"It's a Stinker, But a Playable One"

Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy

Introduction
Well I like Hello Kitty and all her little friends, and puzzle games are fine with me, so I could not pass up the opportunity to investigate this GBC game when I found it for sale for a mere 4 dollars in the used game bin. For that price I certainly cannot complain much. People have compared this game to Tetris, but aside from the fact that blocks fall from the sky, it is really not like Tetris at all. Your goal is not to eliminate blocks by making solid lines; in fact most of the time your goal is to build up blocks so that your Hello Kitty can make her way up to items she must collect in order to end the level.

Gameplay 7/10
At first I hated the game dynamics...it seems sluggish (even for a GBC game) and it is frustrating!! Despite this being a Hello Kitty game, the difficulty level itself seems not geared for the very young. In fact unless you're a rather tenacious & determined gamer, you might be inclined to toss the game aside after a level or two in utter aggravation. But you might be missing out on something here.The first few levels seem somewhat easy but then they suddenly get much more difficult. I tossed this game aside several times, only to come back to it begrudgingly again and again. And then something happened. I actually started getting good at it, I advanced little by little, and I wanted to play it more and more. This is not the type of puzzle game where you instantly learn what to do. It takes some time and effort to "get into the groove."

It is difficult to describe the dynamics of gameplay. Yes it is like Tetris in that blocks fall from above, and you can eliminate blocks, too, if you match up colors. The real poser, however, is in building "steps" for your Kitty so that she may climb up and retrieve prizes. You have a limited amount of time to accomplish this, and it depends a lot on luck, timing, and skill all coming together. Hello Kitty continuously paces back and forth & she has the ability to climb only certain height steps; you may be working on building a staircase only to have her fall off the edge before it's finished, and then she is trapped on the other side! Then you need to build up that side as well so she can get out. You will learn to do little tricks like trapping HK in a small area while you work on your steps in order to keep her out of the way. The frustration comes when you don't get the right kinds of blocks you need, or when HK's "friends" (also pacing around back and forth) cause trouble for you, like Bad Batzmaru knocking blocks out of the way, unfortunately reconfiguring your construction. Sometimes they just happen to be standing in the wrong spot where you need to drop a block, and if it lands on their head, the block freezes in the air rather than dropping down. It is difficult to stay focused on your goal when you want to spend a little time trapping the "friends" so they're out of the way. There is a fine line between "challenging" and "hair pullingly frustrating." And of course, while the timer is ticking off seconds, the game can always come to end if your blocks pile up too high and hit the ceiling (like in Tetris).

You CAN control HK yourself, if you have a third hand. See Controls.

Controls 4/10
The controls are poor, probably the worst aspect of the game. As I mentioned, things are sluggish. Perhaps "unresponsive" is a better word. It's not that it will drive you insane, but it just puts more frustration into an already baffling, frustrating game. As I mention above, you can control Hello Kitty, although this entails holding down Select, A and B simultaneously. Since you need 3 fingers to accomplish this, it means relinquishing your right grip on the gameboy, and putting the unit down on something, like your knee. This is utterly incomprehensible. If it was just that you had to hold down A & B, you could cover both with your right thumb. WHY someone decided to include Select, I will never know...but it makes it so that if you need to control HK quickly, you basically lose your concentration to do it. And of course you are not controlling the still-falling bricks during this brief switchover, so deciding to control HK is more of an emergency move to prevent her from dying than something you use in conjunction with the game.

For the simplistic gameplay, one would imagine it would not be so difficult to give the game some nice controls. But unfortunately whoever was in charge of this aspect of the game design did not do their job very well (and how does flawed control like this make it through the testing phase?). My guess is that it is a franchise game, therefore not much effort was put into the actual game dynamics. Which is unfortunate because with a little tweaking, this could have been a really interesting and challenging puzzle game.

Graphics 6/10
Very basic, very tiny, during the gamephase. The storybook graphics and backgrounds seem worthy but the game sprites are miniscule while you're puzzling. It's not that you can't tell what's going on, but they could have been larger and more detailed. I think perhaps the worst part about the graphics is that the cubes themselves aren't even rendered very well, so that just telling the colors apart takes a bit of effort, even if you play the game on a GBA or GBA SP! Of course being a Hello Kitty game, there are cute aspects like HK getting some new clothing and showing off her outfits as wallpaper background for each level. As I said the storybook phase is rendered really well and those graphics are great.

Storyline/Levels/Difficulty 6/10
There are 11 levels ("lands") with 3 stages to each level. If you manage to complete all 11 levels, you unlock the ability to play the game with other characters like Kerroppi, My Melody, Pochacco, etc. The levels are not very evenly balanced as difficulty goes, as the third stage of each level (even the first one) are incredibly hard. The first stage will be the most basic and simple and suddenly the third stage requires you to be some kind of genius architect. In storybook mode, you can read the adventures of Hello Kitty, adding chapters as you unlock levels; there's no interaction with the story, you just get to read it. When you finish a level, you gain the ability to go back and freeplay any previously completed land. The story is cute and it seems like they spent more effort on the graphics for that, than the actual game. While the game is obviously geared towards Hello Kitty fans (very young girls) the difficulty level is wildly out of synch with that aim. I cannot see a little child getting very far in this game let alone getting past the 3rd stage of the first land.

Sound 6/10
It has cute little ditties that replay over and over, different for each 11 levels, which you'd expect of a leveled puzzle game and a GBC game. But it has some bizarre sound effects, particularly when HK gets one of the prizes, that sounds like...well I'm not sure what exactly it's supposed to be. I'm told it's supposed to be a voice, but it sounds like some static, melodic burp. Honestly, I thought the speaker was blown on my GBC, so I put the game in my GBA and it was just as bad. I still have no clue what that victory tone is supposed to be...perhaps HK screaming in frustration? When it occurs, it completely obliterates the music and any other sounds going on. Fortunately it doesn't happen TOO often.

Overall/Final Word 6/10
I think if I paid full price for it when it originally came out, I would have been pissed off, but as I've said, I can't complain for 4 bucks, and I'm sure you too could find a used copy of it for as much, or even less. I'm a Hello Kitty fan, so this game might be worth it to seek out simply if you are into HK and want it for your collection. On the other hand, it's a (somewhat) fun puzzle game that could have been 100x better if they worked out some of the flaws. I don't regret buying it, and I've certainly had my fun with it. In fact, I liked it enough that I sought out & bought the playstation version of it, in hopes that the challenge is similar but the controls and graphics are more fleshed-out. There is definitely something addictive about the gameplay even if it's not the kind of puzzle game you can instantly latch onto. You learn as you go along...and just when you think you can't beat it and it's impossible, you suddenly figure out what to do. The game does have its flaws and yet, I give it a slightly better than average score simply because of the uniqueness of gameplay. If you're a puzzle game fanatic I would suggest grabbing this if you can find it cheap. If you're a HK fan, it's worth picking up for your collection. It's a stinker, but a playable one, that has some redeeming values that make it worth checking out. >^.^<

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06