12 Games of Christmas: Elf: The Movie (GBA)

Many Christmas classics, both in music and in film, seem to have come from before the 80s, so it’s always a pleasure to see something new slip in and join the ranks, adding some freshness to the media we’ll be seeing every holiday season. Elf is one of the rare post-2000 movies to be added to the Christmas rotation, a feel-good family movie about a child raised at the North Pole in Santa’s Workshop believing he was an elf searching out his true family in New York and bringing that childhood love of the holiday to cynical people who don’t believe in Santa Claus. It’s not really a plot that seems to lend itself well to a game adaptation, but one was made for the Game Boy Advance anyway, and its video game form is definitely not a Christmas classic.

 

Elf: The Movie, a very poor name for a video game that could be sold at multimedia stores that feature the actual movie on the shelves as well, doesn’t really portray its holiday plot well. Digitized stills of the live action movie are flashed on screen without much explanation, many key characters never appear, and why Buddy even wants to go to New York at all isn’t really addressed. The early game is primarily a sequence of platforming levels at the North Pole as well as its unexplained candy forest ice floes and the later portions seem to be Buddy helping Santa bring Christmas to New York primarily through minigames. Neither mode of play is done well nor are the set of three minigames you can only access from the main menu. A game where you slowly match similar colored shoes as they roll out on conveyor belts, an all too simple game about putting toys in santa’s bag in the right order, and an inoffensive game about rolling up snowballs to make a snowman in a twist on top-down box-pushing puzzlers are the only games separate from the story, and none of these are particularly challenging or worth revisiting once you’ve seen what they’re all about. They are, at least, much better off than the gameplay of the main game.

The side-scrolling platforming sections are the most common type of play in Elf: The Movie despite having almost nothing to them. All you have to do in most of them is get to the end of the level, some adding in a collectible to snag but nothing that requires more than brief vertical diversions to reach the floating letter or object in the air. Mostly it’s just walking forward and jumping if there’s a reason to, that being things like a drop into water, an icicle sticking out of the ground, or lazily patrolling polar bears or park patrolmen. You are given a large health bar so you might think you can just push through any problem without worry, but if you take any damage, you will be shunted back to the last arrow sign that served as a checkpoint. These arrow signs aren’t uncommon, but many enemies you have to leap over move around and are about as wide as your jump is long, meaning it’s quite possible you’ll barely scrape their rear end and get thrown back for another try. The park patrolmen on their horses are particularly annoying, too large to leap over unless you have help from a platform and often chasing you far back, just dragging out levels that aren’t really providing anything interesting to do. These would be dull without the bothersome relationship between damage and checkpoints since the platform navigation is too straightforward to put up a fight, so this one choice makes them more irritating than negligible.

 

There is an annoying segment before you leave the North Pole that takes the already boring platforming and plunges it into downright awfulness. Viewed now from a top-down perspective, the player has to make Buddy leap across ice chunks, any miss plunging him into the water and setting him back. The controls here aren’t the greatest and your landing spots sometimes surprisingly small, the distance between checkpoints definitely being felt here. Trying to wrangle Buddy to land properly in the odd perspective can lead to many slip-ups, made worse by the plenty of moving ice chunks you have to wait on and can often only reach after a long period of just standing by and watching the water in the hopes an ice block will soon arrive. Platforms that sink and polar bears that patrol those waiting zones add to a play style that really isn’t so much difficult as it is tedious and prone to error, so when you get to play the awkward to control but comparatively plain snowboarding minigame afterwards, it’s a breath of fresh air compared to that slog of a platforming style.

There’s not really much to enjoy in Elf: The Movie yet, and when you reach New York, besides a tolerable but short pipe-turning game, things just become excruciatingly boring. The first minigame in the Big Apple is literally about walking across sidewalks to gather Christmas lights, the only obstacle present being when you need to cross the street and avoid traffic to then slowly saunter across the other sidewalk. You have a dash that drains your energy, but even that won’t really speed up this agonizingly slow and challengeless minigame much. There is a health system as well that just drains automatically and needs to be refreshed at rotating doors as another tedious task to keep watch over in what might be the worst minigame in the bunch. Sure, the snowball fight in the park is almost just filler in that it’s very easy to hit your elf opponents enough and dodge their weak throws, but the plain old boring games are much easier to stomach than this obnoxiously long stroll down New York streets.

 

The final few minigames are definitely not an improvement. A take on the game Simon Says involves pressing elevator buttons in the way prompted and it too is slow and never crosses the line into an engaging challenge, plus it’s one of the repeated minigames despite not amping up the difficulty at all the way the pipe-turning game did. There’s a game about Santa delivering presents before he does it again in the final minigame, but the first time involves Buddy sorting dropped ones to the right houses based on their wrapping. At least, that’s what it says, because you can’t deliver to the wrong house and can just march back and forth trying every house without punishment until its the right one, this game also lasting way too long for how little content or difficulty it features. The last game just involves jumping with Santa’s sleigh at the right time to grab the necessary items without burning through all your stamina, a task that can rarely be performed accurately since the necessary items are almost always above the screen’s display. This is all that Elf: The Movie offers in its totality, and very little of it has even managed to be anything above boring and slow. This is likely the first game Jolliford Management Limited ever made since they were established mere months before the game’s release and seem to have not done much else before they were dissolved in 2014, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the company that came from nowhere with seemingly no experience put out a game with little understanding of what people would want from minigames, a movie adaptation, or regular platforming play.

THE VERDICT: In a game where the best things are described as barely tolerable, it’s hard to pretend Elf: The Movie is anything but a quick and sloppy Christmas cash grab. It barely represents the movie it is adapting, its minigames don’t provide much worth doing, and even its platforming segments toss in little annoyances to weigh down play that didn’t have much substance anyway. Somehow incredibly tedious and drawn out despite being such a short game, Elf: The Movie makes the holidays seem unappealing with its many dull and shallow gameplay styles.

 

And so, I give Elf: The Movie for Game Boy Advance…

An ATROCIOUS rating. There wasn’t a lot working in Elf: The Movie’s favor, so it isn’t much of a surprise it came out in such a poor form. Fledgling developers under a publisher who churns out plenty of licensed games a year, a film property that seems to tick the genre boxes of things you wouldn’t normally adapt into a video game, and likely a rush to get the game out for Christmas despite being a game adaptation of a movie that came out the previous year. It essentially just needed to be functional, the target audience definitely being young kids who would probably receive it for Christmas, play it briefly, and then forget about it in favor of other amusements. The highs of the experience are often just the empty moments where nothing too annoying or dull is present, but getting to any of them requires progressing through a linear story that drags on despite not even taking an hour to complete. It has that degree of simple, straightforward activity that you’d find in a chore in real life that seems to be the backbone of so many of the minigames, the mind and fingers not asked to do much besides continue the forward motions asked of them.

 

Buddy wanted to bring Christmas cheer to the cynical, worn down people of New York, but the game based on his story is pretty much a perfect storm of why people feel such disdain towards licensed games. With low effort, slapped together design banking on the recognizable brand and nothing else, Elf: The Movie is like coal in your stocking: sure, it’s seasonally appropriate, but its definitely not something you’ll want to receive for Christmas.