WHY ARE THE HAMTARO GAMES SO GOOD??!?!? No, seriously, all of them are in my all-time faves list since I was a kid.

Heartbreak is the best one in terms of storyline and the ham-chats are the most well thought out dynamic of the game.

I love all the different locations! My fave is probably the haunted house. When I was little I was stuck there for a long time.
The soundtrack is really good too.

Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak is the bar that licensed children’s games should aim to clear. It’s nothing too crazy or mind-boggling, but it’s Hamtaro; it doesn’t really have to be. Instead, you’re treated to a nice little Hamtaro-themed romp on your GBA. If you’re a fan of the series or just anything cute in general, it gets the job done pretty nicely and I think you’ll be satisfied throughout. Absolute worst case scenario, you might be the tiniest bit bored or frustrated. Either way, this game seems confident in knowing exactly what it wants to be and manages to maintain a consistent quality throughout.

In Ham-Ham Heartbreak, you play as Hamtaro and (kind of) Bijou. A devious little hamster named Spat has been traveling throughout the land and causing squabbles between the closest of friends, lovers, siblings, and more; ruining their relationships. An angelic hamster named Harmony calls upon Hamtaro and Bijou to stop Spat and help the feuding pairs make amends. Unfortunately for Hamtaro, he accidentally spills water all over his Ham-Chat dictionary from the previous game, Ham-Hams Unite. As a result, he is no longer hip with the latest Ham-Ham lingo, meaning he has no idea how to communicate certain words or actions to his fellow hamsters.

The game serves as a simple point-and-click adventure where you have to fetch objects or solve puzzles at the requests of multiple hamster NPCs. The only issue is that without his dictionary, Hamtaro doesn’t know how to speak or interact with the environment or other characters. While most point-and-click games have a small collection of commands such as Examine, Speak, Interact, and so on, Ham-Ham Heartbreak has a massive array of interactions, having about 90 in total. This may sound daunting, but each object or NPC you interact with only contains a small amount of actions to choose from, depending on the context of where they are. If you exhaust all the available actions and don’t quite get anywhere with them, it means you most likely don’t have the one you need yet. Actions can be obtained by completing quests, in which case a hamster will share a Ham-Chat that you’ll be able to utilize later. Throughout the adventure, there are also a few minigames to play and collectibles to find. You can buy little outfit pieces to put on Hamtaro in a photo studio and you can gather gemstones for no particular reason outside of vague education.

The presentation is where Ham-Ham Heartbreak really shines. It’s one of the nicest looking games on the GBA, as you can tell a lot of care and effort when into the spritework of the characters and environments. Speaking of, Hamtaro and Bijou steal the show with their sprites and animations, especially the Ham-Chat actions. Each one is goofy and super expressive. Even if you have to watch them perform the same action 100 times, the animations never get old. The music is decent for the most part; admittedly the loops are fairly short so some tracks can get a little grating after a while. All your favorite Ham-Hams from the TV show are present and they look great, though they aren’t used too often. The dialog is also very silly, lighthearted, and remains on-par with the show. Once the credits roll and you realize that this adventure is published by Nintendo, it begins to make sense as to why this game has so much charm.

My only real complaint is that some puzzle solutions can be very obtuse. There may be parts where you’ll want to bust out a guide for the simplest solutions because the answer isn’t as intuitive as it should be. Shoutouts to KirbyRockz and their GameFAQs walkthrough from May 2004. A minor complaint is repetition; like I don’t feel it’s necessary to make Hamtaro sniff for sunflower seeds when they’re sitting right in front of him. There are lots of small things in the game like that.

At the end of it all, it’s just a fun little adventure that doesn’t demand much from you. As said, if you’re a Hamtaro fan, you’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit. If you aren’t a fan, I think you’ll still have a decent time.

This is an adorable game. The level of attention in the sprites and animations is outstanding, and the extremely charming Hamtaro and Nintendo touches makes this a truly wholesome "theme park" game. Unfortunately, under the pretty surface this is a mediocre click and point adventure game with plenty of clunky elements which makes it hard to slog through as an adult.

This game is obviously for little children, but I would imagine most kids would get terribly confused on how to procede at several points. I did as a fully grown adult!

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 :)

Love was blooming in paradise. One day fights broke out. Couples stopped talking. Something was wrong. The culprit shows himself: Infernal Trickster is here to ruin everything. It's up to Hamtaro and Bijou to stop him.

Ham-Ham Heartbreak is an adventure game. You walk around, talk to people, solve diegetic puzzles.

Probably the most interesting part of this game is how literally it takes the concept of player verbs. The 'A' button opens up your Ham-Chat window. The game filters out all possible words into a select few that could, make sense to use here. You select it, a cute animation plays, whatever you were interacting with reacts to you. This is how you solve puzzles, its great. You start the game with very few unlocked verbs. As you play Hamtaro will see someone do one and copy it like a baby. Sometimes characters will just teach you one. They made talking to characters into a mechanic. Sort of.

Most of the cutscene will be exactly how you'd expect them. You open conversations by Ham-Chat, but after you will just read through text as the characters speak to eachother. This flows fairly well, and is probably a lot less awkward than selecting each response yourself. You can think of it more as different ways to greet someone.

Ham-Chat is also used for actions, for example reaching a higher place by having our two protagonists stack up, or knocking something down by stomping. It's a very cute system.

The cutesy aesthetic is plastered on everything with a thick coat of paint. They really don't make them like they used to. It's probably just my nostalgia speaking, but this game feels like the Alpha of those cute fansites children used to make in the early aughts. A wonderful time capsule of my youth. If that era interest you, this game is worth visiting just to see all of that in motion.

I've had this GBA game for ages, but never completed it back then. Was hesitant to start it up years later because I had a concern my vague positive memories were very rooted in nostalgia, but then I looked the game up here & saw its surprisingly high score (4+ stars) & decided to give it a go anyways.

I don't think I'm as fond of the game as others on this site are, but it's hard to deny that Ham-Ham Heartbreak being really polished & a very competent hand held experience most of the way through. The premise is really simple (main villain hates love/people getting along. Hence he attempts to make everyone fight) but it's still executed well despite the simple premise. The sprite work is also quite inspired & it compliments the dictionary system a lot with how creative some of the animations are.

...The game does have downsides though, especially regarding how obtuse progression sometimes can be. Make no mistake the game isn't hard, but you can very much run into situations where you run around for a surprising amount of time because there's some obscure text prompt/object to interact with you overlooked - leading you to comb through the whole zone backwards until you find what you missed.

Those moments do leave some frustration and it's also why I can't give a full on no reservations recommendation. It's a good game, think its more polished than most licensed games, but you have to accept 10-15% nonsense alongside it. Though if you can stomach that there's a fun 6-8 hour game in store.