In my journey through licensed games, I’ve been largely dealing with games based on American properties (the only exception is Maya The Bee: Sweet Gold, based on Maya The Bee franchise that originated from Germany). Why not spice my intake of licensed games with a game based on a Japanese property? My random pick for such a game is Crayon Shin-Chan: Arashi no Yobu Cinema-Land no Daibouken! for Game Boy Advance, released only in Japan and Spain. Luckily there’s an English translation that I used to play this game. Fair warning, I knew pretty much nothing about Crayon Shin-Chan going into this, and I can tell this is a Japanese game based on a Japanese property. And y’know what? This game is actually fun.

Cinema-Land is primarily a platformer, where you simulate plots of different movies, or at least I think that’s what’s happening. You control Shin-Chan through 13 levels with different themes and gimmicks. In the first four, you’re introduced to Shin-Chan’s main suits that have different abilities, like a monke outfit that allows for walljumps and climbing vines, or super hero suit that allows for a midair kick, or beam attack that can break blocks and a frogger suit that allows to stick to some grapple things that aid in platforming. Shin-Chan’s family can be called for assistance, like dad allowing for high jumps or mom to break some blocks with “A foolproof butt slam”. You can find new abilities for the family members, although I don’t know what they do, the game doesn’t really encourage experimentation, and the descriptions aren’t clear on what the abilities even do, not only that, but they also consume hearts that can be raised by picking up their favored item, like a ring or a bottle of milk. The most basic abilities available from the start require zero hearts, and I used them the most, naturally. The advantage of movie plot simulations is that the levels are varied with their theme and/or gimmicks, although not everything works. For example, the level 3, “Unkokusai’s ambition” ends with a mecha fight that’s just a QTE. In level 7, “Burst! Hot spring battle!” There’s a very slow and boring autoscroller where a giant robot moves slowly towards you. Still, for the most part the game stays fresh and engaging. There are also mini-games, although a more appropriate term would be challenges, like challenges dedicated to costumes, such as destroying 100 enemies (which is actually not that fun), and monkey and frog suit platforming challenges, along with actual mini-games, in case you liked that QTE robo fight. There are also items for a few exchange missions for cards, which can also be found in the levels themselves, with a total of 100, although they’re shots used in the cutscenes, and you can’t unlock all of them unless you play on hard difficulty setting.

The graphics are decent. I like the cinematic animation during cutscenes, and during normal gameplay, it’s a standard 16-bit pixel art that looks great. The music on the other hand is kind of mid. I don’t mind it during cutscenes, but when playing the levels, most of them turn out to be fairly repetitive. While the movie plots are interesting, the villain twist at the end was actually pretty lame.

Overall, a soild platformer, it’s weird but has some cool ideas and challenges, and it’s fairly engaging, with decent variety and interesting stories.