4/5 ★ – MegaBlastoise's review of Jelly Boy.

Platform Played: Nintendo Switch Online Date Reviewed: Sept. 13, 2021 Rating: 8/10 The Switch's "Virtual Console" is a mixed bag. Sometimes they'll add good games that you wish you found out about sooner, and sometimes they'll add games that are so awful you wonder why you even paid for NSO in the first place. For me personally, I like to at least try every game that Nintendo adds, and Jelly Boy on the SNES was no exception. To say that I had fun with this game would be a bit of an exaggeration. First, the graphics. Jelly Boy is a very colorful looking game, with fluid sprite animations. This is the most obvious with the various transformations that Jelly Boy (the playable character) can take advantage of. Speaking of transformations, let's talk about the gameplay. Jelly Boy is a bizarre mixture of various mascot platformers from the 4th and 5th generations of gaming. He attacks by stretching his own body like Rayman, you can earn lives by collecting 100 fruit like Mario and the coins, your health is determined by how many music notes you're carrying like Sonic and the rings, and Jelly Boy can transform into various tools and vehicles in order to navigate the many levels, kind of like Kirby. These transformations include, but not limited to: a hammer, a hot air balloon, an umbrella, and a pogo-stick. The levels are structured similarly to Plok (another underrated SNES game) where the levels are short in nature, but you have to explore in order to find puzzle pieces and keys, which are needed to complete the game, which leads into the story. There isn't a story. Just go through the levels, beat up bosses and win. Lame, I know, but I wasn't expecting MCU levels of storytelling. The music is upbeat and happy, just the kind of stuff I was expecting from a game of this caliber. However, I do have some complaints with Jelly Boy. First, the time limit is a pain to deal with. It may seem generous, but the level design is sometimes cumbersome to traverse through that you're in constant fear of running out of time. Thankfully, this can be avoided by collecting lemons, which adds more time to the counter. The control is also a little too loose for my taste, which leads me to die several times during the skateboarding sections. Jelly Boy ramps up in difficulty during the second half of the game. Thank god for the rewind feature that NSO has, otherwise I would've given up pretty quickly. Overall, if you have NSO, I recommend Jelly Boy, but beware as its cute and colorful design can be misleading. Be expected to die, but not quite game over.