Around the World in 80 Days (Game Boy Advance)

Around the World in 80 Days

Game Boy Advance - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Saffire Publisher Hip Games Published 2004-10-29 Platforms Game Boy Advance Genres Action, Beat 'em up, Licensed, Platformer Themes Martial arts, Travel Series Around the World in Eighty Days Distribution Commercial

Around the World in 80 Days is a platformer beat 'em up developed by Saffire and published by Hip Games for the Game Boy Advance on 2004-10-29.

The game follows the story line of the 2004 film, not the novel. You play as Passepartout, the valet of Phileas Fogg, and your goal is to protect Fogg and Monique La Roche while successfully delivering the stolen jade statue to your home village in China. You do this by collecting coins, beating up members of the Black Scorpion gang, and finding Chinese kanji in each stage.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes.
Finished	2023-01-12.

I played the game to increase my familiarity with the Game Boy Advance.

Review

4	3	4	2	3

Best Version: Game Boy Advance

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The levels have a fair amount of variety and each locale has a new background.
• I enjoyed the variety of parkour moves used throughout the game. Passepartout can wall-jump, catch ropes out of the air, climb under trains, walk across tightropes, hang from ledges and shuffle across them, etc.
• The game gives you unlimited continues. If you run out of health vials, or fall to your too many times, you simply restart the day with three lives. This is refreshing, but it also means there isn't much of a penalty to dying. You don't even lose the coins you've collected.

Bad

• The pre-rendered character graphics look clash with the pixel art backgrounds.
• Most of the enemies can be stun locked, even the bosses. However, once you get to the levels where they have guns, they become much harder to defeat and it becomes safer to just avoid them. Because of this, there isn't much strategy to the beat 'em up aspect of the game.
• It makes sense that the Black Scorpion gang attacks Passepartout on sight, but why are all the Americans trying to murder him as well?
• The final boss is shockingly weak. They make you fight him twice in the hopes that you'll slip up, but, I didn't even take a single hit from him in the first battle! I actually had a harder time killing the generic enemies in between the two boss fights!
• The ending sequence is pretty lame.

Ugly

• The game is lacking polish. It feels more like an early beta than a finished product.
• The jump is difficult to control. While this isn't a big issue in the early stages, it becomes painfully apparent in the desert level which requires you make several precision jumps in a row. I missed my intended target a frustrating number of times. The designers clearly left this in the game for artificial difficulty.
• The soundtrack is short and boring and the sound effects are pretty bad too.

Media

Both boxes use a production photo from the film and the film's logo, but the EU cover includes a joke with the Sphinx.

Box Art

• 

  USA.

• 

  Europe.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - USA.

Videos

Longplay.

Play Online

Game Boy Advance (Europe), Game Boy Advance (USA)

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	Monique is the only women who isn't background, but even she isn't very important.
Bechdel test?	Fail	No women ever talk about anything other than men.
Strong person of color character?	Pass	Passepartout, the protagonist, is Chinese.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no clear queer characters.

Links