Lego Star Wars On The GBA Is Weird

all right so over the time that we've covered Lego Star Wars on this channel we have seen this game at some of its best and its worst moments we've explored why the original games were so great and looked at how the newer games either improved or fell short of their original counterparts we've also explored this franchise's spotty history on trying to incorporate their game on weaker handheld platforms so it should be no surprise that we will be looking at another Lego Star Wars handheld port and you guys have actually been requesting this one for a while so we're going to be looking at Lego Star Wars the video game on the Game Boy Advance now fair warning I didn't even know this game existed until about a year ago whenever I ranked all the handheld games and that video as you guys probably know wasn't really that good so in this video we're going to take a more in-depth look at this game and see how it stands up to its console counterpart so let's go ahead and get right into the video but before you do go ahead and like And subscribe and let me know down in the comments any of your experiences with this game I'd love to hear about them so alright without further Ado let's go ahead and look at Lego Star Wars the video game on the Game Boy Advance alright so the first thing you guys might be wondering is why does this game even exist to answer that we're gonna have to look at how games were back in 2005. you see back then handheld consoles like the PSP the Game Boy and the DS were still really popular and normally they were a more affordable option compared to their console counterparts and add that to you can just carry this console anywhere and play your favorite games wherever you want these things made handheld consoles a very popular option for a lot of people and that's why many game developers wanted to incorporate their games on those handheld consoles but back then those handheld consoles had one major problem and that's just the simple fact that they're handhelds due to the technical limitations of the time it wasn't really possible to have a device they could play a console game and still be able to fit in your pocket so many companies still wanting their games on these handheld devices had to resort to scaling their games way down or just resorting to some other option many companies not wanting to take their resources away from their main console game went ahead and found an outsourced company to go ahead and make that handheld port for them and this is what they did for Lego Star Wars the video game on the Game Boy Advance the company that they hired to do the support was called kryptonite games but they somehow have some sort of tie-in with the maze entertainment and if you've ever watched the video on this channel before you've probably heard of that company before because of this yeah but either way both Kryptonite games in the Maze entertainment pretty much only did handheld ports for different game companies neither one of these companies are still around today because one I think Kryptonite games is acquired by a mates entertainment or something like that in Amaze entertainment went away because well nobody's asking for handheld ports anymore so now with that explanation out of the way let's see how the Game Boy game actually compared to the console alright so right off the bat you guys have probably already noticed that this game is in 2D now obviously this wasn't some crazy design decision this was done mainly because the Game Boy Advance just really couldn't do a 3D game I believe that there were some attempts at making 3D games for this platform but since the Game Boy Advance was mainly designed to do 2D games it didn't really do 3D games very well so the fact that this game is in 2D isn't necessarily A Bad Thing and to be honest most of the maps are actually pretty good the only real problem is is that you don't really get any like feel of depth so you can't really tell whether an object is something you can jump on or what it kind of just all meshes into one thing and you really it's hard to tell where you're actually at there will be times like where you're trying to jump on say this platform but since it's textured in a weird way you're trying to jump on it but you actually can't because you're not positioned right or it just turns out it's something you can't even jump on in the first place this is pretty annoying and it does hurt the game a little bit there were quite a few games for the Game Boy Advance that was kind of designed like this and a lot of them suffered from the same things but besides the fact that this game is 2D there are a few other differences too one of the biggest differences and probably my least favorite difference is the fact that whenever you die well you die and you have to start over from a checkpoint now yes I understand this adds the level of challenge to the game but I mean come on it's a Lego game it's not supposed to be that challenging but since you don't just respawn whenever you Die the game does give you a lot more Hearts to use so that's pretty good at least you're not just stuck with four but no I could care less for this change it's not really that bad it's just more annoying than anything another thing that they change changed and this is the stud values in this version of the game the stud values are way lower than what you've seen in the console game and in this there's only three different types of studs you can find the first one is the silver stud which is only worth one stud the next one believe it or not is the blue one and that