Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy - If you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything!

23/07/24

As I’ve frequently aired my frustrations regarding, as I play more and more GBA games, I grow more and more tired of the ‘average’. The platformers that just exist, the short-ass puzzlers, the licensed slop that leaves next to no impression on me. As much as I loathe titles like Bratz or American Idol, at least I’ve got things to talk about in that regard! I can giggle at their flaws, laugh at my own idiocy for starting this project, and everything in between. So, early on in my time with Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy, I feared it’d be one of these accursed five out of ten snoozers. And whilst Danny Phantom never really sheds it’s more basic, almost mindless fundamentals, it’s one of those rare titles that the more time you put into, the more it reveals its relative diamond-in-the-rough nature, resulting in a licensed title that, whilst not being anything close to a must-play, does enough interesting to stand on it’s own two legs.

As a kid who grew up with Foxtel, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon were my mainstays as a prepubescent kid. Though, suffice to say, my pendulum always generally swung towards Cartoon Network’s side; Samurai Jack, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Codename: Kid’s Next Door… they were the shows that were my life. And whilst I loved the bigger Nick shows, like Spongebob or Fairly Odd Parents, less popular shows like our topic of the day, Danny Phantom, were lost in the shuffle a bit. No shade against it, but it was just never one of ‘my shows’. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have played Danny Phantom this ‘early’ in the Game Boy Abyss’s reviews, if not for one of my buddies who ADORES the show and everything about it. Here’s to you, I hope you enjoy reading it. For those who are’t Danny P. superfans, the show’s got a pretty basic premise - Danny is a kid who, due to various, fairly tropey scientific accidents, becomes half-human, half ghost, allowing him to transform and battle various ghosts. Obviously, there’s a bit more to it, but that’s all you really need to know going in - it’s just a ghostly twist on the Spider-Man-esque, ‘living two lives’ kind of tale.

Now, I didn’t have high hopes for this game. After the previous Nickelodeon games I’ve covered - SuperSponge and Rugrats Go Wild - I couldn’t help but expect the worst. Alongside that, such is my trauma from generic platformers, upon discovering that The Ultimate Enemy was in fact, at first glance, a generic-playing side scrolling beat 'em up was an utter delight. That, uh, says a lot, doesn’t it? Taking place across a number of ‘worlds’ - a really strange way to divide up the game, since each world is further divided with specific stages and substages. Weird. Anyway, on each stage, Danny moves from left to right, running into a variety of ghosts and utilizing basic melee combos, ghostly powers and tech gadgets to cleave through his foes like butter. Clear a squad of ghosts, you’ll get the prompt to move on. You’ve seen it before, trust me. Everything about the fundamentals are fairly basic, to be sure; most foes can be taken down with spamming the B button, but chaining together combos, and smashing up multiple ghosts with fists and lasers alike is just scratches that return-to-monke part of my brain. A back-to-basics level up system exists, with each level either throwing you a new addition to your combos, an ability, or even just a boost to your attack or defense. Added progression is always nice, but it really doesn’t add too much to the majority of Danny Phantom’s playtime, since the fundamentals are so basic. I just wish there were goon-like minibosses or something, enemies that actually put up some kind of a fight beyond end of world boss fights, but sometimes, an incredibly easy, yet cathartic beat’em up is the kind of experience you need.

Whilst melee feels good out of the box, abilities feel a little off to use. Abilities like his laser pull from Danny’s energy bar, but you’ll start each stage with an empty bar. Enemies will sometimes drop green or purple ooze that can be vacuumed up to grant health or energy alike, but this will usually only give you an activation or two. Instead, the primary way to gain energy is to tap the Select button, returning Danny to his human form. Here, he can’t fight, but he’ll rapidly gain energy, turning encounters into a risk-vs-reward gamble. Honestly, the normal beat’em up stages aren’t hard enough to require this, but it’s honestly worth it just for how much fun it is to use disproportionate force to take down these mooks.

Switching to human form is a better idea when you’re encountering The Ultimate Enemy’s rather surprising slew of bosses. Taking the form of Danny Phantom’s greatest foes, like the game’s core, they aren’t complex encounters, but at the very least they’re actually throwing abilities at you. Lasers, extra enemies, bombs - I think it’s a bit damning to the game that I’m praising the most basic of mechanics to fights. They’re certainly not hard, and they can be bodied pretty hard if you can get a decent energy gauge charged by playing around with human Danny and just lay into them with special abilities. Overall, a decent diversion and probably the strongest part of the game’s core gameplay. The game also has a handful of auto-scrolling flying stages, where you’re machine-laser-gun-firing past fleets of airborne ghosts. They’re perfectly fine, simplistic shoot 'em ups to break up the stages, but seeing they were capable of throwing together alternate play modes made me wish the main story had a bit more ancillary content between endless beat’em up stages. Strangely enough, there are some minigames that are given as rewards for entering passwords earned by completing sections of The Ultimate Enemy’s ‘endgame’, so to speak. These aren’t complex affairs, but it’s odd they’re one of the game’s final rewards - they’d fit so well in between the game’s core stages, creating an overall more balanced experience, though and through.

