Secret Agent Barbie: Royal Jewels Mission

Overview #

What’s up gamers. Here’s yet another review that I procrastinated because I am bad at life, but also because I didn’t want to just be a negative reviewer all the time. I hope nobody reads my reviews as though the conclusion is some kind of exciting surprise that they don’t want spoiled for them. Anyway, it’s just more GBA shovelware with a short expected completion time. But it is my civic duty as a player of games that nobody else does to inform you about whether it is really that good or not.

Secret Agent Barbie chronicles the adventures of yet another of Barbie’s careers… it’s interesting, the joke sometimes made is that Barbie must be a secret agent if she keeps appearing as all these different jobs like an astronaut and a chef and a vet and whatever else, but here she actually is just a secret agent. Not really in disguise as anything else. So that’s not so bad, we have an excuse for Barbie to play with all kinds of different gadgets and travel around the world…

Only problem is, it’s a stealth game. She’s that kind of secret agent, not the kind where you just go around killing people, and it’s in the process of typing that I realise yeah, I guess they wouldn’t have a game where Barbie kills people. Not officially licensed anyway. But it’s just that I don’t really vibe with stealth games too much. It’s not even that they clash with who I am as a person, I am not some kind of “yeehaw go in guns blazing” type of character, it’s just that I have never really found a stealth game other than the Assassin’s Creed games that really click with me, it’s more that I’m bad with making mistakes and the nature of stealth games makes them very punishing.

But this is a game for kids, and I’m okay with that part for starters. But that means it should also be easy, right? More forgiving, and maybe that means it could be a gateway into stealth games? Even if it is sort of a 2D platformer. Spoilers again, it isn’t.

What sucks and what doesn’t #

Well, the music is very cool. Haven’t found a GSF rip for it yet, but I want to. It doesn’t sound like such a bad game at first, just a simple low-budget game and that is okay, games don’t have to be fancy. It has a tutorial which is appreciated, rather than just throwing you into the game with no explanation. Although… given the short length, I’m not really sure how much that would actually be needed, especially when it’s for using some gadget that shows up much less than you might expect. Pretty decently animated, I guess. It has some ideas, I guess? I like that you can roll around into secret areas, find CDs and shit (note to kids: They aren’t music CDs, they are “secret files” because back in 2002 you would plausibly use CD-Rs to store your files outside of your computer, as USB drives weren’t cheap enough to be used yet), use the dog (seems to be modelled after those robot dog toys in real life that were popular at the time) to go into small spaces for you, that’s not so bad.

The gameplay just doesn’t work, though, personally. I guess not being a stealth expert, I can never be too sure if it really is entirely the game, or if there’s an aspect of me being an idiot and being shit, but then surely it’s actually reasonable if I have the skill level of a 5 year old?

I think the main problem is that you have to figure out the range of the guards’ eyesight via trial and error, it’s not intuitive at all. You might think you slipped by but whoops! You got caught. Also the inherent problem of being a GBA game, and one with quite a zoomed in viewport at that, is that you can often not see guards that are ahead in front of you, because they simply aren’t on screen yet. So it’s just you’re running along, and bam! You got spotted. That sucks. Or you see a guard, you need to throw some perfume in his face, bam! You did it wrong, he saw you. Luckily it is more forgiving than your usual forced stealth segment in a non-stealth video game, you don’t lose instantly (except in the tutorial) when you get seen, you just take damage. Being seen is kind of your health meter. It’s not quite obvious at first and even the tutorial doesn’t tell you, but maybe I’m just supposed to read the manual and it’s my own fault for not doing that, but anyway it’s just kind of weird. The rate at which your items recharge, and also how long guards stay stunned/distracted/etc or how long you stay invisible is also just not really intuitive. You just get caught a lot… and even if you did figure out the timing, it’s more often than not just nothing you really could have done to avoid getting caught. Usually you’re climbing down a ladder right into someone’s eyesight, even though how would you know they were there?

