Cinderella: Magical Dreams

Overview #

Good evening everyone! I also procrastinated this review for over a month because I am bad at life. As you’ll soon see, this can be partially blamed on the fact that it turns out there’s not much to write about it. This was just a game that exists. Some game that I streamt, because I thought it might be amusing. I guess? GameFAQs said it was made by Culture Brain. It is not in any way made by Culture Brain. I don’t know why it says that. Where’d they even get that from? Did someone put that info there as a joke? It’s just some random cheap licensed game.

Not that I’m opposed to random cheap licensed games, I think “dumpster diving” for hidden gems can be quite lucrative. So, I set out to either find enjoyment in this game, or if not, find enjoyment playing it in front of 2 or 3 people on the internet and making fun of it. Spoilers it was the latter. In all fairness it’s really hard to find actual information on this game. You search for it, you get ROM sites. I think I already know where to find it, so that doesn’t tell me anything, though I guess I probably could have bought it for maybe $10 if I really wanted.

What sucks and what doesn’t suck #

Well, you uhh… you have an EEPROM chip inside it, so you can actually save the game! 512 whole bytes of save data! That’s pretty good for GBA shovelware! And uhh, you uhh… it has FMVs? I mean, the GBA’s FMV playback capability would never really have been questioned, but like, that’s kinda cool that they decided to compress some video into an 8MB GBA cart? I guess? Some footage from the ye olde Cinderella movie.

I can’t actually find the description that said this, but there was some description out there that said this was a platformer without combat. What they mean is that you don’t get to partake in combat. Everything around you is still very combatative. Every single animal is trying to kill you, no matter how small, as are puddles of water, scarecrows, and also not bees, which every other video game has you take damage from. If you take enough damage, which is like 4 or 5 hits I think, you just die. Not even fall off the screen Mario-style or anything, like you might expect from a kids game. Cinderella just keels over and dies, animations and all. Sure, why not. I actually don’t think I can state enough how funny it is that she just whole entire dies. Oh yeah also she eats worms. Those health pickups are clearly worms. Look, I’ll put a screenshot in here so you can see that it is simply a worm.

The main gameplay of the first stage is uhh… doing chores? On a farm? Because… Cinderella lives on a farm? Do I remember the lore correctly? Anyway, you traverse across areas while avoiding everything trying to kill you by jumping or walking across to a different path (the 2D perspective is a bit weird because there’s a high path and a low path, but it is strictly binary like that). Cinderella runs slowly and doesn’t jump that well, but I guess that’s sort of expected, and also who am I to judge, because I can’t run or jump that well either. So then you’ll get to a gate or door or whatever, and it’s closed, and you have to do a task, which involves going from one side of the screen to another and is generally something like you have to feed a horse or water some flowers.

The problem I guess is that it just… sucks? I mean, it’s not really most people’s idea of fun, concept-wise, but it’s just not good at what it does. The collision detection is wonky, the “press the button here instead of over there” detection whatever you call it is wonky, as in you go to water something but you have to water slightly in front of it, and otherwise you just go mad and have to question if you actually pressed the button or did something wrong or whatever, but no, it is just the game’s fault. There’s just a lot of “oh, that’s what that button prompt actually meant” and “oh, I actually cannot cross paths there, and I can here”, and stuff that’s hard to put into words, just that the game just doesn’t work in general. And I mean yeah, it is just repetitive. Maybe that’s to be expected, but it’s almost like it was designed for children to play it so it normalizes them doing boring chores in their minds, or something. It ends up being brutally punishing and childishly easy at the same, which is an impressive achievement, by virtue of you constantly taking damage and dying often but at the same time there’s no real meaning to that happening and you just keep on doing the repetitive task.

It’s uhh… kinda well animated? I guess? It has that sort of vibe to it, like they paid the graphics people more than the programmer(s), and the latter was just pissed off and gave their minimum effort (and you know what? They damn well should). That’s my theory of what happened. Probably told them to program the game in a week and they’re like you know what? Fuck you and eat shit. I don’t like blaming programmers, but I do like blaming managers, so I’ll do that. Anyway, nice-ish digitized graphics, not sure what they’re digitized from, but it doesn’t really look too bad, or at least I personally like digitized sprite graphics and a lot of people don’t, so maybe I’m weird?

