An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush (GBA)
In the animated film An American Tail, the young mouse Fievel Mousekewitz and his family flee to America in hopes of finding a land of opportunity and find their life in New York has dangers of its own, but when I was young I had no idea of this context when I watched the more straightforward cowboy adventure film that was its sequel An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. Fievel’s second adventure certainly seemed riper for video game action than the first film’s focus on the immigrant experience, so while direct-to-video sequels were keeping the brand alive by going back to Manhattan, a Game Boy Advance game would have Fievel returning to the wild west for a short platforming adventure in An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush.
Apparently having returned to New York City after the events in Green River, Utah, Fievel Mousekewitz is visited by a pigeon carrying a piece of a map. The former sheriff of Green River, Wylie Burp, has found a gold mine but believes a felonious feline named Cat Malone aims to plunder its riches, and so Wylie split it into four pieces and tried to entrust it to his friends until things calmed down. Fievel isn’t content to sit still and protect his map piece though, immediately taking off on a cross country trip to collect the other pieces before he even knows that Cat Malone’s henchmen have pilfered them. The premise of the adventure does mean the set of three levels per area topped off with a boss battle are able to take place across the United States in the early 1900s, some places double dipping like two worlds set in New York City with one in the urban setting and the other in the sewer but others set on a steamboat and train before you reach the Wild West settings of the dusty desert town and gold mine.
What makes the small spread of level themes more interesting is that some thought was put into differentiating these platforming stages quite a bit. Since you’re a small mouse something like a train engine can turn into a massive level, many stages having a pretty strong focus on navigating areas both horizontally and vertically as you try to find a way out that isn’t always to the far right. Some effort is made to make platforms appear to be part of the environment even if the ones that crumble beneath your feet respawning breaks away from the illusion of realism for the sake of difficulty, but down in the sewers you’ll be hopping across pipes, New York City gets some good use out of clotheslines, and the coupling rods connecting train wheels rise and fall for a platform that is perhaps more interesting because of the effort put into realizing it rather than providing any actual challenge to cross. Sometimes the area appropriate decor you’re climbing can lead to confusion in this side-scroller though, the steamboat for example featuring many staircases you’ll be climbing and the cows kept aboard the train are surprisingly numerous and positioned in similar ways so it’s hard to tell if you’re truly in a new train car as you head back and forth across the stage.
Unfortunately, confusion is incredibly common in An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush. The large spaces the little mouse explores often make no attempt to have a reasonable path of progression through them, a player bound to wander around aimlessly if they don’t come to a stop periodically for a pointing finger to appear on screen to tell you the direction you should be going. A few stages have a bit clearer paths from left to right, but in the bigger levels where the entrance isn’t so easy to find you can end up needing to take winding paths to actually access the exit. With many moments where dropping down can lose progress or conversely be the way to progress it’s often wise to stop and wait for the hint so you don’t waste too much time, but this can mean waiting a few seconds after every jump to make sure you didn’t go off course. Sometimes the hand won’t appear though and other times it will ask you to jump down a pit blindly, Fievel able to look down some but still there are dangers down below and instant death pits you might not see if you start taking risks. Some areas are a bit more generous where the dangerous ground will bounce you up with only a bit of damage to Fievel, health easy to grab from the plentiful enemies to offset that damage so long as you can get back to safe ground.
What makes this pointer system worse though is that it seems to have its own ideas about how to navigate that aren’t always the best. In a level with a rather annoying wind mechanic that pushes you backwards the higher up you are on the train the pointer wants you to head all the way to the right even though you eventually reach a jump where the wind is too strong to make a jump. However, you can easily leap up to the top of the train before that jump where the level exit is to the far left, the game leading you astray for some unclear reason that is likely to cause damage and frustration as you can’t go where the game is guiding you. Other times it just seems to ignore level geometry with its direction suggestion so you might meander around an area trying to find the way to get up on a platform you’re actually supposed to reach in a different manner, and while bouncing off enemy heads gives you more height, rarely is it the solution to the guiding hand’s malfunctions. Levels do include some goodies to find all over the place, gold seeming to exist just for going towards an end of level score, but extra life hearts can pay off by offsetting any unfortunate deaths to unexpected pits. A password system lets you return to any world you’ve reached, but losing all your lives will simply restart the current world right away so you can try again without needing to remember your passwords.
