Looking for something noncommittal and not very hard to sink my teeth into before I started playing another game with a friend the next day, I remembered that this existed on the Switch Online service. Of course I had no reason to believe it’d be a great game, being a licensed game on a console with no small amount of dire licensed games, but I’m a sucker for 2D Zelda-style action/adventure games, and there was really only so long one as easily available to me as this was going to escape being played by me regardless of how good or bad it was XD. It took me 4-ish hours to beat the English version of the game via the Switch Online GameBoy service (with moderate use of rewinds and save states).

The story of the game presumably follows the story of the film on which its based. The Quest for Camelot is a film I’m honestly completely unfamiliar with beyond a general awareness that it’s not very good, so I can really only assume that Kaylee’s quest to avenge her slain father, defeat the evil usurper Ruber, and save King Arthur and Camelot is reasonably close to the film. Either way, it’s a very forgettable story told quite clumsily. There are some neat pixelated renditions of shots of the films in between walls of text that exposit between stages, but it’s still just “this thing happens, so do this thing. Okay on to next location to do another thing” over and over until the end. I certainly wouldn’t expect a great story out of a GBC Zelda clone if it were licensed or otherwise, really, but just how clumsy and overly wordy this game’s narrative is definitely makes it start veering towards an active negative on the game vs. being something comfortably simple and ignoreable. At the very least the adventure has quite good signposting, which is certainly more than I can say about a fair few other 2D Zelda clones I’ve played over the years.

The gameplay is no better than the story. It’s frankly pretty easy to say that it’s even worse, or at the very least a fitting counterpart to the inelegance of the writing. In the broad strokes of things, it’s a pretty shameless copy of 2D Zelda games like Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, and the Oracle games. Tons of items and design concepts are copied outright, though that copying unfortunately doesn’t extend to the actual design of the combat and levels. The game is broken up into several stages with action and puzzles (if you can call them that) leading up to a boss fight. Movement feels awkward with the game’s large sprites, enemies are rudimentary and often move too fast to hit properly, and your sword’s length is pathetically too short to hit things with reliably (in keeping with the grand tradition of bad Zelda clones). It even has tons of padding via fetch quests! In addition to enemies being hard to hit (and bosses being miserable damage sponges), the actual world design is dreadful, and the game has some of the most irritating instant-death jumping puzzles I’ve seen in a game like this as well as a serious aversion to enemies ever giving the player health pickups. It’s not the most incompetent 2D Zelda clone I’ve ever played, sure, but that’s damning with faint praise with just how low a bar that is XD.

The presentation is also quite weak. The graphics take the path of many subpar portable games and opt for big, more detailed sprites that then consequently make the action harder to parse because you don’t have enough room on the screen to see yourself. Additionally, the graphics that are there are pretty ugly and often poor representations of their film counterparts, with the main character often looking nothing like the character even on the front of the game’s own box. The music is also just embarrassingly poorly done. The game has like 3 or 4 music tracks total, and they’re painfully simple and half-baked for a GBC game from 1998 even compared to what composers were accomplishing on the original GameBoy nearly a decade earlier. The biggest and most hilarious music issue, however, is now no non-gameplay scene actually has any music at all. I thought my Switch had crashed, but nope, no errors. The company splash screens, the title screen, and ALL of the text-wall “cutscenes” have 0 music of any kind, meaning you don’t even get music at all until a minute or two after you’ve booted up the game XD

Verdict: Not recommended. There are certainly more unenjoyable licensed games on the GBC, but again we’re back to damning with faint praise XD. Even on its best day, this game is tuned overly difficult and aggressively mediocre, and your time is simply better spent on other things. The GameBoy is no stranger to great action/adventure games, and there are even more at least decent ones than there are great ones, so I have no idea why you’d pick this thing to play over the piles of better ones unless you had genuinely nothing better to do with your time at all.

Haha, I said. I will play this bad gameboy game they put on Switch, baffling everyone. Honestly it's charming. They don't make godawful games as part of marketing pushes for failed kids' movies anymore. The bad guy has a really weird-shaped head which I liked. The game is aggressively middling.

Got to the second boss, which had the world's most messed up hitboxes and I died. I hadn't saved in a fair amount of time and lost like, I dunno, 10 minutes of progress which is too much. That's on me, but they make you pay your precious ingame money to save! What am I supposed to do, make good decisions? COME ON!

Snake enemies in the second area wrap you up and make you mash the button to shake them off. Bespoke sprite just for that. I wonder who decided that the snakes had to have an entire unique animation instead of just hurting you normally. A pervert of some kind? I hope so. It would be nice if someone got some satisfaction from this.