Now, I haven’t seen the eponymous episodes that the Ultimate Enemy adapts, but from what I gather from a quick glance at the show’s wiki, the game seems like a basic, but decent enough version of the show. Sure, there’s a lot of sequences that are just ‘beating squads of ghosts’ that probably weren’t in the show, but you gotta pad this out somehow, right? Anyway, The Ultimate Enemy follows Danny becoming embroiled in a time-traveling adventure, a dark future in which an evil version of himself runs rampant, with most stages being intercut with basic 2D sprites over generic backgrounds chatting about whatever. If anything feels generic in this game, it’s the presentation of its story, feeling truly dime-a-dozen in a sea of shovelware. The story itself is…fine, basic as it is, but like the core of the game, this element grows, both in interest and (less so) in complexity, after you complete the game for the first time, pulling the adaptation away from the show, and treading new ground.

Now, everything I’ve said so far doesn’t exactly beat the ‘five out of ten’ allegations so far, no? A fun five out of ten, but, yeah. Well, suffice to say, whilst I won’t say that the core gameplay *fundamentally* improves by leaps and bounds after the credits roll, but the way the game utilizes its limited scope is fantastic to see. After completing the game, and loading back into your save, Danny will have a new cutscene with Clockwork; defeating Dan Phantom and saving his family didn’t fix the timeline, thus requiring you to replay various stages, one by one, to try and find the true cause of the timeline split. The story itself isn’t anything too amazing, but considering the general quality of original stories in licensed titles, The Ultimate Enemy’s is fine. Just fine - though I will say, the true reveal of the mastermind was fun, considering how it contrasts with the game’s original story mode. Alongside this new alternate storyline comes the games most delightful addition; Mission Mode. Every stage will be given three missions to complete. These generally fall under the categories of ‘Defeat x ghosts in x seconds’, or ‘beat this boss without using a certain kind of abilities’. and totally completing this alternate mode will unlock a Boss Rush to put all your accumulated arsenal to the test, a set of encounters that finally got me to lock in a bit as someone who’d played the game a little bit on autopilot. I didn’t quite finish everything this game had to offer - it’s been a busy few weeks, and I just haven’t gone back to it - but completing Boss Rush seemingly gives you some passwords to unlock some simplistic minigames, like

There’s little to say about the game’s visual design, feeling like just another dime-a-dozen licensed cartoon, but at the very least it carries the general ‘flow’ of Danny Phantom’s cartoon animations decently enough. Sure, the frames are a bit choppy in the combat department, but I feel they convey the ‘swirliness’ of how ghosts look in the series. I gotta say, though, even on the GBA, the game’s cutscenes are hilariously low-resolution. Seriously, it’s almost entertaining how bad they look. It’s fine, it’s fine, they’re not that important. The locales are a bit more interesting, especially as you get into the more abstract, time-based zones. It’s more than I can say about the music, which is utterly forgettable and really only feels a few tracks deep. The sound effects, on the other hand, sound fantastic in all their bit-crunched glory. Seriously, this game has some top-tier laser noises, a core component of any game featuring, uh, laser-based abilities.

It’s hard to review games like this in 2024 - with such wide access to games that give me tens, or even hundreds of hours, it’s hard to recommend something like Danny Phantom at all. But if I put myself in the shoes of a prepubescent kid, the kind of kid who gets a new game in a blue moon, who gets every little thing they can out of every game they own? Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy might be a treasure trove to them, especially if they’re already a fan of the show. Mission Mode and Boss Rush alone gives the game a decent chunk of longevity, and the core gameplay, whilst not particularly deep, is engaging and satisfying enough to not grow old instantly. If I played this when I was eight? I’d probably have adored it. Today? I gotta appreciate it for what it was then, not necessarily what it is now. Context is tough, man.

I’m not going to make any claims and say The Ultimate Enemy is anything amazing. Your first run will be an hour, giving you the impression of a mediocre beat’em up. Whilst the fundamentals remain stagnant, The Ultimate Enemy milks the most it can out of it’s poverty-stricken bonds; Mission Mode and Boss Rush are great ways to spread out your time with the game, always giving you something to aim towards - I just wish it had even an iota of more depth to it’s brawling. The more time you put into The Ultimate Enemy, the more you’ll get out of it, but it’s core is so basic and ‘it is what it is’, that you’ll almost instantly know if you’ve got any future with it. I doubt I’ll play it again, but for what it’s worth? Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy is anything but a forgettable title.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy! Sorry for the big gap again, it’s been a crazy few weeks for me and getting back to this has been a bit challenging! Hopefully I’ll be back to a decent pace soon, but I won’t make any promises. But, in any case, you can find me over at Twitter @Lemmy7003, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests. Next time, I’ll be answering a request - a title in a long-running animated franchise that I surprisingly haven’t touched yet! See you then!