Lady Sia (GBA)
Lady Sia is a game that has been stuck in my mind for years thanks to the print ads found in old gaming magazines. It looked like a potentially interesting title with its mixture of fantasy elements and cartoon inspired character sprites, but at the same time no information I had on it ever made me bite the bullet and play it. Recognizing I had put it off for so many years despite having the means to play it is what made me finally decide to buckle down and finally give the game a chance.
Sia is unsurprisingly the heroine of her self-titled adventure. The princess of a magical kingdom known as Myriad, she arranges a meeting with other neighboring kingdoms once the evil sorcerer Onimen and his beastmen forces take over the human kingdom of Athorre. The three elemental masters who rule over the other kingdoms are unwilling to act against this new adversary though, and while Sia is eager to charge into battle, she must not only work to convince the other kingdoms to aid her, but she must repel an incursion by the T’Soa beastmen before she can take the fight to their domain. While the regular play can shift between having large, impressive, detailed sprites and simplified cartoon representations of smaller characters like Sia herself, the opening scenes and character art in dialogue boxes allows for a greater range of expression that helps the simple plot along. You essentially know the full breadth of its scope by the end of the starting scenes, and even with the secret ending you don’t really get much more to chew on. It establishes the world and stakes though, and while Lady Sia’s setting will pick and choose to include advanced technology if it feels like it, it is mostly a game of medieval magic and mythical monsters.
Lady Sia is an action platformer whose protagonists packs a few ways to fight the creatures she encounters, but most of them feel like they’ll get very little play. Sia’s basic sword combo deals with almost every enemy type, and while there are foes who might be speedier, wield shields, fire from afar, or pack some other means to make them greater offensive obstacles, they mostly just require a few good smacks to dispatch. If they are out of your reach you might have to use your magic, Sia able to charge up a ball of light she can fire in front of her, and there are cases where it is your only means of damaging an enemy or boss who can’t be approached otherwise. Over the course of your adventure you can unlock a few new magic spells that will draw from the same mana pool though, but not only do you receive refills at a pace too slow to use them often, the new spells are tied to combo inputs that make them difficult to pull off naturally. They’re hardly worth the effort if you can get them working though, brief invincibility, minor damage to all on-screen enemies, and a strong single enemy kill move not really expanding your options enough to justify dealing with the finicky nature of the inputs.
Some levels will put Sia on the back of a giant bird either for brief portions or full on boss battles. These segments are mostly about dodging trouble as you need to move around attacks you can’t see coming very well, but when you can be aggressive, your bird can only really grab and drop enemies. This is used for the game’s first major boss fight, a hilariously underwhelming battle with a pelican in an overcomplicated flying machine that just boils down to tossing the slowly appearing enemies off his vessel with the bird. The Sasquatch transformation ends up a much more interesting form of gameplay variation, even if the form seems oddly named for something that looks more like a larger and stronger Sia with wolf-like features. Used only in certain boss fights, your sword and magic are taken away in favor of speedy movement, slashes, and a ground pound maneuver. The boss fights in Lady Sia can swing from ridiculously easy to legitimate challenges of movement and setting up the right opportunity to damage a foe such as the fights with the giant walrus or floating fox magician. Since the better battles usually favor you using your Sasquatch form, it’s mostly a nice sight to see when it crops up.
Most of Sia’s adventure will take place in the platforming levels where her most relevant skills will be her jump and the ability to pull herself up onto platforms with her sword. While it can seem like the pulling yourself up with the sword doesn’t trigger with 100% reliability, the levels in the game are often built to accomodate vertical platform placement so a missed attempt to use it usually drops you down to solid ground. There are definitely levels where this isn’t true though, stages that take place in the sky, in port towns, and on snowy mountainsides sometimes featuring drops to your doom. While navigating levels can have plenty of decent jumping challenges, small combat moments, and interesting puzzles or small mechanics to interact with, there is a general slipperiness to the basic movement that can cause some problems. It’s not too hard to accidentally overcompensate when landing on a platform and send Sia slipping off, and with some platforms like barrels in the water appearing to be unstable ground while actually having solid stationary hitboxes, it can even be hard to gauge if your landing will be safe at all before you determine if Sia might skid over the edge. Like with the sword pull up you’re more likely to experience successes than failures, but the moments you do have issues prevent Lady Sia’s sometimes creative and expansive levels from realizing their full potential.