one's worth five studs and the next one is the gold stud and it's worth 10 studs so it is kind of weird seeing the blue stud a lot and knowing that it's not the most valuable stud you'll probably find in the map but other than that the way the studs work in this game isn't really too different from the other games the only real difference is that the values of the studs are much lower but yeah there are other major differences in this game but I'll mention those later in this video alright so let's go ahead and look at the levels but unlike what I did in the Lego Star Wars 2 DS video I'm not going to look at each level in depth instead we're just going to look at how this game handles levels in general instead of nitpicking each one of them alright so the first thing you'll probably notice whenever you start a new game is that there is no Hub World in this now this isn't too surprising since this is the Game Boy but what they do have is this menu here where you can select which episode you want to play now I think this is a pretty good alternative to a hub world for this version and it's better that they did this instead of just giving us a hub world that wasn't really that good so when you go ahead and actually start one of these episodes well you're agreed to these cut scenes I mean if that's what you really want to call them because in reality they're really just slide shows I guess these are okay but some of these can be pretty weird though believe it or not they actually remind me of the cutscenes that were in Lego Batman for the DS so Lego Star Wars for the GBA might be where they got the idea from but once you get past the cutscenes and actually start playing the levels you'll find that most of them are pretty solid I actually don't think the level designs in this are all that bad well yes Tatooine isn't really that good of a map and mustafar's platforms are impossible most of them aren't really that bad and they did a really good job at working around the limitations that they had the one big problem though and this is where the limitations kind of prop up here most of these episodes reuse these Maps a few times because cause I know episode 3 uses kashyyk and UDA pal twice episode 2 uses Tatooine from episode 1 and goes on to use the Droid Factory twice and you know what while we're on episode 2 let's just take a look at it because it is really interesting because the developers decided just to give it only three levels now the two Droid Factory levels I guess make sense but it does Skip important parts of the story like the Jedi battle and other things like that or gunship Cavalry which is probably a good thing that they skipped that but yeah in the third and final level in this you just go from the Droid Factory straight to fighting Count Dooku it's like all that stuff that happened in between that just never happened so while yes that is weird it's nothing compared to how this episode started because instead of starting us off at Camino this game insists on us starting at Tatooine and I imagine every one of you have watched the movie so you guys all know what happened on Tatooine and this game has you reenact the entire thing you know it's actually kind of funny because it's already what you've been doing but instead this time it just gives you a certain amount of Tuscan Raiders you need to kill you know too bad I can't share the soundtrack with you guys because of YouTube copyright because while you're killing all these Tuscan Raiders the Star Wars Crawl music is playing or at least the same version from the menu which is like a 16-bit version of it so just imagine killing a bunch of Tuscan Raiders while the menu theme is playing and if you guys are wondering there wasn't anything really that special about episode one you start off with negotiations and end off by fighting Darth Maul none of these levels in this game are really the same compared to their console counterpart they are like completely different there is a pretty big mistake in both Tatooine levels though where it says that you're in Moss Eisley instead of mosespa you know you think the developers would have like a list of locations down somewhere that way they wouldn't make mistakes like this but I guess in this case they didn't alright so before I move on from the levels there's a few more things I want to mention alright so you guys have probably already noticed that there is no vehicle missions in this game and as I've been looking at this game I don't really think that's all a bad thing but the only problem is is that there is important story pieces that get missed in this actually I think the only space battle that they mentioned in this is when Anakin destroyed the droid control ship other than that it doesn't really mention any of the other ones and it just kind of acts like none of them ever happened I guess the only other one is to battle over Coruscant when you're on the Droid ship and you see Anakin ship sitting there I guess it kind of does mention the battle over Coruscant there but either way it kind of just acts like these battles never existed now I'm not saying this game should have had the space battles put in there but it should have done a better job at filling in the gaps in the movie The Boss Battles in this game are okay but they did add an interesting mechanic to them though and that's this little quick action sequence here you have to do when you're fighting the boss well yes I know you guys know that I've complained a lot about how button mashy these boss battles are in this series I think having this feature added for the boss battles