Astro Boy: Omega Factor - A True Christmas Miracle!

24/12/24

Surprisingly, there is a notable lack of Christmas-themed Game Boy Advance games. You’d think there’d be a million of these things, the perfect shelf-filler for parents and grandparents alike to buy for Little Timmy, no matter how shite they look. To make matters worse, there’s an even greater lack of *good* Christmas-themed Game Boy Advance games. So far, having covered Elf: The Game and the debut Phoenix Wright… well, one of those is terrible, and the other’s Christmas theme is tangible at best, so you can tell I’m not cooking with gas here. So, when I booted up a game as awfully titled and generic looking as Santa Claus Jr. Advance, my only hope was something minimally better than Elf - something above bottom of the barrel, hell, I’ll take mid barrel height. Santa Claus Jr. didn’t, and isn’t going to win any awards (well, any awards worth something *cough*), but from what could’ve been a forgettable, Christmas-themed nothingburger, I found a genuinely solid, challenging platformer with a genuinely fantastic audio-visual experience that elevates everything about it. Hat’s off, this is a good one.

Santa Claus Jr. Advance didn’t just pop up and provide such a solid experience out of nowhere; it’s actually a follow-up/enhanced re-release of a Game Boy Colour game of the same name (sans the Advance, of course.) I viewed some footage of the GBC title, and whilst it (obviously) doesn’t seem as expansive or in-depth as its Advance successor, it’s seemingly a solid, small-scale GBC platformer all on its own, if perhaps a little on the simplistic side. Now, I certainly don’t want to oversell this game, but amongst the random, dime-a-dozen platformers present on the GBA? Santa Claus Jr. Advance isn’t on Mario’s level, but it’s a lot closer than many of the other games I’ve tackled thus far. Look, if we’re making a Christmas GBA game tier list, I expect this to be a LOT higher than Elf. It’s something that feels like it was made in the NES era, at least in it’s premise and foundational nature - a few screens reveal that Santa got defeated/screwed up by a Witch who’s (somehow) ruined Christmas, and it’s up to this random lad of no notable distinction to save the day. Honestly, it’s delightful how brief the game’s ‘story’ is, something which feels almost purposeful with how damn solid the gameplay experience is.

For an otherwise run-of-the-mill platformer, Santa Claus Jr. provides a surprisingly solid amount of content; across twelve worlds, you’ll tackle a total of thirty-six bespoke levels, featuring one of the most solid and engaging difficulty curves I’ve experienced in regards to platformers in recent - or total - memory. Whilst not kicking off at a brain-dead level of difficulty, the game eases you into the intricacies of its platforming before kicking into high gear around halfway through the game. As a platformer, it doesn’t really attempt to reinvent the wheel, but much of what here is the tied and true classics - platform jumping, basic stompable enemies, dodging spikes and bouncing on balls, with a few powerups along the way… it’s a very foundational game, but amongst third party titles it might rank amongst the most solid foundations of them all. This isn’t to say it’s purely a derivative title; of the game’s two major collectibles, whilst one is the classic ‘collect 100 candy canes for a life’, you can also collect little stars who’s usage is twofold. On one hand, you can utilize three of these stars to perform a double jump, a maneuver that is (seemingly) not required to cope with the game’s platforming, but to make your journey easier, or you can utilize ten to restore one of your three hearts, perfect if you need to *just* get over the checkpoint line.

Each level also has a number of children you can deliver presents to; at first, these are in fairly obvious spaces but become more and more tucked away as the game goes on, requiring tougher and tougher performances to reach them. The fact of the matter is that I actually have no idea what delivering these presents do - finding them all on a level, didn’t seem to give me anything, and skipping them entirely - a fact of life considering how desperate I was to just survive the brutality of the last few zones - didn’t seem to punish me in any notable way. If I had access to the manual, perhaps that’d give me a clue, but Santa Claus Jr. Advance joins Shrek Speedway as having almost no documentation on the internet, not even the manual on Archive.org, so it’ll just be one of those parts of the game that’ll remain an utter mystery to me. It’s somewhat funny, considering this game has a surprisingly in-depth tutorial, despite its total lack of text; four entire levels that detail every ability and platforming skill the game has to offer, a fantastically useful element of the game that feels almost overkill with how foundational it is - though I digress, I never take decent tutorials for granted.

