Moomin's Tale for Game Boy Color is another game that varies my intake of licensed games, this time it's based on a property originating from Finland. It’s a platformer with some variety.

The player controls Moomin (Moomintroll) through various stories, like retrieving a handkerchief or watching a solar eclipse. The game is mostly a standard platformer, left, right, jump and stuff. The goal differs between levels. The first level introduces question spheres that give a fruit that can restore health, certain ones give a speed boost, like lemons and apples, and the green ones can expand the health bar. The fruit also acts as continues during boss battles. Anyway, collecting spheres is required for progression you have these mini-levels that are a couple screens long, and the game throws more challenging gauntlets where you have to learn patterns and avoid hazards. In my opinion, these challenges are the most fun you can find in this game. These challenges return in level 3 with more tricky hazard avoidance. That’s not always the case, in some instances you only need to reach the right side of the screen to progress. There are also top down segments in the mountains, though these act as sort of mazes or hubs, where you can enter caves in which you have to reach another entrance to progress. For some reason, you can jump in top down perspective, but there’s nothing to jump over.

The platforming varies from good to decent, but not everything is perfect. Mainly, the boss battles are inconsistent and mostly suck. The first boss you’ll encounter is a mantis, and you can repeatedly bounce on its head, lacking in any sort of challenge, even for a first boss. Although technically it’s a mid-boss, because the first world doesn’t end there. At the end, you’ll find a pleasant surprise, in a form of a button mashing mini-game to climb up a tree. You have to alternate mash between B and A. In that order, mashing starting from A doesn’t work, I learned that the failure way. There’s no midboss in level 2, but instead a rock chase at the end. The screen crunch is real, as the rock takes half of the tiny Game Boy Color’s screen, and there are a few instances where you can get stuck because you’re supposed to jump from a slightly higher platform to the next one that is further offscreen, without seeing it of course. Although I guess you can memorize the layout while coming here, but how are you supposed to do that on the first playthrough? The third level introduces an identical mantis from the first level, only now you can’t jump on it while its performing an attack, even though the animation is the same. This just feels lazy and cheap, though it’s not difficult to get into a rhythm of jumping, waiting, then jumping again on the enemy if you learn the pattern. Of course it’s a mid-boss once again, the real boss is collecting flying notes. Once again, trial and error rears its ugly head, as the notes can fly high or low, and missing any reduces your health quite a bit. I’m not going to go into detail on every boss, so lets jump straight to the last boss battle, level 5, a dragon. This boss is pure garbage. It’s attacks are random, and there’s wind, so if you get hit, you’ll be knocked back far away. And if you game over here, you’ll have to go through some cave levels, fight an eagle (which isn’t a very good boss either), then have to go through more caves to reach to have a chance against this RNGfest. This is where I used savestates, because having to redo lengthy portions of the game because of the boss that isn’t fun in the slightest is so frustrating. The game actually gets easier after this encounter, as there’s a relatively short level 6 with no boss battle at the end, and an interesting gimmick to boot, making said level actually decently enjoyable. Basically, the main issues I have with the bosses are either lack of consistency or alternate play styles that aren’t much fun.

Graphically, the game is pretty good. The animations are plentiful, the backgrounds are detailed, and there’s occasional parallax scrolling or animated background. I also like a small detail when the game is paused, the game turns black and white, reminiscent of the original Game Boy color scheme. When Moomin takes damage, he falls on his back side, and gives you a disappointed look, some enemies actually react, and it’s not just visual, when in this state you’ll be invulnerable until you get back up by a press of the button, which means you can wait until a hazard passes by. I kinda like this approach. Sound-wise, the music is decent, I like boss fight theme for example, though some other tracks are pretty repetitive, particularly in top-down mountain areas or in some cave levels.

In closing, I think this would’ve been a decent, or even good game if it had focused more on little ?-sphere collecting challenges featured in levels 1 and 3, aI can’t stress enough how fun these are, the platforming mechanics are decent, the patterns are consistent and fun to learn. Which is unlike bosses, which don’t feel as polished or consistent, as well as other occasional trial and error moment. They really do drag the game down a bit. It’s still an ok game, and better than most other Game Boy Color licensed games I’ve played, but I feel there was potential for a great hidden gem.