in this game kind of really just helped separates bosses from just regular enemies all this mechanic really does is that whenever you're fighting a boss battle randomly this meter will show up and all you do is press the attack button repeatedly and the quicker you press it the higher it goes and after a few seconds she'll damage the boss but if you don't press it quick enough it'll go down to the red and after a few seconds you'll take damage so yeah like I said I think this is a pretty cool feature and it makes the boss battles a little bit more interesting the end screens on these levels are also pretty interesting well yes they still add up your stud total and how many Collectibles you got throughout the level there's also a kill counter and a deflection counter which I actually thought was a pretty cool addition and these also add to your stud total but I'm not exactly sure how the game determines how many studs you get based on your total kills and at the end of the end screen you get Yoda here and he tells you like what you've unlocked after completing he has a creepy laugh though I mean listen to this it is like weird hmm all right so moving on to the characters and you guys will find that these characters are actually pretty weird pretty much alluding back to the fact that the Game Boy is extremely limited each character only has one Sprite and no not one Sprite for each episode no just one Sprite per character this is kind of weird when we see Obi-Wan have the same Sprite through all three movies or padman episode 1 wearing her episode 2 outfit or Anakin staying a Padawan throughout the entire thing this does hurt the game a little bit but it's not really that bad since it is a Game Boy game and it's like not really close to the console game really at all so it doesn't really hurt the game that bad one cool thing about the characters though is that most of them have some sort of special ability most of these are pretty accurate to the movies like Anakin's lightsaber throw Obi-Wan's Force push or jar jar running around in a blind panic but others are a little less accurate like qui-gon's ability to go invisible had made his grenade launcher and this weird ability that Yoda has but besides how weird some of these abilities are actually do kind of like them it gives something unique to each one of the characters and it adds something cool to this game that the console game didn't have oh yeah and before I end off on the characters swapping characters in this game is actually kind of funny since there's really no way to do co-op in this game they didn't add the option for a second player so whenever you're playing there's only one character on the screen and whenever you go to swap a character the character you were playing as just falls apart as if they died on top of special abilities this game also has power ups there's two different types of power-ups to give you health and another two that UPS your stamina bar I think there's a few other power-ups in this game but I have absolutely no information about them and you know come to think of it I don't think I've talked about the stamina bar yet in this video so pretty much there's a stamina bar that pretty much limits you on how many times you can use your special abilities but other than that I don't really think it does anything different but it is yet another unique thing in this game there's also Jawas and protocol droids all over each map that sell you special abilities or other useful gadgets to help you throughout the level in terms of collectible items this game doesn't have mini kits instead what it does have are these Death Star things now I've heard people call these Death Star plans or just death stars so I'm not really sure what they're called but either way there's five of them in each map and like many kits some of them you have to play free play first to actually get to them speaking of free play it's not really that good instead of getting to play with like a whole bunch of different characters whenever you get to the free play menu you're allowed to select one and that's it the only other characters you get to play as in the level are the characters that were there during story mode so yeah this is just another thing that I think this game just really fell short on alright so after taking a look back at this game again while yes it's kind of sounded like I've been a little bit nice to it at the end of the day I still don't really like this game well yes some of the mechanics are neat little additions I just think this game falls short in so many different ways things like the characters and the cut scenes and all the important story pieces that were just completely cut out really makes you wonder how much the developers really cared about this game I mean we have seen worse from this company but it still doesn't excuse the fact of how far this game fell short at least the game that came out after it Lego Star Wars 2 for the Game Boy Advance actually did kind of okay and eventually we're probably going to do a video about that game so stay tuned for that one but either way I hope you guys enjoyed my retrospective of Lego Star Wars the video game on the Game Boy Advance I've got a lot of great content coming out in the future and the growth of this channel has been amazing here of late so thank you guys for watching go ahead and remember to like And subscribe and see you guys in the next video oh

Channel: Nostalgic9080

Views: 40,545

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Id: q16-7jned4s

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023