What’s old is new once more. Four years ago, I began my journey into the Game Boy Abyss with a little tie-in title called Finding Nemo, and a hundred reviews later, we return to the watery depths from which I emerged. And whilst those waters are a little less beautiful, a little more frustrating, it’s certainly a hell of a lot more interesting than the first go around. Finding Nemo was ‘just’ a side-scroller platformer. Swimplatformer? Regardless, The Continuing Adventure provides proof that variety truly is the spice of life. The Continuing Adventures is a more interesting, more entertaining experience than the first run-around, despite being ‘just’ a mini-game collection, and the quality of the Some of the mini-games, whilst basic, managed to hold my attention. It’s just the overall experience as a whole that feels off; it’s a game that feels cheap down to its core, no matter how many different forms it covers itself in - and the fact it’s most numerous parts are the most abysmal surely doesn’t help it’s case.

The fact that I’ve jumped from what is by far my favourite game on the Game Boy Advance in Mother 3, to a glorified, non-canonical minigame collection sequel to Finding Nemo is hilariously a hell of my own making. In my head, Mother 3 marked the end of the first ‘act’ of the Game Boy Abyss, even if nothing really changes. I don’t know how I’d describe this second ‘act’, if it even really can be described that way. I’ve got no overarching goal, no real plans - just a need to discover the weird, the wild, the good, and the bad, and above all - the obscure. And despite being a follow-up to one of Pixar’s most beloved movies (and a game that sold REAL well for a licensed-shovelware), there is very, very little discussion on the Continuing Adventures on the net. A cursory glance led me to finding no major reviews on the internet, which happens from time to time with obscure titles, but for Finding Nemo!? Crazy. Guess I’m glad to provide some kind of service around here.

In any case, as you’ll quickly learn upon booting The Continuing Adventures up, you’ll see that Finding Nemo’s follow-up is a mini-game collection. With no sequel in sight for a long, long while, THQ tasked developer Altron with creating a follow-up in video game form, and I suppose it makes sense to work on something a little bit smaller-scale than trying a story-based experience like the original GBA game. Altron were one of the big ‘licensed titles’ developers in the GBA, making some good, some bad titles, and The Continuing Adventure falls very much in the middle. It’s absolutely shovelware, don’t get me wrong, but there is some passion behind it and real quality behind it (at times) - it would've been so, so easy to make something as brainless and well, *bad* as something like Elf. Thank. God.

Maybe the most endearing element of The Continuing Adventures is how it lays out its story and structure. A decade before Finding Dory came around, this game is as much sequel as you could probably hope for. With Nemo now free and reunited with his father, Marlin and the others get right back into it by rescuing the other fish of the Tank Gang from the dentist office of P. Sherman of 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. To convey their bids for freedom, each member of the Tank Gang has their own set of fairly-bespoke minigames to complete to reach their new home in the Great Barrier Reef, and you’ll complete each in sequence to mark their progress through the ocean.

Regardless of everything else, it is a very charming way to lay out what is still, essentially, a minigame collection. The fact that many of the minigames are tailored and themed around each member of the Tank Gang is also admirable; for an example, Peach the starfish levels are themed about her lack of mobility, whilst Bubbles levels are largely about - you guessed it, bubbles! It’s just a genuinely really cute way to lay out a game this way, and actually giving the Tank Gang a happy ending (at least in 2004) is really sweet, since their ending in the movie is… actually quite messed up. Even if I loathed the rest of the game, the fact that it’s clear the developers gave two damns about the characters of Finding Nemo, and wanted to provide a fitting way to progress their stories is admirable.

While it’s never anything that’ll challenge anyone older than a pre-teen, I can give this game credit for actually having a decent variety of mini games to engage in across its couple-hour runtime. Very few are innately similar, which based on their quality can be both good and bad. Each minigame, of which there are just shy of two dozen, have two ‘modes’ - story mode, which generally have a set goal for you to meet to finish the minigame and proceed to next one, and ‘Score Attack’, which is exactly what it sounds like. Score Attack *alone* almost helps salvage this follow-up from being as throwaway as something like American Idol or E.T (No, no, that’s too harsh), as they’re generally endless, expanded versions of the original Story Mode, usually with one key feature that’s been twisted to facilitate the endless accumulation of that sweet, sweet highscore.

But how are the minigames themselves? Well, few of them feel overtly original - you’ve got Whack-A-Eel, a crane game, a horizontal, bird-based game of Galaga, or just actual, no-frills Breakout - but creating something more derivative isn’t a bad thing as long as they’re good; just nailing a classic style and making it damn fun is personally way more important than just doing something inherently original. Which is pretty heavily underlined when the most original game in the bunch, where you have to essentially assemble a maze to guide Dory to the exit, is one of the most annoying to actually complete due to its pace and complexity, and this goes double for the similarly derivative Totally-Not-Battle-Mode-From-Mario-Kart-64 which is essentially the final minigame in the game.

