might have on your first play is that the battles are simple and boring, but there are in fact quite a few interesting ideas in there! First, there are attack and defence turnsl when you attack, your enemy defends, and vice versa. The reason this is interesting is because of the second big idea: rock/paper/scissors. Whether attacking or defending, you can either choose the standard attack or block, or one of three skills, each mapped to rock, paper, or scissors. Your enemies do the same. If, while defending, you pick (for example) your "rock" defence skill, and your enemy attacks with their scissors attack skill, their attack is totally nullified, and you get the effects of your defence skill. Defence skills are usually stat buffs or status recovery, attack skills might do more damage, or inflict status ailments, and so on.

 

You might have read the previous paragraph and think that this means that the battles are a totally luck-based affair, but that's really not the case at all. You can see what attack skills your enemies have equipped to each slot, and with this knowledge, you can make an educated guess as to what they'll do. Certain enemies will prefer to try and inflict certain status ailments, for example. Or, you might see a fire-breathing enemy that has a skill named "napalm", and you just use common sense to assume that they'll try and use that when they attack. It's actually a fun and interesting system, that brings a little more strategy to random battles against non-boss enemies that, in a lot of other RPGs, would just have you mashing the confirm button to attack until the battle's over.

 

If you like RPGs, Dokapon Monster Hunter has a lot to offer in most departments except plot (which is barely present at all, and what little there is is very cliched). If you don't, it probably won't do much to convert you. On the other hand, if you like pixel art, you should at least go and look up sprite sheets for the enemies and equipment because they're really, really good. It's good enough that it's also got me curious about other entries in the series, so expect some of those to pop up on the blog at some point in the future, maybe.

Fantastic Children (GBA)

 On paper, Fantastic Children should be worthless shovelware garbage. It is, after all, a licensed GBA platformer based on an anime. I can't tell you much about the anime other than that it's apparently about a group of immortal 12 year olds, and it was created by Takashi Nakamura, whos distinctive character design style you're sure to recognise if you've seen the movie Catnapped. It does have an official english release though, and I might just give it a watch someday, as if the game really gives me vibes of those classic kids adventure anime from the 80s and early 90s, like Giant Gorg, Mysterious Cities of Gold, and The Secret of Blue Water.

 

Right from the start, it's obvious that this game is possibly the best-looking game on the system, with lavish, detailed backgrounds, and really amazing animation on the main character's sprite. As he runs, jumps, climbs, falls, and so on, you can really feels the weight of his body and the force of his movements, and those are all things you do a lot of, since most of the game is made up of Prince of Persia-style precision platforming. It's so far beyond the usual garish colours and blobby pre-rendered sprite you see all too often on the GBA.  

 

Like I said, the game is mostly PoP-style platforming, as you clamber around, exploring various environments, like jungles, abandoned buildings, quiet little seaside towns, and so on. The quality of the animation makes this a totally joyful experience, even if he practice of holding the jump button to grab and keep ahold of ledges, then pressing up to climb onto them takes a little bit of getting used to at first. What's  really unique about this game is the rare occasions when you meet enemies (well, there are wild animals that can hurt you right from the start, but they're more like hazards than enemies), as this is the only platform game that I can think of that has turn-based combat!

 

The way it works is that you and your opponent each has a hand of five attacks. There are specials that each do specific things, but mostly, you'll be using punches, kicks, and chops, which have a rock-paper-scissors dynamic going on: punches beat kicks, kicks beat chops, and chops beat punches. You can switch between your attacks as much as you like in the few seconds before they meet in the middle, at which point one of you takes damage (or both if you each used the same attack). Used attacks are discarded, and if the fight's still ongoing after five turns, you each get your full hands back and carry on. 

 

You can change the attacks in your hand via the pause menu, and you get more choices, including things like attacks that hit twice when they win, as well as the aforementioned specials, by beating enemies and opening treasure boxes. Certain kinds of enemies have specific hands too, so if you know you're going into an area where the enemies prefer kicks, you might want to build a punch-based hand, for example. It's a system more interesting than exciting, but it does solve the problem of having enemies without them getting in the way of the sheer kinetic joy of the platforming.

 

I think that's all I really have to say about Fantastic Children. Of course, I very highly recommend that you go and play it as soon as possible, and don't worry about there being a language barrier, as while the story text is all in Japanese, all the menus and so on are in English. It should be counted alongside Ninja Cop, Gunstar Super Heroes, and all the other truly great GBA games that people still love to this day, it's honestly that good.