Fievel’s abilities are pretty simple, his jump able to defeat enemies he bounces off of but not sending him up very high. A lot of the environment can be jumped onto though even when it just looks like decoration and the danger in An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush usually comes from enemies occupying where you need to jump to rather than the jump itself. Fievel does have a special cowboy hat he can hurl at his foes though, the white headwear working like a boomerang unless it hits a target. The hat will drop if it makes contact with an enemy and can beat regular foes in one hit, but if ends up out of reach you need to wait quite a while for it to reappear on Fievel’s head. This does complicate the platforming slightly as you might not want to wait for it to return either because you’re in danger or just tired of how much waiting the game asks you to do already, but most enemies amble about a bit so rarely are you forced into using the hat in a wasteful way. Enemy types are mostly a gradual evolution to characters who walk side to side and might run at Fievel with some attack when they spot him, although a few levels do introduce flies who prove to be a constant nuisance despite not damaging you. The flies will reappear almost immediately after they’re defeated and their main purpose is to bump into you while you’re trying to do things, the management of them tedious and their interference during jumping possibly leading to you plummeting down and losing progress in levels focused on upward climbs.
An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush does try to vary up the substance of its six boss fights to the point most of them feel distinct and take a bit to figure out. Your hat can’t hurt these characters that tower over Fievel, bosses like the train conductor bulldog and the large rat in the sewers asking for different approaches to hurt them enough they give up. They’re not quite puzzles since there are very few elements in the area you fight the boss, but learning what’s on hand and how it can be used against your enemy make these a nice change of pace from level design where you often need to rely on the game telling you where to go to avoid wasting time bumbling around. Oddly enough though the game’s final boss is incredibly underwhelming and more straightforward than any other boss, the showdown with Cat Malone even simpler than the first boss and that final confrontation further soured by the fact Cat Malone is a recolor of the first boss. The gold mine that makes up the final world also has an underwhelming mine cart level where holding forward will lead to an uncontested win and the only danger is if you want to jump and risk your life to grab the gold, the little adventure ending in a whimper when you reach the area the game’s all about.
THE VERDICT: An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush had some promising ideas on how to differentiate itself from the standard licensed game side-scrollers of its time but it didn’t quite understand how to realize them. The larger levels are just complex enough to get lost in but not varied enough to make exploring them interesting, the hand that points you in the right direction feeling too important despite it sometimes giving you incorrect guidance that only causes further navigation frustrations. The boss battles do ask the player to work out how to beat them for something that is interesting to figure out, but during regular stages you’ll find that even though the areas do an interesting job of theming their level space around your stops on a cross country American tour, those new platform types don’t add much to the platforming play.
And so, I give An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush for Game Boy Advance…
A BAD rating. Putting aside some unmentioned oddities like the character sprites seemingly being flattened 3D models that animate a touch oddly, An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush’s most memorable feature is likely its levels that feel expansive without having much substance. Hopping around a bunch of interchangeable pipe platforms in the sewer, passing through train cars with similar interiors, and going up and down stairs on the steamboat without any guidance would be a slog, and having to come to a stand still so the game’s hint system can point you in the proper direction isn’t much better either. With there being danger out of sight if you do try to chart your own path you learn you can’t be too daring in trying to explore, and while there are some less complex levels along the adventure they don’t demand the same level of attention and are a bit too simple to really offset the more maze-like stages. There is definitely some effort to introduce new ideas that fit the setting of a world that held potential if they were more substantial, but the ones that stand out are things like the wind that serves more as an annoyance and visually impressive ones like the coupling rod that don’t actually impact play. When you are progressing through a more basic stage things are at least plain and harmless for the most part, health easy to grab since it pops out of every defeated enemy to make it easy for kids but they’ll hardly find the more labyrinthine stages so forgiving, and when it all culminates in the gold mine being the least interesting of the worlds it does feel like the adventure provided very little to get excited for.
Verticality in platform level design can be risky if it offers many chances for losing progress through falling down below, but An American Tail: Fievel’s Gold Rush instead hits the issue of trying to fill too much of a level with navigation up, down, right, and left without any clear direction to head. The confusing layout is often more of the challenge than anything inside that stage save when it is a bothersome baddie like a fly or pesky hazard like the wind, both of those actually designed to help you lose progress as well. When you reach a less ambitious stage with clearer forward motion in its design it’s more a relief than something that provides an interesting challenge, but at least you get breaks from having to rely on the floating hand hints. Few players probably expected to strike gold with this small licensed game that came out a decade after An American Tail: Fievel Goes West’s release, but it still proves to be a bit of a disappointment because some decent ideas for spicing up the platforming end up barely leaving a mark while others tarnished what potential it did have.