Every regular level in Lady Sia packs 25 diamonds and 5 hostages, the player needing to collect all the gems and save all the people if they want to see the game’s proper ending and experience the bonus levels. Both collectibles definitely give extra depth to stage navigation, the player often seeing a diamond or hostage just out of reach and having to figure out how they’ll make their way over to these optional objectives. There is perhaps a bit too much to do overall just to see the game wrap up properly, but if you aren’t too concerned with the conclusion of your quest, Lady Sia’s regular levels can have their own interesting goals built into beating them. Some stages are just about getting to the designated end point or facing off with the enemy waiting at the end, but some will feature extra objectives like freeing all the captured turtles in a port town. Players might have to take minecarts or catapults to maneuver around a stage, use enemies as parts of puzzles, or enter a sub area like the underground caverns beneath a town to make progress. There is a little problem with some of Lady Sia’s larger and more involved levels though, that being if you hit a checkpoint in a stage, it retains however much health you had when you flagged it. This means if a tougher area is coming up and you go in with low health, you can very rapidly lose life after life, but the diamonds and hostages offer chances to earn extra lives and there are pickups to replenish your decently sized health meter. If certain parts of the game’s basic components like the checkpointing and platforming weren’t so rough, the diversity in level design could have had a good chance of shaping Lady Sia into an enjoyable platformer, but RFX Interactive didn’t seem to have the experience needed to hone the game’s mechanics into something that could reach such heights.
THE VERDICT: Lady Sia’s colorful fantasy world with many strong level concepts could have lead to it being a good Game Boy Advance platformer, but a few fundamental aspects end up tarnishing the experience. The checkpointing system is rough, slippery movement harms the platforming, and the occasional boss fight ends up too easy or basic to enjoy, but the creative stage designs and the fights where the Sasquatch form are utilized still give the game enough punch to overcome some of its flaws. Lady Sia ends up a little shaky because its levels are experienced through mechanics that can sometimes come up short, but a little persistence will allow a potential player to have a decent time with what was nearly a nice little action game.
And so, I give Lady Sia for Game Boy Advance…
An OKAY rating. A bit too often the games I put off playing despite some degree of interest end up mediocre, and Lady Sia unfortunately joins Black and Area-51 in that pile. My curiosity is satisfied though, and at least there were plenty of upsides to counterbalance the downsides of the platforming experience Lady Sia offers. In many ways, the game just needs little refinements to excel. Checkpoints should just give you full health after a death, your magic combos should be heavily simplified so they can be utilized more, and the platforming and movement should be tightened up a touch, and that’s pretty much all Lady Sia would need to work on to at least put it on the level where a recommendation would come without too many conditional statements. Its current state is acceptably interesting but comes with the little warnings about movement problems and bland mechanics like the parts involving the bird, but the levels nearly have the degree of quality required to support an enjoyable action platformer. It would likely still need to feature much stronger combat and far fewer simple boss fights to really change a simple recommendation into a hearty one though.
Lady Sia can still entertain, but it feels like its gameplay is a bit too excited to explore new mechanics and stage designs that it didn’t take the time to nail the basics. The true ending requirements embody a game with high expectations but whose substance can’t quite justify such an investment, but the merits it does have can’t be completely sabotaged by the occasional missteps. Mileage will certainly vary on what might help or hurt this experience, but if Lady Sia sounds like a game that might interest you, it’s probably better to give it a look sooner rather than later to spare yourself an anticlimactic experience similar to my own.