Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak

released on May 03, 2002

All the hamsters are bickering, and there's little wonder why! Spat, a meddling troublemaker, is telling fibs and causing heartache everywhere. It's up to Hamtaro and best-girl Bijou to follow Spat, stop the squabbling, and get everyone back on talking terms again.


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The makings of a full super duper lovely and cute hamtaro season congealed into one very wonderful ~metroidvania-esque~ package. It's really sweet <3 Lot of smiles, lot of wonderfully relaxing and cozy vibes while simply taking care of all the hamsters as you help them find love!!!

hamster em processo de alfabetização

The other game in this series for Gameboy Color, Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! is one of my favorite adventure games ever. I never even knew a sequel to it existed until a little over a year ago while talking to a friend of a friend about it (I can't exactly remember why). I was so happy to finally find a copy a few days ago, and now that I'm all done with it, I can pretty safely say that it was alright. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that it doesn't really surpass or equal the sequel in most any way.

I was quite surprised to learn that this game and the previous one were produced by Miyamoto, but given their brilliant simplicity, I suppose that's not really that much of a surprise. There is no combat, and really no dying or failure state of any kind either. Instead, this is an adventure game where the biggest feature is learning Ham-chat, which are special code words that work a little like the information prompts in Final Fantasy 2. Hamtaro, the titular character whom you play as, doesn't talk outside of saying these phrases. You can't use one until you've heard it at least once. Each hamster you talk to and item you interact with has a certain number of them possible to use (with ones you don't have yet represented by a ???). These effectively function as dual passwords/skills that you use to solve just about every puzzle in the game. To get more words, you need to talk to people, so there is a LOT of doing tasks for other hamsters and just talking to them generally to try and learn all the Ham-chat you can.

The story is fairly simple, but more complex than the first game in that it actually has an antagonist. Spat, the devil-costumed hamster, is doing his best to destroy all the love (brotherly, romantic, friendship, you name it) among Hamsters (for no other reason than because he's a hateful bastard, I guess). An angel-costumed hamster named Harmony has come to give Hamtaro and Bijou the task of fixing all the love in the land and kicking Spat out of town. The game actually has a lot of really well localized dialogue, quite funny lines combined with quite meaningful and well done scenes of healthy ways to express relationships. Many hamster couples you mend the relationships of are never explicitly gendered either, so I like to give it at least a slightly LGBT-positive notion, even if I'm pretty sure the Japanese version genders the hamsters at least implicitly with gendered speech patterns. One thing this game definitely has over the original is that slightly stronger plot and much better dialogue.

What this game doesn't have over the original is the strength in premise. While the original had a weaker plot of just "find all the ham-hams and bring them back to the clubhouse," it felt far more organic to the more fluffy plot of the show. Spat is a fun villain, sure (I gave him a voice of Skeletor, because that's basically who he is), but he hardly makes for a super compelling narrative. A lot of the things he does feel very out of place in the Hamtaro universe due to the other problem this game has of a very poor use of setting.

Hamtaro's whole thing is that they're hamsters. So much of the charm in the first game is found in the locations you explore from the perspective of a hamster. A junk yard, a school, a playground, a grocery store. Crawling over and under all that human-sized stuff as a tiny little hamster was just so cool! Other than some big sunflowers, this game might as well not even be a Hamtaro game with the settings it has. A hamster-sized amusement park, a hamster-sized haunted house, a hamster-sized beach resort. ALL the locations wouldn't be out of place if the main characters were humans instead of hamsters. The other bits of wasted premise lie in things like slightly obvious puzzle solutions (at least I certainly remember the original's being harder, but given that this is probably a game intended to be accessible for younger kids I can forgive that) and really uninspired new Ham-chat phrases. Those are really my biggest complaints about the game, and they're fairly small all things considered.

Verdict: Recommended. It's definitely an inferior product compared to the original, but it's still a damn fine adventure game for all ages on the GBA. Even if you aren't into Hamtaro, this is still a fun adventure game that'll take you probably 10 or 15 hours to get through :)

Pues me lo he vuelto a pasar pero esta vez en streaming y además en compañía de una amiga.


Ha sido genial haber podido rejugar un juego de infancia, le tengo mucho cariño y siempre que lo juego lo disfruto como la primera vez!

NOW THIS IS A GAME!!!! You're a little hamster on a big adventure to save LOVE!!!