This is a pretty bad pinball game. The game clearly wants you to learn to actually play pinball, which is cool, but it wants you to control the ball pretty precisely from screen one. This ends up being a big ask in part because the ball physics feel off. Youll spend alot of time trying to hit a specific button to open the path to the next screen, losing your ball on that screen, then dropping you back to that previous screen to try and hit that button again. Its tedious and not particularly fun.

Game highlight: the visuals are charming and the opening cutscene is very funny.

Man I wanted to like this, I was obsessed with Pokemon Pinball RSE back in high school and I was really hoping this would be just as good. But between the weird angle of the board and the lack of bumpers, I felt like I had no control over the ball as every time I hit them upwards with the flippers, the ball would just ride along the edge of the board back down to the bottom, not hitting anything.

And like, listen. I'm not trying to say I'm good at pinball or that I know what I'm doing when I play. But half the fun I had with Pokemon Pinball RSE was like, messing around, watching the board evolve as you hit other things and activate things and seeing where your ball would get stuck and get a bunch of bonuses. Here I just felt like the boards (at least the grass one, in all honesty, I couldn't unlock anything past it) just felt so small and empty. Not fun to mess around with at all.

It looks/sounds good and the physics are quite accurate to a pinball cabin, but the problem resides in how the stages themselves play...
The star challenges are some of the most tedious and time constrained stuff I've ever played because of the precision they demand from the player to hit objectives, all while:
a. The ball won't go exactly where you want it to most of the time.
b. The enemies are in constant movement and/or airborne, making more room for errors.
c. There's the chance you leave the room accidentally by losing or aiming Mario towards a normal/secret route.
d. All the above.
Also, in case you get the star to lie there in the center of the room you better touch it, because everytime you get out of the room where the star is, THE WHOLE ROOM RESETS INCLUDING THE DAMN STAR! WTF WERE THEY THINKING???
Oh, and the blue coin minigames are even worse, since each of them are on a time limit to complete to destroy all enemies, and with the whiffy nature of pinball you can guess where that goes.

TL;DR it's fun for the first 5 minutes, but going for story completion is SO not worth it, let alone a 100% completion.

I'm so torn on this game, at moments it can be a fun time, but most of the mechanics and the overall level structure is so unforgiving that you NEED to play with save-states in todays age. Whenever you enter a room and don't collect the star and accidently leave the room the star disappears and you have to do the task over from the start again. With how easy it is to easily leave rooms its nothing but a chore to get through. There needed to be more mechanics to help us traject where we want the ball to move because there simply isn't.
A fun concept, but maybe if more thought was put into it then it could've been something special. Ignore this one if you want.

Sadly the most overlooked and underrated mario spinoff.

I've gone back to this game so many times over the years.
The pinball can be wonky but it works when you get used to it.
The adventure of it all is a strangely unique concept. A few random games on older systems attempted the adventure pinball concept but this was the first mainstream attempt at nailing it down, and one of the very last.

Still an extremely unique idea that MORE than deserves a remake.

The graphics in this game are pretty amazing, yes, you may argue it looks "ugly" but the 3D effect for the GBA is very convincing and works wonders for a Pinball game, making it so you can actually hit the ball forwards and up, and this game even incorporates hitting the ball in the air to hit things which is a great idea and great use of this tech! Secondly, the IDEA of the way the progression works is a solid one, it takes the "open world filled with non linear missions" type structure straight from Mario 64, dropping you into worlds and challenging you to go and grab stars to unlock doors a literal translation of Mario 64 to pinball, fantastic idea!

Everything begins to fall apart in the execution however. Every single board, and I mean every, single, board. Is just a square, with some blocks, and some enemies. Thats it. And rather than actually take advantage of the GBA's power we are still limited to 1 board at a time, with screen transitions like this is a GB Pinball game. Every single level just feels identical, and every identical level isn't even fun to begin with! They are simply tedious. There is no interesting puzzles or gimmicks, it is always as simple as, youre in a rectangle space, heres some shit, go smack the ball into the shit, get the star, move on. But do not be mistaken into thinking this tedium is easy, because these tiny spread-out objects move, and you must hit all the specific objects, as if you hit the OTHER specific objects on the board you will trigger the wrong thing and have to start over, and usually to start over you must purposely go BACK a board and make your way BACK up again by hitting MORE tedious objects in the correct way. Even the bosses in this game are tedious as all hell, especially the final boss which is an absolute nightmare due to the previously mentioned specification order of hitting blocks and the way you must climb your way back up the board again to retry. The amount of precision needed to do even the most basic action in this game just makes it feel borderline unplayable at times.