Hamtaro: Ham Ham Heartbreak

"Ham it up again!"

In matters of technological gaming improvements I am a cranky conservative. There are plenty of people still to be done with a 32x32 pixmap, 256 colors and minimal animation. And are there not puzzlers to think up? Does it not waste less time for developer and player alike, if bad ideas cannot be airbrushed? But games like Hamtaro: Ham Ham Heartbreak(H4) seem to chip away at this veneer with alacrity. Apparently the programmers decided to take a good game, Ham-Hams Unite,(HHU) and refine it using GBA features and power not available on the GBC. H4 outflanks me further by adding plot and humor, the sort of thing I like to pretend is mutually exclusive from better special effects in my cheaper arguments.

But it's also as absurdly charming as you would expect for a game about hamsters running around and scavenging items. H4 is based on the Hamtaro anime series and takes one of anime's key gambles in the introduction. It slops together several conventions many people have gotten sick of into a cute background. And it's plausible. Which, in any cartoon, is a fantastic success.

Hamtaro, your character(unless you rename him) has a nightmare about a demon-ham with wings who flies around saying Pfpth! and cleaving hearts between two entities who like each other(feelings range from platonic or even family stuff to marriage) with one swipe of its pitchfork. So he runs downstairs to see Boss, who's in charge of the hamster commune, and Boss gives Hamtaro the Ham-Chat book from HHU as he explains that Bijou, Hamtaro's secret crush, is missing.

After which Hamtaro trips and drops the book in a puddle, giving you the player new puzzles in figuring out Ham-Chat, small words that end with a hyphened letter on the end or just plain sound cute(Luck-E, Might-T, Hamigos or--for 'bite'--pakapaka.) It's replaced the cynical Leetspeak as my 'Quick-E' language of choice to tinker with, and it helps preserve one of HHU's best points--you pick up on words as NPH's(non-player hamsters) use them in context. Later you'll need to use them to communicate with the next NPH. All the basics have returned from the original, such as Tack-Q(roll forward, the most violent you'll get running into other hams) or Hamha for greeting or Hif-Hif to pick up an item. The best 'secret' ones such as Go-P(done in good taste as part of a puzzle) have returned too. Finding them all gives a special ending beyond expelling Spat, the troublemaker, or reuniting all the couples, and you can also buy clothes or accessories with the sunflower seed currency you find, or you can even uncover new songs for your dolled up hams to dance to.

But for starters Hamtaro must find Bijou with just a few basic moves. And he finds that they need to perform some transparent teamwork to get through a few puzzles, mostly involving his climbing on her head to reach some panel or other, although occasionally one of them gets lost and you pick up someone else to trail uselessly.

Once Bijou and Hamtaro have begun their Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers act and noted that Hamtaro's dream really was true, they meet with Harmony, an angel ham, who helps them with a few occasional words. She pretends to be Boss's sidekick, but Boss does little more than gloat about how she taught him a Ham-Chat first. Harmony even opens up a new area(a theme park where no-one's having fun, haunted manor, beach or a weird jungle) once you've rescued enough from the previous. They've all got short catchy names too like Boo Manor or Fun Land or Sunny Peak, and overall you have more major puzzles than in HHU(21 couples, including some non-Hamclan members, vs. 12 lost friends.) Many of the hamsters to console are cowering in corners wondering what their other half things, and this is a better rationalization than most for the general puzzles where you need to scavenge items and talk to the right people and set things straight. You're not just doing things for society in general or because the back of the box told you so.

Besides the item-swapping, you'll need to get into the right position and using a certain Ham-Chat, some of which are shown as question marks until you learn enough. Positioning Hamtaro for this is sometimes annoying as being able to move him more microscopically is a drawback, but fortunately there aren't too many actions in a scene, or they're foreshadowed by evil laughter and someone running out of the room. Secret doors may be the toughest parts and sometimes you have to find the right spot on the wall to bash into. The abstract thinking isn't terribly dense with a square-slider puzzle being the worst, and even the mini-games aren't too bad. One called Tic-Tack-Q just requires patience and thought. There's another sort of boss fight where you can't actually get hit, and although I didn't think much of the hula dancing puzzle, it was funny to see Hamtaro and Bijou dance around once everything was all right. And once locations get too familiar you can make the pair scurry around with the B-button, which is nice an easy on kids' attention spans and even cuts short any shallow dialog you don't want to read again.

The plot twists generally work, too, from biblical references to Spat just popping around--C.S. Lewis pointed out that Animal Farm worked better than 1984 due to the animal imagery and while it's all a bit cheesy it's much better than those horrid young adult novels where the author Knows What Teens Think, He Was One You Know But Now He's Got Perspective or some modernist discussing Evil for Evil's Sake. And I think with the fantasy surroundings and lack of need for an explanation, it's OK for some weird hamster or monkey to explain he's always wanted an acorn cap or weird egg as you see how Decency Trumps Magic. Occasionally you'll get something emotionally askew, like Hamtaro looking very pleased he's learned Ham-Chat from a crying hamster, or you'll get some bizarre causality to move a puzzle along. It only gets a bit lousy at the end when you have to find rocks and rub them to create gems. Although they can buy and make accessories to go with your clothes and so forth, the right ones to make a certain item pop up at random.

Hamtaro and Bijou can steal the game at times with the little dance that accompanies each Ham-Chat--most of the time they'll just synchronize or say 'Heke' in response to something odd, but sometimes one makes a fool out of the other--and you can even make them conspire for minor mischief, but then there are also hamsters that verge on psychedelic or have all manner of patchings. From the weird tribal traditions to the friendly clean-up bot and Ham-Rangers at the amusement park you won't be short of things to do. And you can do them wrong and try again--the hagglers throw horrendous hissy fits if you do things right. The GBA's detail is used well here--in one scene, Hamtaro must drive a boat and you can see the wind pulling his fur back, and Spat's pratfalls once people start acting nice are delightful. In the first game hamsters didn't do much more than extend their arms, and you had to use sound as a cue for their moods.

I didn't feel silly at all playing such a kid's game. Maybe it helped that I was playing it at work a bit, which let me concentrate more on guilt, but H4 feels more like the game everyone can appreciate than one that talks down to you. I spent more than I usually do on a game for H4, and I wasn't disappointed. Spat is the perfect bad-guy for this sort of thing, and the reunited hamsters give a wide range of emotions and problems. Everything's still bright and playful and even if you're over some of the activites in the game, the hamsters aren't, and they're fun to watch. So despite the game getting picky and random near the end the whole deal works overall. The only big problem may be that, although you can't really take steps back, you must restart the game to relive the funniest parts of the narration(it saves on each room change,) and there aren't many alternate paths through.

But even there I made out OK. My rechargeable battery had decided to misbehave as I took out Spat. The light on my GBA was dimming as I reunited the final two hamsters(whom you can probably guess from this review, but the hints are equally obvious in the game.) It conked out in the middle of the lavish end sequence. I fiddled with things and found a makeshift solution, but would I be able to see it, or would it skip? I should have known the answer. Because it was such a nice game.

Hoor-A
--Catch-E graphics
--Craf-T concept, with great Varie-T
--Fun-E, warm and Fuz-E game in Gener-L
--Amusing Enem-E, hardly too Scar-E
--New refinements on new system are Spif-E
--We're going to have a Trilo-G! (Rainbow Res-Q)
--Often Cute-C, rarely Corn-E

Clich-A
--Loo-P randomization near the end
--Last Ham-Chat word may be hid-N
--Tough to play it Ug-N, Ham.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/03, Updated 07/19/03