L'Aigle de Guerre (GBA)

The Game Boy Advance being a big step up in power from the handhelds that had preceded it meant there were various attempts at genres that were previously impossible on handhelds. Like how there are a whole bunch of GBA first person shooters, for example (I know the original Game Boy had Faceball 2000, but that's a far cry from a port of Doom). L'Aigle de Guerre is an attempt at squeezing a real time strategy game onto portable hardware,and a fairly successful one at that.

Well, it's successful at being an enjoyable game, at least. I suspect that fans of super fast-paced multitasking PC real time strategy games will probably be left a little cold. It is a lot slower paced, which is at least partially down to the fact that instead of a cursor, you control Napoleon, as you ride around the battlefield, telling your soldiers where they should go in person. Other than that, the game mostly focusses on capturing bases by sending infantrymen, the weakest units into them.

Infantrymen are the weakest, but you need to send four into an enemy base (or a neutral city) to capture it, cavalry are faster and more powerful, and artillery are the most powerful, but they move very very slowly. On some stages, you'll also get various kinds of boats, but they're pretty much just nautical versions of your land units. Like I said, most stages will have a main enemy base to capture, but some of them are boss fights, like a giant monster troll thing, or Horatio Nelson surrounded by giant cannons and endlessly respawning soldiers.

The plot is something that's definitely worth talking about in this case, as all of the characters seem to be people who actually existed, with the main villain being the strangest of all: wax museum proprietress Marie Tussaud, depicted ingame as being an evil monster-summoning witch who wants to take over the world. Only Napoleon and his plucky band of French military commanders can stop her!

L'Aigle de Guerre is a pretty fun game, and I definitely recommend that you give it a try. Like I said earlier, though, don't go in expecting something like Starcraft or even Command and Conquer. It's its own thing!

Maniac Racers Advance (Game Boy Advance)

Also known as Motorcross Manaics Advance, this is the second sequel to that orginial Game Boy pirate cart classic, Motorcross Maniacs. (The first sequel was on Game Boy Color, and I might also feature it here someday. Shame they didn't carry the sries onto Nintendo's later handhelds, isn't it?) In case you never played that game, it was a slightly platformy racing game, where you were a little motorbike guy doing laps around crazy tracks full of ramps and loops and such,  all with a strict time limit, and an opponent racer who was so inept that they might as well have not shown up. Maniac Racers Advance is very much a sequel to that game, buidling on its ideas while still having a similar feel.

The main thing you had to worry about in the original was nitro management, and that's the same here. Using them at the right time means getting round the track faster, being able to collect more of them, and being able to take optimal routes, as each course has a few different routes to take, kind of like the stages in the 2D Sonic games, only here the only method of jumping you have is nitro boosting off of ramps. You can also hold left or right to rotate in the air, the main pruose of which is making sure your wheels meet the ground at the correct angle when you land, but you can also show off by doing lots of flips during particularly long jumps, if you are so inclined.

Obviously, the biggest change compared to the original is the graphics: Motorcross Manics was released very early in the Game Boy's life, and like most games of that time, it had very minimalist, functional graphics. By contrast, Maniac Racers Advance looks amazing! The stages take place in a variety of locations, there's a bunch of character to pick from, who all have appealling cartoony designs, and everything's big and colourful. The characters are of course another big change, though they all feel identical to play despite having different stats. You now race against three opponents instead of just one, and once you get past the novice courses, you really do have to do your best to come in first!

Even with that in mind though, it probably won't take more than about an hour to finish the game and unlock everything. That's fine, to be honest, I'm a big proponent of shorter games, but in this case it does feel like something's missing. Maybe it's the fact that most of the tracks are repeated a fair few times over the course of the championship mode? I can't quite put my finger on it, but once I finished the game, I was left asking "is that it?". There are a couple of bonus modes, like one that has you running over zombies, and another where you're wheelying over frozen penguins in a lab to collect stars, but they don't have a lot to offer, either.

I think I can recommend this to anyone with fond memories of the original, though. It might only be an hour long, but it is a good hour, and the feel of the boosts and the midair rotation is  as good as it ever was. It just looks a lot nicer here than it did before.

Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws (Game Boy Advance)

I'd previously written off the Simple 2960 Tomodachi series, assuming that it was just a bunch of untranslated visual novels like the Dreamcast's Simple 2000 DC series. I happened across some screenshots of this one recently, though, and it turns out I've been wrong all this time, and the GBA Simple games have at least one cute puzzler among them! In fact, looking at the list of titles, I have no idea where I got my previous assumption from, as it's clear that none of them are visual novels at all. But anyway, this is The Itsudemo Puzzle ~Massugu Soroete Straws~, or The Anytime Puzzle ~Line Up the Straws~, and it's pretty good!

The game presents you with groups of stars connected by lines, and you move your cursor thing around, pushing stars up and down the screen so that the connecting lines become one straight line, either horizontal or diagonal. Do it multiple times in quick succession for more points, of course. There's a totally unimportant story about an apprentice witch who I think is trying to hold back the dawn for as long as possible by arranging the stars in the night sky into straight lines? That's what seems to be happening in the main mode, anyway, as the moon scrolls across the screen and the sky gets lighter as time starts to run out, while going in reverse when you get more time while clearing lines.

Other than the main game, there's also a time attack mode, in which you attempt to score as many points as possible in three minutes, and a free mode, which just goes on forever until you quit via the pause menu. Oddly, even the free mode has a high score table, though the nature of the mode means it really just measures the player's tolerance for boredom (though playing free mode did help me figure out little techniques here and there to improve my game, like any good practice mode should).

There's not much more to be said about this game! It's cute, it's fun, and unlike a lot of Simple Series games, a real copy of it can be found for next to nothing online if you're lucky. It's recommended!

Boukyaku no Senritsu (Game Boy Advance)

I don't know what made this game's title stand out to me while I was perusing a list of GBA games, but it did, and I'm glad I decided to investigate for myself then and there instead of going online and looking it up first. Because what this game is is a pretty fun Kiki Kaikai-alike, and what GameFAQs inexplicably lists it as is an adventure game. If i'd have seen that listing before playing, I would have just assumed it was completely unplayable without Japanese literacy and ignored it. So the moral is not to trust crowd-sourced info when it comes to lesser-known games, I guess?

So yeah, Boukyaku no Senritsu (also known as The Melody of Oblivion) is a top-down shooting game based on a 2004 anime I've never seen,, and in it, you pick from one of three characters and go trough five stages fighting against strange monsters, like robot cows, monkeys and babies, a bull/buss hybrid thing, and so on. Once per stage there's also a non-shooting section where you're riding on a jetbike and you just have to avoid stuff until it's over. I was pleasantly surprised in a number of wats playing this game, too: not only is it a really fun game to play, but it also has an amazing soundtrack, reminiscent of PC98 shooting games. The GBA doesn't have a great reputation regarding music, but it is possible to eke a good soundtrack from it.

With two exceptions, the presentation is a good job all-round, in fact. The first exception is that the sprites are in that ugly, blobby pre-rendered that was popular for some reason in the GBA's heyday (though the backgrounds are still nice enough). The other is that a few times per stage, and between the stages, there's lengthy dialogue scenes that you can't just skip in one go with the start button or anything: you have to sit there hammering the A button until the characters stop their yammering and let you go back to shooting stuff. There is one really nice bit of aesthetic flourish that almost makes up for those things, in that when you use your bomb attack, you get a few seconds of full screen animation that not only looks great, but is also pretty impressive for a GBA game. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any others that do that. And again, the music really is great.

There's not much more to be said about this game, to be honest: it's another, heretofore unsung high quality action game that manages to be worthwhile on a system that already has a generous supply of better-known high quality action games. It's a little easy, since I got to the final boss on my first attempt on default settings, but there are higher difficulties, including one that has to be unlocked by completing with every character. It's also pretty cheap to get a legit copy of, which is probably thanks to its relatively unknown status. I recommend it! One final word: apologies for this shorter-than-usual, slightly thrown-together post, but a combination of being busy with some other writing, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night getting released last week, and some bad mental health days have all hit at once, taking away the time and energy I need to research a few posts in advance like usual.

Mo Jie Qibing (GBA)

I'm not the biggest fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in fact, my main exposure to it was watching the first movie at a friend's house on DVD many years ago, and being left with no desire to ever watch the other two. What I do like, though, is the KiKi KaiKai games, also known as Pocky and Rocky. They a great bunch of Commando-style shooting games, but they're about a shrine maiden shooting ghosts instead of an army guy shooting other army guys. Mo Jie Qibang is an unofficial, unlicensed Lord of the Rings game that's also an unofficial, unlicenced KiKi KaiKai game.

