Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD) is based on the Chinese movie of the same name and is somewhat of a rarity. Most movie license games are released near the movie’s opening day to take full advantage of the associated marketing blitz. CTHD however comes to the GBA nearly three years after the movie’s release in North America. Since the movie is not really fresh in the minds of the general public, the game must be aimed at fans of the movie who’ve seen it at least once or twice since it left theaters. Otherwise it is hard to imagine someone unfamiliar with the film understanding what is going on in the game or even having the persistence to play through a rather average side-scrolling action game.

I don’t want to get into the story too much here. If you’re familiar with the film than you know it, if you’re not then it would be impossible to summarize here in a few short sentences. Basically you play as Jen Yu from just after her, um, ‘acquisition’ of the Green Destiny sword for 25 levels that are designed to roughly follow the plot of the movie. Each level is introduced by text and stills that help you to place the next level within the context of the movie’s plot, but without prior knowledge of the movie you’d be hard-pressed to follow what is going on. The levels primarily involve a lot of fighting and jumping, with a few different sequences such as a horseback ride thrown in for variety.

CTHD the movie included many amazing fight scenes replete with acrobatic and gravity-defying moves. CTHD the game tries to recreate this by giving you several different attacks and the ability to launch another set of attacks when jumping. The game does not have a combo system, so you won’t be able to string attacks together to create new ones. Killing enemies not only prevents them from killing you, but also will fill a special attack energy meter. Once you’ve filled the meter you can unleash one of eight special attack moves. Unfortunately you won’t have much use for most of the attacks in the game. The enemies attack in a very straightforward manner and can be easily dispatched by repeatedly pressing the attack button and not even worrying about selecting one of the other attack types.

The film’s characters wowed audiences with their ability to run up walls and easily leap from rooftop to rooftop. CTHD tries to incorporate some of this into its gameplay but doesn’t do a very good job of it. There’s plenty of jumping between roofs and platforms, but many, many games have this feature and it comes across as nothing special in CTHD. As for the wall walking, there are just a few places where you need to use a special wall climb move to continue on and when you reach them it once again plays like a game aspect present in plenty of other games. It would have been nice if the wall climbing were an option at any time and allowed you to unleash some interesting attacks on enemies, but alas that’s not the case here.

The straightforward enemy attacks combined with an abundance of health power-ups and extra lives make CTHD somewhat on the easy side to finish. Since it seems like the game will primarily appeal to fans of the movie, the designers should have made the game more challenging. Such as it is completing the game is not a labor of love and doesn’t take much labor at all. Fans will be disappointed in the short length and other will wonder why they bothered.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 58%.  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon should be left to those who are big fans of the film.