Wayforward made some videogames. Unfabulous for the Game Boy Advance is certainly one of them.

Before we delve into negatives, let me tell about things I liked about this game. The music. It’s Shin’en yet again, and they usually hit rather than miss, and this is another soundtrack for me to listen to whenever I feel like it.

And, uh… that’s it, actually. This game sucks. The end.

Alright, fine, I’ll tell you why it sucks. First, let’s address the most visible aspect of the game – the graphics. More specifically, the character designs. Some bright mind at Wayforward, or, most likely, Nickelodeon, decided it was a good idea to use realistic human heads digitized and plastered on top of normal pixel art bodies. It looks so jarring, so uncanny, and not very appealing. Besides that, the graphics are just fine, I didn’t think the backgrounds were anything special, probably because I was bored out of my mind to pay attention.

Let’s actually delve into what makes this game tick. No, not the source code repository that was released as part of Wayforward lot on archive.org. The actual gameplay. And the gameplay consists of fetch quests with a few mini-games sprinkled throughout. First, the fetch quests and running around is a SLOG. Even when holding the B button to run, you’re not that fast, and the corridors you’re running through are needlessly long. I have no shame stating that I used the emulator’s fast forward feature a lot when I had to run somewhere, I can’t stress enough how much running there is and how boring it is. I will admit that I haven’t paid as close attention to the dialogue as I should have, so I did engineer some unnecessary back and forth for myself, either way it’s nothing to be excited about, because you’re doing stuff like… collecting laundry scattered around the house, or collecting someone’s homework, or obtaining a ticket for the girls to get an approval to hold a party in your basement. Y'know, the cool stuff.

Luckily, the fetch questing isn’t everything you do in this game, as I said before, there are occasional mini-games. Stuff like… an auto runner, where you jump over things or duck under things until you reach the end. A couple of “stealth” sections where you go inside rooms/lockers to hide from danger. A few “rhythm” games. A Puyo Puyo style game. A Tapper clone. A simple basketball game. And a mini-game where you catch things falling from the top of the screen. But like… they’re all average at best. You still have to slog through the boring parts to get treated to something that may be slightly less boring, which is not guaranteed. There are a couple more mini-games that are completely optional, and you don’t have to play them to beat the game. Hangman and Venus Flytrap 7, which is basically Galaga but sideways, probably the ONLY decent thing in this game (aside from music).

Did I mention the jumping? You can jump in this game, as if it was going to be a proper platformer, but aside from a few mini-games, and ESCALATOR STEPS from the Mall area, you don’t have any use for the jumping mechanic. It seems like such a basic thing, then why have it if it has little utility in the entire game?

Overall, Unfabulous is a terrible game. It’s painfully slow and boring through the majority of it, with rather mediocre mini-games here and there. It has very little value as a piece of entertainment, the only good things about it are music that you can listen to outside of the game on Youtube and a few okay mini-games, but they’re not worth it, really. You’re better off playing something else. No, don’t look at that copy of Garfield Gets Real! No, don’t even think of playing Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway. NO! NOT Arctic Tale GBA!!! I mean, an actually good game! Like Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers GBC.