The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond (GBA)

The ESRB’s Early Childhood rating is a surprisingly informative symbol to find on a game’s box. While it does play into the ESRB’s system for labeling a game’s potentially objectionable content, this rating’s greater use seems to be in helping establish a line between games designed purely for children and games that anyone can play and enjoy. Game series like Kirby like to balance accessibility for children with extra content for more experienced players, but a game that falls under the Early Childhood umbrella very rarely has any merit for anyone outside of an age group that has little experience with the medium. Because of this, parents can find good titles for their young kids and older players won’t be tempted to see if it might have something for them too.

It’s doubtful many people would have had high hopes for a Land Before Time game anyway. Famous for the glut of child-friendly movies created after the more artistic original, The Land Before Time is the butt of many jokes about a series getting an overload of low quality sequels. Somehow, The Land Before Time has had just as many video games as it has had movies despite them not being straight adaptations of the films, but the game releases seemed to end with the Game Boy Advance title The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond.

Not really based on any Land Before Time film specifically but evoking the name of one of the series’s better songs, The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond doesn’t spend too much time telling its story. A little tyrannosaurus rex named Chomper has wandered off away from his friends and they go off in search of him. The core group from the films all put in appearances as playable characters, Littlefoot, Cera, Petrie, Ducky, and Spike all taking a turn in the spotlight before the game culminates in having them work together and ultimately receiving help from Littlefoot’s grandfather. Oddly though, despite not doing all too much with the story, the game still gets some details about the series wrong. The biggest one has to be Spike, a young stegosaurus who in the early movies couldn’t talk but later in the series learns to say a few words, like a child learning to speak. In Into the Mysterious Beyond though, Spike casually speaks a full grammatically correct sentence to offer his help in navigating a forest. A subtler error that could fall under some people’s radar though is the game constantly calling where Littlefoot and his friends live the Valley, referring to it only as such and with that capitalization despite the series taking place in The Great Valley. It seems like the developers didn’t feel the need to care about accuracy when they knew their young audience was not likely to pick up on it anyway.

Despite being developed for pre-school children, The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond has a structure similar to what you might find in a normal E rated game, just with the difficulty toned way down. There are a couple of play styles, the way you play changing between the eight short worlds. Littlefoot the apatosaurus starts things off in a fairly traditional platforming level. There are enemies to avoid, pits to jump over, fruits to collect, and some trees you have to knock over to make bridges. It is possible to lose, either from falling down pits or taking too much damage, and Littlefoot doesn’t really have a way to defend himself besides jumping on bugs, but that will only impede young children. This platforming is only really challenging to someone with no experience with the format, and even a player who has had a brush with Super Mario Bros. will find not much to stand in their way here.

Most all the levels have similar issues, wherein the challenge is not what the game is putting forward for the player but the mere existence of a game type young audiences might not have seen before. Anyone who has played a few regular games will be able to breeze through things even as they change. After Spike speaks fluently, his level involves navigating a forest maze, eating plants and pushing logs to make paths over puddles. Spike’s levels are a bit abnormal for having a top-down perspective instead of a view from the side, but Cera the triceratops has the same for her stages, wherein she’s marching up a mountain breaking rocks just by touching them to protect her friends behind her. Cera’s stages are fairly bland since the rocks roll slowly towards you and can be reacted to easily, and if one does slip, by Cera has a few screen-clearing stomps she can activate to take care of it. Petrie the pteranodon and Ducky the saurolophus have the levels that come closest to challenging, with Petrie having to repel an adult tyrannosaurus while fire rains down from above and Ducky has to manage her air while swimming underwater to loosen logs to make a bridge. Petrie’s level taking on the form of what seems like a boss fight is what makes it a bit more interesting, and Ducky’s air meter requiring the player to know when to swim to the surface means there is something to keep track of in those stages, but it’s still fairly easy, just not as much of a given as most levels.

Where you might see some deaths though would be the levels where the group works together. The river raft ride is straightforward and full of health pick-ups (most levels have health pick-ups anywhere near the slightest hint of challenge, again assuring next to no challenge for older players) but the sledding levels involve having to take jumps over pits or facing instant failure. Into the Mysterious Beyond uses a lives system and does, surprisingly, have Game Overs, but if you choose to continue after one you get a free life and can start in the level you left off on. The level where you play as Littlefoot’s Grandpa also pushes into the territory of nearly being threatening, as he actually faces some aggressive enemies. He has the attacks to deal with them though, but the health pick-ups aren’t as common here as most levels and you can get ganged up on, but at most it just means a young child might hit a barrier in play rather than an adult finally finding a meaningful trial to overcome.

Most every level type is seen across three levels save Petrie’s battle with the t-rex, but stages are all pretty short and fairly similar to others of the same type. A strange surprise comes when you complete a world though, as you’ll see that Into the Mysterious Beyond has a ranking system based on your fruit collection during the stage. Most fruits are floating out in the open or have fairly obvious hiding places, so it’s not hard at all to get at least a silver rating, but gold requires finding all the fruits and that’s not a very compelling reason to replay a stage. Almost every silver rating I got was from just going through the stage and not ignoring the fruits I saw, only to see I missed one or two on the results screen. Replaying the dull, toothless stages again to try and nab that last fruit just to see my rating change colors really didn’t feel like it was worth doing, and it likely just exists as a way to make kids feel better for beating the stage at all.

THE VERDICT: It honestly would have been more shocking if The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond was a good game. Just because it isn’t good though doesn’t mean it’s without its place in the video game medium. For a young child just getting their start with a Game Boy Advance, having a few games that will keep things simple and straightforward will let them grow into the kind of player that could pick up something more substantial later down the line. In its niche, Into the Mysterious Beyond does its job, but as a video game judged against the entirety of the medium, it’s so easy, boring, and basic that it can’t hope to hold the attention or interest of anyone aged in the double digits.

And so, I give The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond for the Game Boy Advance….

A TERRIBLE rating, but one that comes with a caveat. It comes as little surprise that The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond holds next to no value for an adult, but it does clearly have some purpose, that being to serve as a soft introduction to gaming staples in a child-friendly atmosphere.  The lives system still might be a little much for the youngest of children, but as a way to be safely shown things like the platforming genre and the many ways a video game can change its style of play, Into the Mysterious Beyond does its job. It’s still not likely the best method, and there are far more stylish and interesting games that could do the same and still have merit outside of that purpose, but if your kid loves cartoon dinosaurs, it may be a decent way to get them interested in gaming.

As a game for the youngest of the young, Into the Mysterious Beyond is serviceable, and that might be all its has to be. There are ways to help a child learn to walk and learn to read, so having some options when it comes to learning to play video games is not without its place, but its a place that adults have no business visiting.