Finding Nemo: Extremely Fishy

Games based on movies, in general, have gotten a bad reputation over the years. It used to be (and, to some degree, still is) that a game based on a movie was rushed in order to coincide with a movie’s release, and generally were just clones of other games that were already available. These games were generally seen not to be entertaining, but simply to make some more money by cashing in on the popular license of the moment. Of late, however, some games based on movies, like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, have been quality games in their own right, and at least as entertaining as the movie itself.

That said, I’ve always enjoyed Pixar’s movies, and am looking forward to seeing their latest release, Finding Nemo, when it comes out in theaters. Upon seeing the video game version in the video store prior to the movie’s release, I figured it would be a good waste of time and help to get me psyched up for the movie. After all, I thought, how bad can it be?

To answer the question, let me say this: If the movie’s quality is anything like that of the game, I’ll be walking out of the theater in the first fifteen minutes and demanding my money back.

The basic premise of the game (which, is really the premise of the movie) is that Nemo is a small clownfish with a bad fin, so he has a hard time swimming. As a result, his father, Marlin, is extremely overprotective. On Nemo’s first day of school, he ends up investigating a boat and is captured by a diver, who ends up selling him to a pet shop. This sends Marlin on a quest to find his son, and Nemo to escape from the dentist’s office fish tank in which he’s found himself.

Not having seen the movie yet, I can’t really comment on how closely the game follows the plot of the movie, but it seems to do a fairly good job of it. The story is advanced via clips from the movie, and the game gives you enough to work with that you never truly feel lost or that you don’t know what’s going on. The storytelling is a bit choppy, to be sure, but given that the designers probably made the (legitimate) assumption that you’ve seen the movie before playing the game, it’s hard to fault them for that.

Gameplay varies based on the level, but generally consists of three main types of areas. The first is the standard side-scrolling obstacle course, where you have to swim from point A to point B while avoiding unfriendly sea creatures. The second is a type of swimming scene where you have to either follow another character (by swimming through golden rings that appear) or beat him/her in a race. Finally, there are chase sequences where you have to dodge out of the way of a predator as it tries to grab or eat you. The designers do a decent job of mixing up the different types of areas, but they just get old after a while. After the third or fourth chase sequence, I was tired of them, especially since it seems awfully arbitrary whether the predator catches you or not.

The game is also extremely unforgiving, to a degree that I haven’t really seen since the days of Contra on the NES. One hit will often send you to the big fishbowl in the sky, and it can be extremely difficult to see what is dealing the killing blow at times, especially since the game cuts to an overdramatic death scene upon collision. I agonized for a quite a long time early on in a swimming scene in a dark tunnel where the game would just keep cutting to a scene of my fish gagging and wheezing, seemingly for no reason. As it turns out, there was a spurt of black ink that was nearly invisible against the dark blue scenery that was repeatedly killing me. While there is no set number of lives, so you can start the same section of the level as many times as you’d like, the game can be maddeningly frustrating at times.

One other gameplay element that really irritated me was the use of sliding puzzles as an obstacle to clear in certain levels. (To be clear, a sliding puzzle is a square cut into smaller tiles with one empty space, and the goal is to assemble a picture by sliding tiles into the empty space.) As a mini-game, I don’t mind a sliding puzzle quite so much. Even if it was in just one level, it would probably annoy me a bit, but I’d get over it. The designers decided to use sliding puzzles in four consecutive levels, and the novelty wore off extremely fast. They were time-consuming and frustrating for me as a grown adult, so I can only imagine how a young child would react to not being able to clear a level because they couldn’t solve the puzzle.

Speaking of things that irritated me about the game, the load times for Finding Nemo are easily the longest I’ve experienced in any GameCube game I’ve played to date. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen load times this long since the days of the old Commodore 64. I timed one level’s load time, and it was over a minute and a half. While that may not sound very long on paper, it’s an eternity when you’re sitting in front of the screen waiting for the game to start. In fact, the load times were so long that I initially thought that the game had frozen my GameCube. In the time that it took the game to load, I was able to walk to the kitchen, get my wife a soda and return before the game finished. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I can’t stress enough how inexcusable these load times are, given that more complex GameCube games have been able to eliminate load times altogether or at least keep them to ten seconds or less.

Control in Finding Nemo is kept simple, but the responsiveness of the control leaves something to be desired. In general, the control stick moves your fish around the screen, A serves to speed up your movement, and B is your action button. Generally, “action” means dash into things, but it can also be used in a context-sensitive fashion to pick up rocks, swim through holes, or move tiles around on the aforementioned accursed sliding puzzles. The control is generally either too sensitive or not sensitive enough, with a tap on the control stick either sending your fish swimming at top speed or not moving him at all. Especially in sequences involving jumping from object to object, it would have been easier (and, I’ll add, more fun) to swim through molasses than to get the fish to move to the object I wanted him to be on.

Graphically, there’s nothing wrong with Finding Nemo, but there’s nothing spectacular, either. The fish are rendered to be recognizable, and all the environments are cartoony and pleasant to the eye. Some levels are extremely dark, however, so much so that it’s nearly impossible to see anything. On one level, I understand that this is intentional (since you’re being chased by a fish with a light over its head), but it just adds unnecessary frustration to the other levels. There is occasional slowdown in same areas as well.

Sound is similarly unimpressive. There are some background music tracks that are fun to listen to, but for the most part, music is on too short of a loop and gets repetitive quickly. Sound effects are also sparse and simplistic. It should be said that the lines of text are all voice acted fairly well, but sounds drastically different and not as high quality as does the voice acting in the film clips.

Overall, it’s very easy to pick on Finding Nemo, both because it’s a kid’s game and based on a movie, but in this case, I think it’s warranted. If Finding Nemo was just too easy and too simplistic, then I could excuse it, because that’s what makes a good kid’s game. However, there are just too many problems, both technical and otherwise, with this game for me to simply overlook because Finding Nemo is intended for children. Making a game intended for children does not make poor game design OK. While children may indeed enjoy parts of Finding Nemo, it is likely it will greatly frustrate them in the long run, and frustration for frustration’s sake is simply no fun. There are very few redeeming qualities about the video game version of Finding Nemo, and it should be avoided accordingly. Simply put, these fish have gone very, very bad.