Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! Review

Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is a licensed Arthur game for the Game Boy Color. Arthur has a surprisingly big history of video games, although most of them are Living Books, which are mainly interactive versions of the Arthur books. There's also a good amount of online games made in Flash, Shockwave, and HTML5. However, Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is the only Arthur game to be on a handheld console (unless you count the mobile games, which came much later).

Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is a minigame collection that is certainly not "absolutely fun." The minigames can be downright tedious, like the top-down berry picking game where Arthur moves at a snail's pace. Most minigames are rather unoriginal and generic, like playing air hockey with Buster or kart racing against Brain. Beating a minigame earns you a star, and you need 16 to beat the game. The problem is that there are only 10 minigames, so you will have to play the same ones multiple times. Once I tried every minigame, I just found the one that took the least amount of time and played it repeatedly to earn the rest of the stars.

The game's graphics are simplistic and unimpressive. Due to the game's palettes, most characters look off-color, like Brain appearing a weird shade of brown-green. Arthur's glasses also switch between yellow and white depending on the minigame. Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! doesn't have much music, and most minigames are played in silence, with only a few sound effects. I did enjoy the map screen themes, but the only other music is some strangely ominous, repetitive loop in the treasure diving game.

If you get all 16 stars, which won't take any more than 30 minutes, you get access to Wonderworld. There are five more minigames here, all recreations of classic carnival games like bumper cars. These are endless and you're prompted to stop playing after a while, and you probably will want to, because most of these aren't fun. It's nice that you get something for finishing the game, at least.

On my scale, I'd give Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! a vomitrocious rating. It's a generic game that's boring, very short, and overall not worth your time.