You play as Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Gandalf, or Frodo, and you set out on an adventure that's a very, very loose interpretation of the original story. Like how the first stage is a north american-style desert full of cacti and bleach-white cow skeletons, culminating in a boss battle against a giant scorpion. Like the KiKi KaiKai games, you can shoot enemies from a distance, or you can bat them away with a risky, very short range melee attack. You've also got a limited-use bomb (represented by a gold ring) that instantly clears the screen of enemies. There's not need to save your bomb for the bosses, either, as both it and your melee attack are disabled during boss fights. I wonder if this is because the developers couldn't come up with a way of making those weapons do normal damage, rather than having them insantly kill enemies? We'll probably never know.

Anyway, though it's a terrible LotR adaptation, it is a pretty decent KKKK knock-off, so it's a lot of fun to play. There's only two real problems I've encountered. The first is that power-up distribution is totally random: every enemy seems to have an equal chance of dropping any power-up, or nothing at all. So on some runs you'll get lots of health items, extra lives, and so on, and on other runs you'll get nothing. The other big problem is the first boss: it's so much harder than the stages and bosses that follow it, and again, there's a bit of luck involved in beating it. Basically, there's a safe spot just in front of its face and to the side a little, and if you stand there, it'll stay still, fruitlessly trying to attack you while you safely shoot it in the face. Sometimes, though, it'll just move straight away and go back to attacking you.

Other than those faults, Mo Jie Qibang is still a pretty good game, though: it looks great, and it's a lot of fun when things go your way. It's easily one of the best pirate originals I've ever played, and I like it more than any official Lord of the Rings-based media I've encountered, too. Totally worth playing, though not as much as the actual KiKi KaiKai games are. Play those first, obviously.

Miracle! Panzou - 7-Tsu no Hoshi no Uchuu Kaizoku

I think that means "Space Pirates of the Seven Stars", but I could be wrong. Anyway, it's a combination shooting game and platformer, and though it looks and feels like it might be based on some anime aimed at little kids, I haven't found any actual evidence that it might be.

Anyway, each world has three parts. The first is flying to the world by spaceship, represented by a short and very easy vertical shooting section. Then, you land on the world, and walk around a top-down map with a vacuum cleaner sucking up little creatures and finding the entrances to the actual stages. The actual stages come in platform form. On the map, there are doors with orbs on them, with stages behind them. At the end of each stage there's an orb, and the doors open when you have as many orbs as they're displaying. So progression between stages is totally linear (not that that's a problem or anything, but the map sections add nothing else to the game). The last door on the map leads to the boss.

Miracle! Panzou is a nice looking game, and it's fairly fun to play at first, but it does have some pretty big problems. Firstly, there's one of the worst problems with a lot of post-2000 videogames: pointless tutorials for everything. It mainly only effects the first stage (with exceptions when you gain a new ability, though there's no real reason why those abilities couldn't have been available from the start anyway, another modern game design nuisance), but there, your play will be interrupted so you can be told how to shoot, jump and pretty much every other action, no matter how basic. There's also the problem that I feel bad about bringing up, since it feels so subective: the games is just way too easy. Like I'm sure you have, I've read that criticism being given out by all sorts of idiots, from those who don't understand the point of Kirby games, to those who think credit feeding through an arcade port on the easiest settings means they've seen all it has to offer.

Miracle! Panzou just doesn't feel like even the slightest challenge at any point. I played through the first two worlds, which took about 20-30 minutes, and there were no hard parts, no progression in difficulty from one world to the next, nothing. The new abilities that were obtained weren't really any use except as "keys" (the double jump appears just before the first time you reach a platform that's just out of reach for a single jump, the charge punch appears just before you reach a statue that has to be smashed to progress, and other than similar specific situations, there's no uses for them). It just felt like the game was wasting my time and I might as well have been watching a tv show while mindlessly pressing buttons. Looking at the game's aesthetics, it was probably made with a younger audience in mind, but to me, that's not a valid excuse. There's plenty of games suitable for children, while still being challenging and interesting. A game like Miracle! Panzou, however, just feels insulting.

Toyrobo Force (Game Boy Advance)

For some reason, shooting games seem to be something of an underrepresented genre on handheld consoles, especially on post-2000 handhelds (though having said that, the PSP has a pretty strong line-up, even if it is mostly ports). So obviously, when I found out there was a GBA shooter that I hadn't played, I had to give it a try.

