Eragon (Game Boy Advance)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.9 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Greg Mueller
• Reviewed on: 01/22/2007
• Updated on: 01/23/2007
• Released on: 11/14/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Eragon (Game Boy Advance) Review

The Eragon license lends itself well to a video game adaptation. Dragons, magic, monsters, and unlikely heroes abound in both the film and the novel it's based on. Given the theme, it makes sense that the license would be applied to a role-playing game, which is exactly what Eragon is on the Game Boy Advance. The structure of the game is generic but functional, and there's enough content to pad out the relatively shallow gameplay. It's easily overshadowed by the abundance of great role-playing games on the Game Boy Advance, but Eragon does offer a simple and oddly engaging experience that will keep you playing long enough to get your money's worth.

The game takes place in the fantasy world of Alagaesia, where the forces of evil are sweeping across the land, destroying towns and more or less taking over the world. Eragon is a young farmer who one day stumbles upon a glowing stone that turns out to be a dragon egg. The dragon hatches and Eragon finds out that he's been chosen to become a legendary dragon rider. Also, he has to save the world. The story is bland and the characters are uninteresting, but it's all very straightforward and it doesn't get needlessly convoluted.

You spend the game traveling from town to town and dungeon to dungeon defeating hundreds of orclike urgals and earning experience, which is applied toward strengthening specific skills, such as magic, herbalism, weapon proficiency, endurance, and so on. You can choose to focus your character on one of the specific skills, and when you gain enough experience to increase in level, that skill will increase in level. So if you focus on endurance, your character will gain more hit points when he or she levels up. If you focus on magic, you'll be able to learn more powerful spells. It's a very basic way of letting you develop your character as you play the game, and although it doesn't allow for much flexibility, it's rewarding enough to see your characters grow appreciably stronger.

Whenever you're on the overworld map or in a dungeon, you'll get drawn into battles with as many as five enemies. When you're in a dungeon, you'll actually see the enemy sprites running around onscreen, so you can at least try to avoid them. Even then, you'll usually end up having one battle for every four or five steps you take. The high encounter rate makes for a challenging, but also very repetitive and tedious, gameplay experience.

When you get into battle, the perspective switches from a top-down view to a side view, with the enemies on the left and your party of up to three characters on the right. The turn-based battle then plays out according to initiative. You can rest, retreat, use items, cast spells, or attack. But even though you're given plenty of options, you'll usually just end up attacking each turn. You have two attacks, a medium strength attack with the A button, and a stronger, but less consistent, attack with the B button. You can enter chains of up to five attacks, and then your character will perform the moves. Depending on the order in which you use your two attacks, you'll pull off combos for added damage or status effects. As you play, you'll open up new, more powerful combos. The combo attack system works well, because you can quickly enter in your attacks without sifting through menus or checking stats. This makes the battles move fairly quickly, although the enemies you face are often much stronger than you, so they can take several turns to defeat. It doesn't help that your characters will often die with only a couple of hits, and the magic and item systems are too costly to give you much of an advantage in battle.

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Eragon (Game Boy Advance): $9.99 - $18.99

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