Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The Ottifants on SEGA Game Gear offers a classic 2D side-scrolling platforming experience that manages to capture both youthful imagination and tight controls. You guide baby Ottifant Bruno through five distinct worlds—starting in the house and basement, working up to the building site, office, and ultimately a perilous jungle. Each world is split into three stages, ensuring a steady ramp-up in difficulty and plenty of variety in obstacles and enemy types.

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Central to the gameplay is Bruno’s trunk, which serves dual functions: firing jelly babies at enemies and sucking in objects like out-of-reach platforms or boxes. This trunk mechanic is intuitive and adds a clever puzzle element—sometimes the path forward depends on repositioning crates or scooping up far-off ledges. Combine that with collecting yellow, green, and red lollies to trigger special transformations—Superfant flight, speedy shoes, extra continues, and more—and you’ve got a simple but satisfying loop of exploration, combat, and power-up hunting.

Throughout the campaign, you’ll find hidden entrances to secret rooms tucked away in walls or behind destructible scenery. While these bonus areas on Game Gear are more modest than their Genesis counterparts (smaller rooms, fewer rewards), they still encourage thorough exploration. Beyond secret rooms, a points system rewards jelly collection, enemy blasts, and paper pickups, though it caps at 9,999 points. Overall, the pacing never drags, with each world’s three stages offering unique challenges and a boss fight to test your mastery of Bruno’s abilities.

Graphics

Visually, The Ottifants leans into the Game Gear’s modest color palette to deliver charming, cartoon-style sprites. Bruno himself is adorable—his oversized ears and stubby trunk animate fluidly as he hops, shoots sweets, or transforms. Enemies range from bouncing toy soldiers to oversized carnivorous plants, each rendered with enough detail to be recognizable on the handheld’s small screen.

Backgrounds cleverly repurpose everyday settings—kitchen countertops become hazardous cliffs, office cubicles morph into labyrinthine corridors, and a mundane garden turns into a treacherous jungle when seen through Bruno’s wide-eyed perspective. While these environments lack the lush parallax scrolling of console versions, they still convey a toybox-meets-forest vibe that fits the game’s imaginative premise.

Occasional sprite flicker appears when many enemies populate the screen, and some stages reuse a handful of tilesets, but these are minor trade-offs on a portable platform of the era. The level layouts stay readable, and hitboxes feel fair—important factors in a genre that demands precision. Overall, the visuals strike a good balance between playful design and technical limitations, making for an appealing handheld adventure.

Story

The narrative of The Ottifants is delightfully simple yet brims with childhood whimsy. One ordinary evening, young Bruno worries his dad hasn’t come home from work and concocts an alien abduction scenario. From that spark of imagination springs a full-blown quest—Bruno races through familiar locales, convinced he must rescue his father from extraterrestrial captors.

To justify his heroic journey, Bruno follows a trail of jelly babies that fell from his father’s pocket en route to the office. This silly but endearing premise transforms banal settings—bedrooms piled with toys, dimly lit basements, office cubicles—into landscapes of danger and mystery. It’s a playful reminder of how everyday items tower like giants in a child’s eyes.

Although the game doesn’t pause for lengthy cutscenes or dialogue, its level introductions and boss encounters unfold the story efficiently. You never lose sight of the goal: gather sweets, blast annoying toys, dodge snapping plants, and plow ahead until Bruno reunites with his dad. It’s a lightweight narrative, but it keeps you invested without over-explaining, perfect for quick pick-up-and-play sessions on the go.

Overall Experience

The Ottifants successfully distills a larger console title into a portable package that remains enjoyable from start to finish. Its blend of straightforward platforming, inventive trunk mechanics, and collectible-driven progression makes each world feel fresh. You’ll tackle traditional jump-and-shoot segments, explore secret alcoves, and strategize your use of special transformations to overcome tougher sections.

One trade-off versus its Genesis cousin is the reduced soundtrack variety—on Game Gear you get a main stage theme and a boss tune, with simpler sound effects. While the lack of additional melodies and the missing “Garden” world might disappoint purists, the remaining audio still complements the action. And since handheld play often happens in short bursts, the looping tracks won’t overstay their welcome.

For retro platformer fans or anyone seeking a whimsical child’s-eye adventure, The Ottifants on Game Gear is a charming choice. Its intuitive controls, engaging level design, and imaginative premise make it a solid pick for on-the-move gaming. Though modest in scope by modern standards, it delivers just the right mix of challenge and cheer, ensuring Bruno’s quest to save his dad from alien perils remains as fun today as it was back then.

Retro Replay Score

7.1/10