Completion Time: 13h:11m:00s
Rating: 7/10

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A Very Grim Adventure

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We should get the preliminary data out of the way. For the uninformed, "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy" was a Cartoon Network show from the early aughts that lasted some years, 6 seasons, and got some direct to TV movies. It also got a multiplatform video game. A fighting game at heart (though I think the handheld version is some kind of platformer?), the Grim Adventures video game offers a decently fun experience for those willing to play it. But does it hold up for those unfamiliar with the show it's based on, or even just as a fighting game? It's pretty easy to make a bad fighting game, after all.

Surely controlling a giant mech gives this game a leg-up on some of the competition

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Destroy Them All

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A combat arena sort of fighter, Grim Adventures gives the player(s) a top-down perspective to fighting, allowing you to whomp and wail on one another in a 3D space that can be easily conveyed all on one screen. The fighters and stages are all pulled directly from the show and it's various episodes/movies, which likely won't inspire anyone unfamiliar with the program to go pick it up and play it. But the style alone I think provides joy to look at. Just don't focus on the game's assets for too long lest you be on the receiving end of a super attack.

Uh, that's not the Stabbin'-Flabber, Skarr, its you're other robot. I sure hope whoever wrote dialogue for this game got fired for that blunder

In function, the primary mode of gameplay is to whittle away at your opponent's health until they're completely out of lives and health. You must understand that once their at 0 lives and have nothing left to give, they aren't removed from the fight just yet. Instead, your enemy is dazed for a brief bit, so that you can rush in and provide the finishing blow through a series of timed button presses. I'm not that fond of this mechanism, as it pauses the entire game for everybody and doesn't even come down to skill. Hell, you can do all the damage and still fail because you pressed Y on the controller instead of X, and then either your enemy can heal themselves with a piece of mutton on the battlefield or, even worse, another player can take that person out instead. Perish the thought! But that isn't all, there are these items called Mojo Balls that litter the arena as well, and once you collect enough to fully fill your meter once, you can unleash a special attach on another fighter. Fill it up to it's max (twice fully), you can unleash an undodgeable attack that automatically kills all other players on the battlefield. This is something that PlayStation All-Stars notably ran with years later, but to much clunkier effect.

This game's score automatically increases by 1 because it features the pig gun

There's plenty of charm here to be certain, from the music to the set pieces, and the nature of the game is to allow itself to be enjoyed across all the different playmodes as well. There are story modes that you can play through for each of the characters, though the narrative doesn't change, just the match-ups and stage orders. There's also a bevy of different gameplay modes to play in VS outside of just draining the lives of others. Things like King of the Hill and Capture the Flag are alive and well in Grim Adventures. You can even step into the Mission Mode to really be put to your limit in all these different types of matches, up to the very end, where it's 3 against one in a colosseum match-up where every hit has a "vampiric" effect, making it take extra long, and leading you to be extra cautious to not get hit by the 3 madmen running at you.

Now how can the Grim Reaper die? It boggles the mind

I also need to mention that this game does a lot for me on a bare minimum kind of level, because I loved this show when it was airing. Every slight detail and nod was enough to carry me then and it offers some obvious nostalgia now that I look at it. Even down the specific casting present in the game as well. Sure all the original voice actors are here to reprise their characters (including my favorite character actor the late David Warner), but even Weird Al makes an appearance as the announcer throughout the entire game! They had already gotten him in the show as their Sorting Hat parody the Squid Hat, but it's nice they could approach him again. Even the brain-eating meteor asks as the final boss of Story Mode, singing the Voltaire-helmed song from his episode of the series. All of this was good enough for me while playing!

I can't remember the last time I thought about Voltaire. Memories come flooding back

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Completing the Game

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This is a fighting game, and the unlockables in fighting games tend to be pretty consistent. There are secret characters, secret stages, and sometimes even secret play modes. Well, the former is really the only one that applies here. No hidden stages or play modes to be found here, it's all about the characters and their costumes. Pretty simple here, there's a Mission Mode that operates similarly to the Event Matches in Super Smash Bros. Melee, to pull from another GameCube fighting game, and beating the different missions will unlock characters for you. As you make your way through the tiers and reach the bottom of the tier list, you'll also unlock a set of costumes for every available character, and once you beat the final super ultra challenge, you get... concept art. Welp.

Actually, any unlockable that teaches you how to make knockoff merchandise is good in my book

So you've made it through all the missions, have you? Well, you aren't done yet. There are 5 additional secret characters that can be unlocked through extra means, and some of these are a tad insane. These are super secret characters, in that their selection boxes don't even appear on the character select screen and get added after the fact, again much like the aforementioned Melee. But these guys... oof. They're the nadir of unlockable characters, the very bottom of the barrel. They have no special animations, no costumes, no voice clips, and they can't use items in battle, which is half the fun. It's just an extra little something I guess, but the means to unlock them make it feel like you're unearthing some major reward, when in fact it's the opposite. One of these guys you can only unlock by beating Story Mode and then destroying every letter in the credits sequence. There are thousands of these, and if you miss one: start over. And for what? A generic Viking that can't do anything? Hard pass. Below I've listed how to unlock them all:

• Chicken: Reach 10 hours of total gameplay time
• Clown: Fight in at least 100 VS Mode Matches
• Nergling: Beat Story Mode with all characters
• Pumpkin: Reach a total of 100,000 damage across VS Mode Matches
• Viking: Destroy every letter in the credits sequence

These characters are the true meta. This might as well be Fox only, no items, Final Destination

This one holds together about as well as you can expect for a fighting game of the time, at least when compared to most. It can't rise to the ranks of something like Melee, but it doesn't have to. The main drawback with a title like this is that if you have no attachment whatsoever to the characters or IP behind the fighter, then there isn't gonna be much that you can take away from it. Sure it doesn't have abhorrent controls and is oozing with style, but if you don't care about the show itself, then there are dozens of other games like this you can engage in that will likely suit you better.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 21/652