And then there are mice? For some reason? Once you’re done with the first level you are suddenly playing as two mice. Not really sure what the game’s actually supposed to be about at this point? Is it Cinderella’s dreams? Does she dream of doing manual labour on a farm? Are the mice part of the dream? I don’t know anymore. Anyway these levels are more straightforward 2D platforming, without the weird up/down paths nonsense, and in theory not a bad idea, just that the game is still wonky and sucks. You have a shoulder bash, but it doesn’t really have an animation, so it’s hard to tell when it actually starts and ends, and ends up being a bit hard to control, and also you think you can use it on enemies but you can’t (because this game doesn’t have combat, remember? I did not remember). But then you can throw buttons at them (like the sewing kind of buttons), because I guess that’s how mice work, so there is combat! Aha! You lied to me! Whoever it was that said that! Who did say that? I swear it was on the back of the box or something.

The game is just falling more and more apart at this point… collision detection is getting worse, random things don’t make sense (red threads hurt you? Blue threads don’t, and you stand on them, but only sort of? Tomatoes filled with sewing needles don’t hurt you even though they look like they should, but you bounce on them? Fucking measuring tape hurts you?), using the shoulder bash is basically just a “you fall off the platform and have to jump back up again” button. Actually, comparing the screenshots, it almost looks like it’s a completely different game. Art style is completely different, and also no that’s not me compressing the screenshot badly, I remember when I played it that the cat really did have compression artifacts in the game. It’s just a bit like that.

Not really sure what to say about the rest of the game. At least it’s actually the plot of Cinderella now, or at least my understanding of it. Now we have annoying repetitive minigames. Yay. My faaaavourite. Surprised they didn’t put a Simon Says minigame in there. And then back to a Cinderella level, except it’s a long autoscroller instead of going back and forth doing things, which is somehow… worse? There’s kitties that you take damage from, and also weird looking old dudes who at least do look like you should avoid them or that you’d take damage from them. Perspective makes even less sense because sometimes you can jump over barrels and sometimes you’re supposed to go around them. Anyway, that’s the fourth level, and then… you’re the mice again? Uhhh… were they not turned into horses earlier? I don’t get it. At least you can ride butter across a table. I like that for some reason. But otherwise, same as usual. Same theme of weird things trying to kill you, like peas. I don’t like peas either, but I don’t think they cause you to die. And grapes, and droplets of water. And then when you’re done with that, you get another mouse level. It’s like the people who made this game really wanted to make a 2D platformer where you’re a mouse, instead of making the game they were actually assigned to make. There’s almost a decent game in there. Almost. But yeah, that’s the game.

There’s collectibles in there, but I guess I just didn’t really feel like viewing them. Oh well. They would have just been artworks of Cinderella, I guess.

Conclusion #

Some may argue that I’m not in the target audience for this game, and will probably smugly go “Ummm you’re not a 6 year old girl sweaty???” and first of all: I can review whatever the fuck I want. Second of all, I debatably have the mental age of a 6 year old, and most certainly the skill level of a 6 year old when it comes to video games, and I like the idea of being a princess and also reliving the childhood I didn’t have, so I actually might as well be the target audience, and also I don’t think this game would be great for kids, because it’s too repetitive and frustrating. I guess like… if you wanted to get kids into NES games, but without the difficulty? Like, a kid can complete this, I’m just not sure they’d want to. There’s probably other Cinderalla games out there that have the redeeming quality of not being this game.

Also, you can’t pet the cat. 0/10. Actually it’s probably more like 1/10, or maybe a 1.5/10, because I reserve 0/10 for games that shouldn’t even be games, but yeah nah. Not really much nice things to say about this one.

I told you there was nothing really to say about it. Nothing interesting. It’s not an Angery Gamer™ kind of game, it’s more like a “well that was pointless and I’m not sure why I played that” Gamer™ kind of game. Still, I don’t really like writing reviews like this. Doesn’t feel great.