Even more surprising than how solid it all is the game’s surprising quantitative nature; It took me around three and a half hours to complete the game on hard mode - more (well, not that much more) on that later - delivering as many presents as I could along the way, which is pretty solid considering a lot of third party platformers sometimes clock in at less than an hour. Hell, that’s 3 and a half hours from a guy who plays way too many Game Boy Advance games; I could imagine kids spending a lot longer forcing their way through this (relative) monstrosity - not just from the amount of content, but from how genuinely difficult it can be. The last few worlds of Santa Claus Jr. are genuinely some of the more brutal ones I’ve encountered in any platformer between the eras of Nintendo-hard difficulty and its more ‘all-ages’ present. Timing jumps between spiking rapidly scrolling blocks, persistently dangerous foes and no shortage of children to deliver presents to, this game hits the pedal *hard* in the last third and never really lets up in a half-delightful, half-frustaining way, which has far less to do with the game’s masterful difficulty curve and more it’s own ability to keep up with said masterful difficulty curve.

I’d be drenching the game in even more praise if the game’s difficulty curve stood up to it’s occasionally janky controls and minor platforming quibbles. Sometimes, the double jump just wouldn’t proc, no matter what part of the animation I was in, and even though I 100% had enough star pieces to use it. On a related note, there are a handful of moments in the game which felt like they practically *required* the double jump, regardless if I have, or even have access, to the start chips needed. Now, I’m sure I could’ve gotten around these moments with a ‘git gud’ mentality, but it genuinely felt like the margin for error was so small, I was better off dying and coming back to it with a stockpile of star chips. The also frequently presents you with numerous leaps of faith, and whilst usually these don’t end in pits of death, if the game was zoomed out even a teensy bit, this quibble would pretty much evaporate away. I also want to point out the bizarre decision of the game having a Normal and Hard mode, and much like with delivering the presents to children, I was utterly befuddled as to what the different modes actually did. I played through all of it on hard mode, but my explorations on normal mode - albeit on the earliest levels - gave me no inkling as to what was being made easier/harder. More a quibble than anything else,, but with how pretty much everything else is explained elsewhere, I’d just be curious to know. Either way, I don’t think there’s any need to play on Hard Mode, the game’s mechanics aren’t deep enough to really warrant a distinction between the two, but to each their own.

Now, as I”ve been honest in the past, I’m not always exactly playing these GBA games on a screen the same size as an actual GBA, but this has led me to understanding another facet of how well games hold up; how well does the game look on a big screen? You could probably blow thisWhilst Santa Claus Jr.’s graphical fidelity is quite mediocre, it has a rather striking art direction that feels like an idealized version of a strange, Christmas-themed flash game you’d find on the internet around the same time. And whilst many of the stages have similar, snow-themed aesthetics, it’s rare that you play a platformer that starts in the snow, and feels like it ends up in some sort of apocalyptic, heavenlike locale, which coupled with the brutal difficulty of that final stage, creates a totally unique experience. It’s just an amazing mix of generic visuals mixed with genuinely fantastic aesthetics and background, one that almost defies expectation. This is only elevated by the genuinely great, albeit small selection, of soundtracks present throughout the game - this is a very specific reference, but it reminds me of an obscure PC title called SanctuaryRPG Black, along with tones of the much less obscure MMORPG Old School Runescape. It’s an extremely cozy soundtrack, one that perfectly fits the Christmas spirit - if not the somewhat stressful difficulty of its latter half. It culminates in a track that feels akin to Arceus’s theme from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, something that feels far and away different from pretty much anything I’ve heard on the Game Boy Advance thus far.

Maybe I oversold it a bit, but Santa Claus Jr. Advance is far and away the biggest surprise of the year for me. Proof that strong fundamentals and decent art can take you so far, it’s lack of innovation and occasionally janky controls don’t stop it from being a genuinely beefy, solid third-party platformer - and one of the few actually decent Christmas games on the platformer. There’ll always be the kings of the console, but Santa Claus Jr. Advance sticks out amongst the chaff and was a perfectly cleanser to end my run of GBA games for 2024. Now we can just hope I can find a decent Christmas game for next year!

Thank you for reading my review of Santa Claus. Jr Advance on the Game Boy Abyss! My last review of the year, and I’m glad we went out on a good note. I’ll have a Year in Review up before the New Year rolls around, and then we’ll be back in the mines. As always, you can find me over at Bluesky and Twitch under GameBoyAbyss, and email me any questions or requests at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com. Thanks again for reading, Merry Christmas, and I’ll see you next time!