I'll be kind, and talk about the positive parts of the game first. Most of the game's positives stem from its presentation: in-game it looks great, with a very friendly, colourful pallette that's somewhat reminiscent of cartoons aimed at the very young. Everything's well-drawn and very detailed considering they low resolution of th GBA screen, and there's cute little touces, like cows in fields that run away when the player shoots at them. The TV cartoon presentation continues between stages, with eyecatches appearing before and after each stage. The character designs are all okay, though a little bland, and unfortunately, most of the enemies are pretty generic.

As for the game itself, it's a vertically scrolling shooting game, with the inclusion of a Xevious-style bomb weapon, which is actually a pretty rare thing in modern shooters. The player controls a police robot on a flying motorbike, and they fly upwards, shooting the generic enemies, and bombing turrets and tanks on the ground. Sometimes during the stage, a criminal will appear, in the form of a mini-bossfight, after which the defeated perp will be left lying on the ground dazed for the player to pick up. The coolest example of this is actually in the first stage, which takes place in a town centre, and has the criminal running around on the ground, avoiding and hiding from the player's bombs and so on.

This all sounds pretty good, right? It's okay, but there are some massive flaws in this game. Firstly, the player only gets limited ammunition for each stage, which can leave no onther choice than just commiting suicide since obviously, having no weapons in a shooter makes things pretty much unwinnable. Secondly, the stages don't just flow into each other, but between them, there are sections in which characters talk to each other, and the player has to go to different buildings to talk to characters in the right order to be able to go to the next stage.

Although the fact that I can't read Japanese makes this more of an exercise in trial and error than it would be for someone who could, even if the game has Englishtext, I'd hate this. I've spoken before, ironically at great length, about how much I hate games that interrupt the player's fun for lengthy sections of usually terrible storytelling. If a game is exceptionally good, or in very rare cases, if the story is actually interesting or entertaining, it can make sitting through these parts worthwhile, but Toyrobo Force definitely doesn't fulfill the first condition, and though I can't read the text, I feel confident that the story is no great saga for our times, either.

If you really want to play a shooting game on your GBA, you'd be much better off going with Gradius Advance/Galaxies, a game that is better than Toyrobo Force in pretty much every possible way.

Elevator Action Old & New (Game Boy Advance)

So obviously, everyone knows of the Elevator Action series, probably through the amazing arcade game Elevator Action Returns, but I think this entry into the series has gone mostly unplayed, released as it was, only in Japan, and apparently not in great quantities.
The cartridge contains both the original Elevator Action and a whole new game. The original is what it is. I won't waste too much time talking about it, but it's definitely a game that lives in the shadow of its sequels: it's

brutally hard, fiddly to control and moves like it's set at the bottom of a treacle ocean.
The new game lets you pick from three playable characters, with different stats. There is a fourth character unlocked after completing the game with all three characters, but I didn't go that far. I got most of the way through with one character before giving up on the game. The game's stages are split into 8 sets of four, which all have to be played through individually, which presents one of the biggest problems the game has. Because you get a whole new set of lives every four stages, this makes getting through the first three quarters of the game incredibly easy. You might argue that this is to make the game more palatable for a handheld console, but compare to another GBA game, the excellent Ninja Cop (which itself has a few similarities to the Elevator Action series), which allows the player to start at any set of stages, but also goes straight into the next once one is finished, with the continuing score adding an extra incentive to play the game from start to finish in a single run. Elevator Action New doesn't even have scoring, so the player is literally just trying to get from start to finish.
With that complaint out of the way, you might wonder why I didn't complete the game, even once. The thing is, once you get to the penultimate set of stages, the game does two things that totally throw the difficulty from "pointlessly easy" to "unfairly difficult". The first thing is a new enemy, big robots that stomp around the floors shooting lasers, and who take ten shots to kill. For context, consider that your ammo is limited in this game, even for the default gun, and the player starts each stage with only 30 bullets. The second is the fact that the stage layouts are no longer simple vertical buildings with the exit at the top or bottom. I gave up on

the game, when, after finding all the secret files in one stage, dying to a time out when I couldn't seem to find the stage exit anywhere.
The game isn't a total write-off, though. There is one new element that I really liked in this game: the disguise power up. It turns the player into an enemy for 10 or so seconds, allowing them to walk about the stages freely, without any enemy interference. It's only a simple little thing, but it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save this game. I never expected EAN to be able to stand up to Elevator Action Returns, but the fact is, it doesn't even stand up to its Game Boy Color antescendant Elevator Action EX, which is a great game, and one which I definitely recommend, should you have a need for some portable elevator-themed espionage.