Completion Time: 9h:53m:00s
Rating: 6/10

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I'm Ready, I'm Ready

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Who isn't aware of Spongebob Squarepants at this point? I mean, that's a legitimate, non-rhetorical question. The character has been all over the place for going on 2 1/2 decades by now, and has been everywhere from the small screen to the large, video games to books to placemats, and even flying high at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. It's some of the former that I'll focus on today though, as in the old tradition of creating licensed material for every animated feature to ever come out theatrically, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie also received it's own 3D action platformer. So let's dive on in and take a look at it, shall we?

With just slightly above average wind speeds, this thing could level New York City

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Some Nautical Nonsense

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This is your pretty standard affair for a 3D platformer of the early aughts, and it at least controls pretty well. It's just the presentation that's lacking here. The soundtrack is grating more often than not, and the models lackluster and lifeless, especially whenever a cutscene is playing. That is, the in engine cutscenes, which are really just characters speaking with dialogue boxes overlayed to explain mission statuses. The actual cutscenes that the game offers up are still screenshots, some of which are taken straight from the movie, whereas others are ripped character designs inserted into generic background shots. At least even the worst Disney garbage on the PlayStation had poorly compressed VIDEO cutscenes.

No joke, this Spongebob drawing has gotta be one of the first results on Google Images. It's a promo image with an alpha channel!

But this is where I digress, what about the gameplay? Well, it's perfectly fine, I can't complain. The strange thing is, I feel like I've played a number of Spongebob games from this era, and I swear they all use the same abilities. Punching upwards, rolling a ball, spinning (well, that one is kinda cheap, every game character spins), etc. They work fine though, and as you collect items, you can upgrade these abilities to make yourself more powerful, which is fun enough. This lends itself well to the gameplay, as you run and jump and bash enemies, I can certainly say I was never fully bored. But my favorite levels have to be the sledding ones. There are a couple of driving stages (which suck, believe me), but there are also a number of these downhill sledding levels that were quite a hoot. They keep the momentum going and the time attack medals (medals are like stars in a 3D Mario game btw) lead to jumping off of sections onto other sections and all that jazz. It's one of those thrills that I'm sure speedrunners feel before they reach that "dead inside from playing the same game 1000 times" stage.

This is fun, going downhill, jumping around and... ew! Where the hell am I?!

To break up the monotony that one might feel during the game, you can also play minigames scattered across the different stages. These will also earn you medals, and medals are required to access later levels in the game, including the final boss fight with King Neptune. These vary just enough to keep things interesting and entertaining. There are combat fights where you have to make your way through waves of enemies without dying. Sometimes Spongebob is compressed into a ball and forced to roll around platforms to get to the final exit. Patrick has sections where he has to jump from block to block high into the stratosphere in order to win. And one mustn't forget bungee-ing down from the heavens to smash targets with your head. Yeah, not many of these really make sense, but it's a cartoon, who really cares.

Spongeball Roundpants

Spongebungee Underpants

Spongebox... yeah, you get it, right?

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Completing the Game

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The main currency of collection for the game are... dumbbells. OK. Different colors/weights will give you a different amount of that currency, and upon "leveling up", you're allowed to upgrade a single one of your abilities. These range from bowling electric spiked balls to putting spikes on your boxing glove. An awful lot of spikes to be honest. It feels great to get these upgrades as they of course make you stronger, but the abilities themselves are just interesting and off the wall enough that I want to see what the game considers the "natural progression" of an idea. This upgrading, of course, applies to both of your playable characters.

I hope someone makes a "Getting to 99999" YouTube video for this game, so I can watch their disappointment when nothing happens

The other big collectable to concern yourself with, which is certainly more of an extra tidbit, are the hidden undersea treasure chests that can be found scattered around. Some of them are more thoroughly hidden than others, but each provides you with an unlockable that are pretty standard for games of this ilk. However, something to be said about this title is that the unlockables are massive in scope, there are a ton of things to get here, even if most of them are video clips and behind-the-scenes art assets. The best feature of course are the costumes that you can get and equip, which can be pretty standard or fairly absurd. My favorite of these is the insanely simplistic realistic sponge costume, which makes you look... just the way it sounds.

You've heard of Spongebob Squarepants, now get ready for... sponge

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie video game is perfectly fine, nothing to write home about but it's amazingly competent and I'm sure fans of the series or the movie would like this one just fine (assuming they haven't already played it). I've had a good run of licensed video games that I'm hoping keeps up it's streak, though I'm positive that soon enough I'll come across more that are completely abhorrent, given the fact that the library of the GameCube is seemingly 75% licensed slop.

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: 18/652