The worst minigames - sans one unique example - are the ones that barely feel like you’re playing them. There’s one where you have Nemo using a crane to rescue lobsters, and it’s literally just a case of lining up the shadow of the crane over the shadow of the lobster, hit A, repeat until you get bored. Boring match-the-item puzzles, a level where you’re just lazily tapping A to dodge obstacles, or hell, even a poor BreakOut minigame couldn’t find a way to be engaging - and I love BreakOut! It doesn’t matter how easy or difficult the minigames can be - they just need to be engaging, even for sixty bloody seconds, and then you’ve got some form of a decent collection going. For what it’s worth, the general quality of the minigames are very much split down the middle - I’m either having a good time blowing up boulders with Bruce and slapping seagulls out of the sky with Nigel, or I’m falling asleep playing a poor man’s Memory Match and a clunky rhythm game. For those, like myself, who are here to get as much bang for their buck out of their minigames collections,here are a few, admittedly limp, carrots to chase beyond just getting each member of the Tank Gang to their new home. Earning certain score counts, or collecting enough items in any given minigame will unlock new pictures in the game’s Gallery mode… And…. I think that’s it. Yeah, it’s not much of a carrot, is it? Oh boy, I unlocked a transparent still of Marlin grinning at me! That’s totally an exciting worthy award, and not something that feels like it's going to haunt my dreams or something. Still, something is something, and with how low my expectations are for a game like this…

As mediocre as many of the minigames can be, they could be forgiven - hell, I might’ve even considered rating this game outright positively - if it wasn’t for the ball-rolling minigame. The goddamn ball-rolling game. By some measure of insanity, despite each member of the Tank Gang having two or three unique minigames to play around with, ALL of them start with a level where you physically guide the fish, still in their water-filled plastic bags, from the dentist office to the sea. Holy shit, my first thought was it felt like I was playing an underwater version of Katamari Damacy or Super Monkey Ball, except I’m rolling through liquid lead, not water. Dodging spiny plant-life, holes, traffic and ravenous animals, it’s a janky, awkward mini-game that’s longer than anything else in ‘story mode’, and playing it seven times is woeful when it wears out its welcome on the second go-around. The other minigames subsist on the fact that a lot of them are quite quick and don’t overstay their welcome, but this escape attempt is the opposite of everything good in the Continuing Adventures.

But really, I think the thing that really burns me on the game is just how cheap it feels. It’s not atrociously ugly, but considering the original had a few moments that, for a clearly low-budget, much earlier licensed title, had some fairly attractive and evocative visuals. But the sequel just doesn’t measure up, and I think it’s summed up with the screenshots I’ve provided, and the fact when I was playing, my fiance lent over and just let out a long ‘ohhhh noooo’ when she took a look. Characters frequently look like little more than blurs of pixels at times, ‘cutscenes’ are just PNGs of characters stapled on the screen, and the music doesn’t remotely scream ‘Finding Nemo’ to me. More like a ‘beach island party’. Hell, it’d fit more as a Little Mermaid OST or something.Hell, even in the minigames, you’ll be greeted with weird-ass, motionless PNGs like Bubbles pogging his way across the screen.

This cheapness extends to how the game feels from minigame to minigame, and I think there’s a direct correlation to how good it feels, to how simplistic the minigame is. The ‘feeling’ of playing each minigame varies heavily; some feel fantastic to control, combining platforming and button prompts in sequence and requiring rock-hard focus, but others like the ring toss minigame just feel off and imprecise. Like so many elements in this game, it’s not overpoweringly bad. It’s very playable, but it’s just not a whole lot of fun when you get into the weeds, and with your only real carrot on the stick being high scores and PNGs to unlock in the Gallery, being uninteresting can almost feel worse than being outright bad.

Plus, despite the fact the game actually has high-scores and rewards for hitting certain benchmarks, my greatest pet peeve rises once more - no save games! Nope, due to the amount of variance in scores and whatever, if you want to (for whatever reason) continue off from where you left it, you have to plug in a password of randomised characters that are more trouble than it’s worth. I know having the ability to save made carts more expensive, but it’s goddamn 2004! There are scores, damnit! There are high scores and awful PNGs to save!

All things considered, Finding Nemo: The Continuing Adventures was better than I expected, managing to match it’s predecessors mostly-mediocrity with a fairly decent selection of minigames to play around in. Score Attack will give you a bit more time in the best minigames on offer, but it’s still a fairly one-and-done deal, as seeing everything and doing everything sans getting every Gallery picture will only take you a couple of hours. It’s just the entire cheapness of the experience, the lack of visual polish, along with making the worst minigame in the entire collection mandatory for half-a-dozen times that really drags down the entire experience. Still, I give my props to the developers; as I said, it would’ve been so easy to make something as lazy and awful as possible. It’d never appear in a ‘Top GBA Games’ list, but for what it is? The Continuing Adventures isn’t nearly as bad as it’s bargain-bin title might imply.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Finding Nemo: The Continuing Adventures from the Game Boy Abyss! Nothing crazy to report this week, just that I’m feeling way more re-energized and ready to tackle some weird-ass stuff in the near future. As always, you can find me over on BlueSky @GameBoyAbyss, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests! Thanks again, and I’ll see you next time!