my small collection of beanie boo dragons :3 (darla, saffire & cinder)
i also plan to get anora, the black one with rainbow wings and spectra, the purple one with red wings :)))
(I'm not usually a beanie boo fan/collector but i think the dragons are so cute and i used to have some of them as a kid so they're kinda nostalgic for me lol)
I compared Inevitable‘s console Hobbit game to Starfox Adventures, which itself is riffing on 3D Zelda. Appropriately enough when Saffire came to do a GBA edition, the result feels like a top-down Zelda. There’s combat and puzzles, plus a growing arsenal of tools including various ranged weapons of dubious use and two kinds of firework to get past obstacles. I will say that traversing the levels is more complex than any proper Zelda, with lots of narrow paths and clambering for complication. It actually makes the world feel more realistic, although I could do without the dead-ends some levels have.
Bilbo’s journey feels closer to the book than the console game did; indeed there’s more dialogue quoted verbatim from Tolkien’s work here, not to mention levels set around Rivendell, the Carrock/Beorn’s abode, and the desolation surrounding Erebor. Add to this more frequent conversational snippets and the quick pace, and it ends up feeling a breezy and enjoyable adaptation. Of course there are cuts as well; you barely interact with Smaug, and don’t even see his death! All the dwarves also share palette-swapped sprites and portraits save Thorin and Bombur, but I suppose most felt interchangeable in the book itself as well.
I liked how the console game expanded on the story with new characters; that doesn’t happen here so much, outside of minor incidental NPCs. There’s a lot more enemy types though with lots of angry animals of varying degrees of cartooniness. You have rodents of unusual size; various bats, birds, and bugs; evil squirrels, exploding slugs, Banjo-Kazooie style vines, trolls to pickpocket near Erebor, even ghosts in the tombs you explore in the ruins of Dale. Bosses include a gigantic wasp, octopus, and of course spiders, while the final confrontation is with a wolf-mounted goblin (perhaps Bolg?).
So combat is prevalent but there’s other kinds of gameplay. Some levels are peaceful and involve minigames or stealth, which is thankfully trivial with this game’s version of the magic ring. Exploration is rewarded with runes for upgrading your stats, coins for extra lives (a relatively merciful system, although it’s easy to instantly die from pits or water), or abundant food to stuff in your full pockets. The food system lets you refill your health at any time but requires opening the menu; considering I was often at full capacity I would have liked an auto-consumption mechanic but oh well.
So yes, it’s a decent enough little effort, and without many of the frustrations that characterised my playthrough of the console game. Like many GBA games of the era it has a pseudo-prerendered graphical style which has held up better than most thanks to its cartoony colourfulness, and little touches like the weather cycle in some levels were appreciated. It was just a nice chill time!
