RetroSpective: Astro Boy Omega Factor

[Ganepark32]

Nearly 6 months have come and gone since the last one, so it's time to kick it off with a biggie.

 

 

Treasure’s legacy as a development studio lies in its ability to craft what are considered some of the best games in the industry, with many of these sticking firmly to the shoot’em up genre with Treasure putting a spin on how they implement the game into said genre. Creating a game based around the Japanese manga Astro Boy is no mean task as the story is quite elongated and elaborate and condensing it so that gamers get a big enough bit of what Astro Boy is all about is very difficult indeed. And yet, in a release period that spanned the three major gaming territories from December 2003 to February 2005, Treasure took up the challenge of bringing Astro Boy to the games industry on the Game Boy Advance and the results were well received by press and gamers worldwide. However, the games industry has moved on progressively since its release so is Astro Boy Omega Factor a title that is still relevant to today’s gamer and how does it hold up.

 

As has been said, bringing Astro Boy into a condensed form for a game is a difficult challenge, and that’s putting it lightly. Yet Treasure managed to produce a game that provided the information and feel of the manga while incorporating their trademark on screen anarchy and it filled up with enemies and effects, bringing the GBA to its knees. In terms of gameplay, Astro Boy is still one of the best action titles on any handheld platform. Mixing together the platforming, beat’em up, shoot’em up and even RPG elements initially seems like the game is trying too hard to appeal to a broad spectrum of gamers but it is once you start playing that you see that all these element of cross genre gaming blend well into a fantastic action title, and the transition between them is seamless. One moment you’ll be traversing one of the games level, fighting enemies on the ground and the next you’ll be flying above the Pacific Ocean or above the Antarctic, all the while taking on a plethora of enemies hoping to thwart your progression through the levels. Indeed, it is this continuous onslaught of enemies that has become the trademark of many a Treasure title and Omega Factor is no different. The RPG elements of the title boiled down to upgrading things like you life bar, your strength or your energy beam attacks and careful planning of your upgrades will make the difference between a smooth ride through the game or a rough one. But even careful planning of your upgrades doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride because, as is trademark in Treasure titles, there is a significant challenge and quickly picks up pace as you delve deeper into the experience. Looking at this in comparison to games nowadays is interesting because newer titles are constantly being labelled too easy for the seasoned gamer and even though this is an older title of sorts, it shows testament to Treasure who have continued to ply gamers with a challenge worthy of old hands.

 

Providing a challenge is one thing Treasure do well. But when it comes to their titles, they do many things well, especially the graphics. Ok, by today’s standards of High Def 2d graphics seen on the Xbox 360 and PS3 the graphics are rather lacklustre. But that kind of comparison is the wrong way to go about looking at the graphics. Looking at them in comparison to what the DS and the PSP have offered does show its age yet the charm and the shear intensity of the graphical action happening on screen is so unthinkable of on these consoles, with perhaps the likes of Bangai-O Spirits on the DS being the closest that has come to recreating the anarchy that batters the GBA’s hardware. The game, while looking blocky, still looks good now with an incredible amount of detail in backgrounds, characters and their animation. Really, it is a marvel even now at what Treasure managed to pull off given the hardware constraints. And these constraints do some through in the form of slowdown when things get a little heavy on screen. Yet even with these cases of slowdown you can see that there isn’t much more that could be done by Treasure to alleviate this and it’s perhaps a true showing of the GBA’s limitations being pushed as far as they can go.

 

Accompanying the game is a compatible soundtrack that moves with the action on screen and like those which have appeared in other Treasure titles, it stands out as being memorable. The upbeat tones which signal the beginning of the Metro City level give an audio representation of perhaps the livelihood of life within the city while the more sombre tunes of the ending show how well the audio developers have done in mapping the game’s story to the music. And like the graphics, the audio is done to a high standard that makes you wonder what kind of technical wizardry Treasure have had to pull off to get everything onto the cartridge.

 

And that’s a good point: how have Treasure managed to cram everything into this game? Even now with the bigger capacity cartridges of the DS and the UMD media of the PSP it’s still amazing. People could be remiss for thinking that the game is all style and no substance but really it’s all style and all substance. Treasure created a fantastic title in all departments when it was release those years ago and looking at it now, it is every bit as good. It even stands out among the current offerings on both the DS and PSP as there is no real equivalent title that has come close to providing the high octane action that Omega Factor encapsulates. And that’s another thing, this has been developed as a sort of tie-in with the manga, using many story elements from the show. So how is it that Treasure can manage so masterfully to create an action title from there when there are developers out there creating action titles from scratch that can’t hold a candle to Astro Boy.

 

So to answer the initial question, yes Astro Boy Omega Factor is as relevant now to gamers as it was upon release. While gaming may have moved on and hit new areas, this still stands as an excellent example of how to make not just a game but any game. If you haven’t had the opportunity to play the title, then you can in a way be forgiven due to the close proximity of its release to that of the DS in Europe but I do implore you to track down a copy and play it for yourselves because it is not only one of the best games on the GBA but also one of the best action games of the generation past.

[dwarf]

If I knew Astro Boy and you spaced your writing out a bit more I'd be tempted to read.

[Guest Captain Falcon]

One thing that always bugged me about this game, and all games that feature this particular gameplay quirk, is that when you press the jump button, your jump height is set so it doesn't matter if you hold it down or not, you always jump the same height and there is no way to do so any lower.

 

The slowdown was pretty frequent really. IIRC, Guardian Heroes Advance was plagued with slowdown so I'd have thought they'd learnt their lesson. Saying they showed the limitations of the hardware doesn't excuse them for trying to go beyond what the device was clearly capable of - that shows poor judgment on their part.

 

And whilst I liked the gallery feature giving a little bit of history of the various Osamu Tezuka, I couldn't help but feel they'd been shoehorned into the title. I knew nothing of Astro Boy before this game, other than the name, so being bombarded by a new character every time the screen changed was a bit confusing.

 

It's a game with a lot of charm and was crafted with genuine love - that much is obvious. But the difficulty spikes (even more apparent in Rebirth Mode which can be really hard if you've not balanced your upgrades correct - no matter the difficulty), antiquated jumping mechanics, lack of enemy variety, and music that wasn't terribly memorable beyond the first stage is difficult to forgive - I do love the little Astro Boy jingle that players at the start of each level though.

 

This is one of those games that I can see why people praise, and I want to like it more than I do, but there are things holding it back in my eyes that I can't ignore.