A very flawed but still a pretty interesting experience for the GBA.
You're a vague member of some "body guard"-esque organization called "Gate Guardians" tasked with keeping a train full of frontier settlers safe. The entire train gets abducted by an also-vague organization of bad guys called CIMA who then force you to save each settler one by one.
The gameplay is a weird mix of lemmings-style strategy where you're commanding settlers around while trying to keep them from dying, and an action RPG. The strategy portion is the majority of the game, but also is vexingly not very fleshed out. Puzzles are simple from beginning to end and never have any additional mechanics added to increase complexity. Additionally settlers have absolutely no pathfinding so you're forced to command them very carefully.
A cool element is that the game has a "trust" system which, when settlers trust you enough allows them to craft items for you. This fits nicely with the games primary themes so it was a nice touch, even if the majority of the items aren't very useful.
The story was simplistic, but still had a nice ending! All sorts of elements went entirely unexplained, but I don't think it's fair to ask much of a GBA game intended for kids. The bigger shame is the localization which is absolutely full of errors.
Another highlight for me were the game's character art, and the boss encounters. Every settler has a 90s-manga-style portraits that seemed way too high quality for a game of this budget.
Bosses had multiple attack patterns, some with even some shmup-esque attacks that fill the screen with projectiles. The arenas too were occasionally unique, like a railroad-themed room that forces you to battle on train tracks. It's not great that this was the game's high point was boss fights considering the majority of the game is spent shepherding around weak settlers though.
Overall probably wouldn't recommend this to most people as like 75% of the game follows the same exact structure of
1. enter new zone
2. save person
3. get split up from person
4. fight boss
But if you're looking for a unique game on the GBA this might be for you.
You're a vague member of some "body guard"-esque organization called "Gate Guardians" tasked with keeping a train full of frontier settlers safe. The entire train gets abducted by an also-vague organization of bad guys called CIMA who then force you to save each settler one by one.
The gameplay is a weird mix of lemmings-style strategy where you're commanding settlers around while trying to keep them from dying, and an action RPG. The strategy portion is the majority of the game, but also is vexingly not very fleshed out. Puzzles are simple from beginning to end and never have any additional mechanics added to increase complexity. Additionally settlers have absolutely no pathfinding so you're forced to command them very carefully.
A cool element is that the game has a "trust" system which, when settlers trust you enough allows them to craft items for you. This fits nicely with the games primary themes so it was a nice touch, even if the majority of the items aren't very useful.
The story was simplistic, but still had a nice ending! All sorts of elements went entirely unexplained, but I don't think it's fair to ask much of a GBA game intended for kids. The bigger shame is the localization which is absolutely full of errors.
Another highlight for me were the game's character art, and the boss encounters. Every settler has a 90s-manga-style portraits that seemed way too high quality for a game of this budget.
Bosses had multiple attack patterns, some with even some shmup-esque attacks that fill the screen with projectiles. The arenas too were occasionally unique, like a railroad-themed room that forces you to battle on train tracks. It's not great that this was the game's high point was boss fights considering the majority of the game is spent shepherding around weak settlers though.
Overall probably wouldn't recommend this to most people as like 75% of the game follows the same exact structure of
1. enter new zone
2. save person
3. get split up from person
4. fight boss
But if you're looking for a unique game on the GBA this might be for you.