It should be illegal for anyone to be this cute!

U.S. Game Front

Run Away! It's Too Cute!!

Is Hello Kitty Trendy Or What?

Sanrio never ceases to amaze me with their marketable characters like Hello Kitty, the tale of a precocious little third grade kitten from the suburbs of London. For that matter, I should say Japan as a whole never ceases to amaze me. Hello Kitty is one of the most popular characters of all time in Japan, and her influence is so great that it has even spilled into other regions of the world, including the U.S. She even has many video games that are based on her outrageously cute tales and confrontations with Badtz-Maru and many others. While there are at least a dozen games based on Hello Kitty, only a few of them came to the U.S., and Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy is one of them.

I have to put this out there...why is Hello Kitty out at a beach resort by herself jumping into hot springs (pretty PG-13 stuff for a kids game) while Badtz-Maru parades in a crazy contraption of his own design that sends her to another world? Well, it doesn't really matter since she's so cute, you'll forgive her anyway...With that being said, that is how the game begins. You'll have to watch out for candy-colored cubes that fall from the sky as well as Badtz-Maru and his cohorts if you wish to get Hello Kitty out of her trippy dream sequence and back to reality.

The graphics are 2D with colorful backdrops abound. I like how every level has different pictures of Hello Kitty, and depending on the world you're in, Hello Kitty will wear a variety of different things (in the backgrounds)! It's all utterly cute, and the game sports simple character animations and a cute opening and ending FMV. It's pretty simple looking, but suffice to say, it works. The sound is also nice...but there is one thing that really gets on my nerves. It's the ditty that plays whenever you grab items in the game, and since that's the primary goal of the game, you can expect to grab a lot of items. It plays this exaggerated theme to congratulate your efforts on successfully picking up an item, and when you pick them up quickly and the ditty starts over or overlaps the previous ditty, it can be one of the most annoying things in the world. My advice? Take this game as nice and slow as you possibly can.

The gameplay reminds me a bit of the popular Japanese Arcade Irem puzzler, "Gussun Oyoyo". In this game, you must guide Hello Kitty using Tetris-esque blocks that fall from the top of the screen. Hello Kitty is usually on the move and you must make staircase structures or whatever structure you may need to help her reach the items needed to clear the stage. There's a catch though; Much like Gussun Oyoyo (Super Gussun Oyoyo for those SNES/SFC players), Hello Kitty can only climb vertically at one blocks height at a time. She must also watch out for the bad guys who will impede her progress, and if time runs out, it's move it or lose it time for our beloved Sanrio heroine. There are some differences between this game and GO/SGO though. One difference is that the blocks you put down can be destroyed when paired together in a color-coordinated fashion. You can also manually give Hello Kitty commands such as to run and change direction. This game is also much easier than GO/SGO, which is good anyway since this game was designed with kids in mind. This game even has branching paths in its Story Mode (when you beat a stage in story mode, story is added in the storybook). There are numerous unlockable things as well such as hidden playable characters from the world of Sanrio, Extra Mode, and more!

That one ditty that I could live without...besides that, Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy is a nice, simple puzzler with more to like than just the Sanrio characters and a simple, endearing story. Kudos to Sanrio Smiles, NewKidCo, and Culture Publishers for giving the U.S. this cute Hello Kitty title. It's one of the better games based on the Hello Kitty franchise.

- Written by Vyse the determined -