Pyroclastica

I’ve decided that for a Christmas Break Challenge 2025, I’m going to play through all 3 of the Magical Quest games on GBA.
1 game in, this is a very chilled out experience. There aren’t that many “ARRGGHHH EAT SHIT CAPCOM” moments in the level design, the music is A+, and it feels good to control
People say these games are too easy, which is kinda true, and honestly I think that’s all because of the lives/continue system. There is almost 0 penalty at all for dying in this game. You even keep all your coins between Game Overs, which means it’s extremely easy to go in a level with a bunch of coins at the beginning, grab them, die, rinse & repeat, then be ultra mega rich next time you get to a shop
But, even if you do this, it doesn’t matter if you’re ultra mega rich next time you hit a shop, because there aren’t any items that make the game considerably easier. We’re already sort of on the floor
Like other ports on the GBA, some level designs suffer really badly from the chopped-down screen area. To put this in perspective, the SNES versions ‘feel easier’ because there are 0 memorization checks; every single thing is reactable. On the GBA, you will hit a memorization check or 2 just because you had no way of seeing part of the level that was off-screen when something came flying at you. Usually this doesn’t lead to a death, because you get so many additional hearts from exploring.
Obviously you don’t need this if you’re emulating, but the GBA versions let you Save 👍
I tried to look up the answer to this and could not find it so I’ll post it here to maybe get the Google juice: There are items in the shops where the description says something like ‘Figure it out for yourself.’ All these do is unlock stuff in Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse on GameCube, if you have the GBA link cable. If you aren’t playing Magical Mirror alongside this, those items are useless.
Overall enjoyable but too easy/short. Looking forward to playing the rest of this trilogy

Magical Quest Starring Mickey & Minnie