The sylvanian families series continues with a jump to the game boy advance! Still meeting Epoch's breakneck "every december" release date, SF4 unfortunately is the most uneven and rushed-feeling game so far. Many of the side areas/forests from previous installments are just random-feeling mazes of raspberry bushes: we have raspberry islands, forests, hills... all identical.

The game introduces a hint-system, but like the hints in SF3 it mainly serves as a band-aid to the difficulty of progressing on your own.

The new GBA art style makes the maps larger to navigate (and thus harder to find characters). The higher fidelity also creates an even weirder sensation when the characters repeat the same lines for days on end.

Gathering Points (the currency) no longer levels you up, so everything you do in the game just feels like gathering money for buying the few pieces of furniture or wallpaper.

There's no MOON-esque stamina system: instead the day ends at 6 PM and you're whisked home, rather than losing progress. The game now shows a clock in the top-right, and the world map actually makes physical sense. At the same time , these things were part of what gave the GBC games their charm - having a brutal survival system in a kids game felt somewhat refreshing. I appreciate the clearer map, but there's also not much to the navigating or exploring that makes the map feel all that necessary now.

Basically the ironed out the 'wrinkles' to an already simple game design, which leaves SF4 feeling even more featureless than its predecessors.

The game is centered around finishing mini-storylines with characters and collecting "Dream Seeds", but the game takes a step back from the GBC trilogy, which would often hide the MacGuffins at the ends of suspicious spots or paths. Instead in SF4 the Dream Seeds are seemingly randomly spawned in the middle of fields. This serves to make the backgrounds and level design feel even more like pointless set dressing: overall the game has a feel of a middling children's story with huge moments of radio silence in between.

Honestly I feel like the team was probably feeling burnout at this point, that with learning the new GBA technology and likely the lack of any strong design directors, and perhaps who-knows-how-many weird brand guidelines to follow - resulted in a overall middling game.