Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code
Title: Aero the Acro-Bat: Rascal Rival Revenge
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 11/02/2024
Story
In this GBA entry in the Aero the Acro-Bat series… Hey! This is Deja Vu, as we’re back at Aero 1 once again saving the circus from Edgar Ektor. Only now you have a bit more lore in the form of very weird comic book style cutscenes. Besides that, the plot is the same.
Presentation
Carries on with the same newer UI from the other 2 recent Aero games, meaning that this GBA port in turn leads to the whole Aero trilogy being underneath this new wrapper, with the OG version of Aero 1 being the odd one out. Being a GBA game vs a SNES title, I was curious if the platform change meant any crazy differences in performance/display options, but nothing seems to have changed much on that end, with fast forwarding being pretty slow while the rewind function works just as good as you’d want it to.
The display mode options also make a comeback, as does manual/art scans and sprite sheets, and I found the LCD filter to really work well with this game due to it being a GBA title, so I left the filter on during my play session. Also being how this was a GBA game originally, there’s an in-game brightness toggle and you sure bet I maxed that out for the sake of letting my inner GBA lover soar.
But yeah, you have a GBA port of Aero 1 based off the SNES version, with screen crunch and worse audio. Somehow though I found the music at times to be less annoying than on SNES, even if the shrill instruments did the songs no favors. Maybe that’s the GBA nostalgia speaking to me?
Gameplay
I could make this a single paragraph review by just saying “Aero 1, GBA, small screen, end of story”, but Rascal Rival Revenge isn’t that barebones of a port. In fact, it tries doing a few cool quality of life changes in an attempt to make the tedious Aero 1 a lot better! The most immediate comes from Aero’s movement, with the bat being way faster to match how he was in Aero 2. This alone makes traversing the stages way more tolerable than in the original game, since the amount of searching you have to do can get silly, and being able to zip around on food makes that task a bit easier.
The other QOL come from little minor things that make the experience a tiny bit nicer. Visual tutorials on what the current task is. Better combat against enemies, (at least I sure felt like enemies were easier to aim at than on SNES) and tighter controls make the GBA Aero a lot better playing than you might expect!
Unfortunately, this port does an annoying thing which made me realize a big flaw with the new Ratalaika wrapper, which is the complete inability to remap the buttons. See, A on GBA and A on Switch should be the same, but they aren’t. A is mapped to B and vice versa, meaning in order to throw stars at enemies you have to hit A. Incredibly annoying and the fact they didn’t even map it to Y as a secondary button to match the SNES layout is just utterly infuriating. Why button remapping is no longer a thing baffles me, but I hope they patch that in at a later date, especially if they’ll be doing more NES/GB/GBA stuff down the road.
So while these improvements are overall good, you still have this being Aero 1 at the end of the day. A more approachable, better Aero 1 for sure, but still a game with lots of backtracking, stupid arbitrary tasks that slow the pacing down, and some poor level design that only slightly gets better with the GBA additions. Combine that with screen crunch and while you do have a decent port of Aero 1, it still ends up being a poor game due to the source material it had to work with, as this is a platformer where you have to do certain things before the exit opens up, rather than just booking it to the end and having fun level designs to play with along the way. Oh well, at least there were admirable efforts here, and I kinda wish they gave QOL to Aero 2 on GBA, but that never came to be.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Rascal Rival Revenge is pretty redundant if you already own the original Aero. The improved speed and slight QOL make the game more fun to play than the original version, yes, but the smaller screen and weird controls sorta offset those gains, and even the QOL doesn’t do much to help the fact that the first Aero is an incredibly tedious series of chores that aren’t all that fun to play around with.
Now if the SNES version had a modification to include the benefits the GBA version added, we’d be talking about something special, but as it stands, even this decent port of a GBA port of a very mediocre game isn’t really anything to write home about, and while I don’t think the new Ratalaika wrapper is anything great yet, I’ll at least give the guys credit for indirectly unifying all 3 games under a similar wrapper. Shame that the worst game had to come out twice, though.
I give Aero the Acro-Bat: Rascal Rival Revenge a 6 out of 10.