Lady Sia

"Dedicated to Aunt Jamima."

When I first heard about this game I couldn't wait for it to come out. But then I saw a review for it in Electronic Gaming Monthly that made me wonder. But I managed to find a used copy for rather cheap and decided to give it a try.

Gameplay:9 Lady Sia is what I would call an action platformer. You do a fair amount jumping around and you go around slashing things that get in your way.
You have two different forms of attack on this. First there is your Sword. ( Which you will be using a lot.) You go up to slash enemies and SIA will do all of these different moves while she's attacking ( Which I thought was kind of cool.)And then you have magic which you can charge up to various different powers and later do special techniques by doing certain button combos. (Kind of like you would Ryu's fireball from the SF games.) Unfortunately I never found them to be very useful.
Later on you can turn into a giant Sasquatch, but only on bosses.
There a four worlds with five levels each ( Not including the secret levels) in this game and basically each level revolves around getting from point A to pont B. And in each level there are 5 hostages and 25 gems to find. If you can beat all levels in a world with finding all of them, and having full health and magic at the end you will open up a secret area in that world.
One thing that made this game more difficult than it should've been was the midway points in each stage. When you find a midway point everything up to that point will stay with you. INCLUDING how much health you had. This sometimes made it very hard for me.
The coolest thing about the Gameplay is the bosses. Most of them will require you to think rather hard to be able to beat them. And some of the things you have to do are not very obvious. Like the Walrus boss for example. It took me nearly TWO hours to figure out how to tackle that beast. My only gripe about this is that once you know how to beat a boss, they are very easy to beat.

Story:8 You are Lady Sia and you and your people are having to deal with a new threat. ''The T'soa's''. The game starts out with Lady Sia trying to convince other people in her kingdom. The Tsoa's attack and surprise Sia and knock her unconscious and is then taken to a prison.
Sia is rescued and then you begin the game.
The best thing about the story here is that the dialogue between all the characters is rather humerous.

Graphics:10 I was blown away at how good this game looked for a portable game. And I am not one that is easily impressed by graphics. All the areas in the game are very nice to look. My favorite level was the sea level in the 2nd world. I thought it was cool how the water makes waves and moves back and forth.

Sound:7 The music in this game is fairly decent, though I did find a couple of the tunes repetitive. The first level and the water level had the best tunes in my opinion. There's really nothing noteworthy about the sound affects because I never really payed much attention to them.

Difficulty:8 I want to know what EGM and Nintendo Power were on when they said this game was easy. IT'S NOT! While it is mainly because of the bosses in the game, it is also because it is very hard to get a perfect on some levels. And a couple of the enemies in the game are rather cheap so it is hard tonot get hit by some of them.

Replay:6 The only reason to keep playing this game again is to score a perfect in every level and open up all of the hidden areas. The main thing that kept me playing in the first place to see what I had to do to figure out beat the next boss. And since the bosses are so easy once you figure out how to beat them, that really takes down the score.

Buy or Rent:8 If you can find a place to rent this game I suggest you do. It's really not that long. Probably around 10-15 hours depending whether you want to find everything or not. While it is a worthwhile to play the first time through, I can say for certain that you probably wont want to play through this game again once you've done everything.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/01, Updated 12/23/03