N-Philes

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Posted December 21st 2005 by Jorge Gomez.

Welcome to the ill-fated world of Narnia - a world cursed to a hundred-year winter by the nefarious White Witch. Ruled by the mythical lion named Aslan, the world is doomed to an icy grave if not for four brave adolescent siblings and the prognostication that they will be the ones to lift the vile curse dispensed across the land. With the aid from a menagerie of talking animals, Susan, Lucy, Edmond and Peter will have to do whatever it takes to save Narnia and in the process, defeat the villainous White Witch and stop her from trying to rid the world of all humans.

The Chronicles Narnia starts off with you taking the role of Lucy. As she is playing a game of hide and seek, she discovers a magical wardrobe which happens to transport her to the world of Narnia. Once there, she encounters a faun, a half man-half hoofed animal named Mr. Tumnus. Shocked from laying eyes on an actual human being, Mr. Tumnus invites Lucy to his home to tell her of all the events plaguing Narnia and of the White Witch's plans. They soon find Edmund has betrayed them, aligning with the White Witch, and the only way to divert their dastardly deeds, is to unite with Aslan and destroy the two conspirators.

Narnia certainly is not a bad-looking DS game; the character sprites are pleasing to the eye and when conversing with the game's characters, you can really see the amount of detail that went into the character models. The same thing can be said about the game's locales, all of which are nicely designed with some cool lighting effects which all add to the game's arctic ambiance. With so much detail and so many things going on at once, the game unfortunately does suffer from slight slowdown and repetition at times, most notably when five or more characters show up on screen.

Like the visuals, the sound here is really outstanding, too. The game's musical score sounds as if it was ripped from the movie itself although, sadly, there isn't any voice acting. As for the sound effects, the game's designers really paid close attention to detail. For example, you'll hear the sound of your footsteps change when you walk over different land masses and the clanking and grunting of the character's weapons and enemies.

The gameplay itself is that of a hack-and-slash role-playing game, having you complete a series of missions in dungeon-type scenarios. As you progress through the game's missions, you're given special items to use as well as tokens. You'll always have missions to complete and they are usually given by the characters that have red exclamation marks over their heads. The missions themselves in the beginning are fairly easy, and grow harder as you progress throughout the game. Nobody likes to be the weak link, so it's good to try to level-up your characters because they'll be more adept to actually helping each other out in battle.

Each of the characters in the game have their own abilities which can be taken advantage of in the character-specific challenges; Lucy uses the dagger, Susan has the bow and arrow, Peter attacks with the regular sword while Edmund uses the great sword. Teamwork plays a big part in the game with the boys being best at hand-to-hand combat and the girls kicking butt with projectiles. Since everyone shares a giant health meter, utilizing strategy becomes of utmost importance. Although fighting with weapons is fun, you can't have a game starring talking animals and evil curses without having some magic, right? Lucy aides the team by utilizing both Magic Cordial and Mr. Tumnus' Pan Pipes.

Another great aspect to the game is its multiplayer function. Although each person who plays this way needs a copy of Narnia, up to three of your friends can enter the game and explore all of the vast dungeons while dealing a beating to the weird mythical creatures present. This is a g

This game gets an N-Philes score of C+.

The Chronicles of Narnia for the DS is a game that should be praised for actually trying vigorously not to be a run-of-the-mill licensed game. With such a great movie to work from, wonderful musical score and its attention to subtle detail, this is a DS game that stands out above all of the recent mediocre movie-games that have been released in recent months. It would almost be a extraordinary game to play if only it weren't for the game's bouncy difficulty levels, slightly sluggish gameplay when groups of enemies are present and the requirement of all players having separate game cards.

Matt C.'s GBA review

Posted in: Reviews

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