I dunno, looking back at my gameplay stream… it does seem like if I’m being fair to myself, I was giving it my best effort. It’s just not really a stealthy game even if it’s supposed to be. The platforming kind of works, I guess, but it’s not really a platform game so much a side-scrolling 2D stealth game with platforming elements. The sidescrolling viewpoint is probs the biggest problem, in retrospect, maybe if they made it a top down 2D game it’d be better, but they didn’t. Maybe another instance of developer secretly wanting to make a 2D platform game but that’s not what their job was. It also almost seems like it’s zoomed in too much, and the scale is a relic of an era where “ooh it has large sprites” was how you got review scores (back in the early 90s), but now it’s like… just scale it down for the GBA, you doofus. Kind of bites off more than it could chew.

Eventually I just found myself running through people, taking damage and healing “health” as I go. Not even bothering with the gadgets. That’s not how stealth games are supposed to work at all! If I can only play the game through emergent gameplay of subverting the whole point of the genre it’s supposed to be… that’s not really good, is it? You have some gadgets that just don’t even make sense at all. How is the dog actually supposed to work? I mean, it’s suppsoed to distract the guards and make them come over to it, but I never found a way to actually make practical use for it, since the guards still see you. There is no situation in which you can just make them walk over there and leave you alone, you still need to get past them… and then if you actually do make use of the gadgets? They’re taken away in different levels. The second level in China, you only have the dog, even though it really feels like it could only be useful in conjunction with the perfume or invincibility ring. If Barbie could fly, or jump REALLY high, that could help you get past people in the side scrolling viewpoint, but sometimes you just cannot?

Even the chase segments at the end of each level don’t really work. Not if you want to get the CDs anyway. You can, it’s just sometimes impossible with how the screen scrolls and how the movement works to avoid crashing into traffic because of where the CD is placed. I don’t really get it… it also seems to have the same problem of not being able to see things coming on-screen before it’s too late, but at this point it almost seems deliberate for difficulty’s sake? Can’t have a real challenge so let’s go with trial and error? That’s not nice.

Gotchas #

Password save. That’s unfortunate if you actually do want to play the game thoroughly, and collect all the CDs, and not do that in one sitting, but at least it’s better than if there wasn’t a save feature at all.

I guess in terms of accessibility, the hacking minigames are based on timings and reactions and might be difficult for players that struggle with that, and that’s something to mention considering the whole idea of this game is that it’s for kiddos, but then also the game itself is janky and somewhat frustrating anyway, so whaddya do.

Honestly the viewpoint of the game with how zoomed in it is, and how it scrolls around back and forth quite fast, might give people motion sickness. I think someone in the stream chat mentioned it was a bit uncomfy for them?

Conclusion #

In retrospect, this game might actually be the worst. Worse than Cinderella: Magical Dreams? It’s even less functional at what it tries to be, honestly. I really want to say I just suck at stealth games, but it didn’t really feel like the issue that it was just too difficult. Playing this game, I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to be “good” at it. How the hell would a small child be expected to play this? Would they also just not care too much about getting caught? Am I really just that bad at games? Is it possible that actually nobody in the target audience for this game ever liked this game, but they aren’t the ones who write reviews, and it’s just adults who make assumptions about how playable a game would be? It didn’t exactly get considered game of the year but it was reviewed decently enough by those who did review it at the time.

Well, whoever this DICE company is (I believe they also made a Bratz game for GBC?), they have potential as a developer. I hope they didn’t go bankrupt from this game. Imagine if they made a whole blockbuster FPS series or something later on, that’d be funny. Or bought out by EA… nah, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, they seem nice enough to not deserve that. Ha ha! Just a wacky thought. I can’t imagine companies that get stuck developing a licensed game like this end up doing much.

It’s going to have to be a 1/10 from me though. Sorry kids, I just can’t give it any higher than that.