The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (Game) Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 11/25/2023)

[Image from igdb.com]

The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (Game)

Developer:  Heavy Iron Studios

Publisher: THQ

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: GCN, PS2, Xbox

Release Date: October 27, 2004

The Spongebob Squarepants film released in 2004, to most fans of the Nickelodeon animated series, was the first vital benchmark for the beloved cartoon sponge. For me and most likely a fair chunk of other children who grew up during the dorky, yellow phylum Porifera’s prime in the early 2000s, his motion picture debut was the sponge’s Swan Song. Even when I was the innocent age of nine, I noticed that Spongebob’s return to the airwaves in 2005 after the movie wasn’t quite the same as it once was. The animation had creased its sharpness to look more puerile, the dialogue timing between the characters was rushed, and the plot premises of the episodes became utterly ridiculous. I seem to recall tapping out on Spongebob upon seeing an episode in the fourth season where he ugly cries and wails like an infant over fracturing his spatula, and the writers treated the melodramatic scenario without a trace of irony. Now Spongebob knows how Joan of Arc felt. Anyways, according to the online cartoon community, Spongebob has become appallingly bad since then and shows zero signs of returning to the timeless quality of its early days. Steven Hillenberg departed from the process of maintaining his cartoon creation after the movie and some corporate shills were hired on to maintain Spongebob indefinitely so Nickelodeon’s hottest property wouldn’t sink the television corporation like the Titanic once Hillenberg resigned. With three full seasons of the show beforehand with Hillenberg at the helm, The Spongebob Movie served as a marvelously compact way of sending off to the only era of the show whose existence I acknowledge. The tie-in video game released for all major platforms of the time is not as significant as its source material, but I recall it being an adequate accompaniment to the film. After brushing off the dust of nostalgia, I now realize that assessment holds only a kernel of truth.

For those of you who weren’t children in the early 2000s and somehow skipped over this event, the summary of The Spongebob Movie is as follows: Mr. Krabs is about to be executed by a shamefully bald King Neptune for swiping his regal crown from its resting place, except that the situation is a set up by Plankton in the first of many objectives in his “Plan Z” scheme to take over Bikini Bottom. To clear Mr. Krabs of the outlandish charges, Spongebob and Patrick must travel far to the enigmatic and dangerous Shell City where Plankton has sold the king’s crown off. Besides the alarming stakes of series staple character Mr. Krabs wrongfully being sent to the proverbial guillotine, Spongebob and Patrick’s (but mostly Spongebob’s) journey is heightened by the underlying theme of maturity and masculinity, proving himself worthy of the status of a man after losing the promotion to manager position of the next door Krusty Krab restaurant to the older Squidward. It’s a story of exceeding one’s potential and impressing those who underestimate you, with overt themes of masculinity and maturity that Spongebob and, to a lesser extent, Patrick are striving to exude. Or, the film is a lesson that one can earn admiration and respect from their peers and garner special attention from the ladies if they pick up the electric guitar, regardless of how weak and scrawny they are like Spongebob is.

Video games aren’t restricted by the run time of a film, so a number of select scenes from The Spongebob Movie are stretched out as video game levels. Such notable segments include the Goofy Goober bar where Patrick and Spongebob get drunk on ice cream to down Spongebob’s sorrows, the rough and tough biker bar where Spongebob and Patrick must retrieve the key to the Patty Wagon, and any swathe of driving implied by the film has been rendered as a chance to use the sandwich automobile. The abominable, monster-infested trench between the fractured road to Shell City is now fully traversable, sans the “Now That We’re Men” musical number to accompany it. While the levels do a fine job of somewhat fleshing out every conceivable scene in the movie, whether it was necessary or not, the cutscenes that glue them together to retell the movie are atrociously half-assed. Instead of playing clips from the film, that Jacques Costeau narrator provides exposition through mere screencaps from the film. For specific shots that are not found in the footage, the developers photoshopped basic Spongebob clipart that anyone can Google to dig up. I can’t help but laugh at how abysmal the presentation looks.

Immediately as the player starts controlling Spongebob through his grandeur-filled dream sequence that introduces the movie, anyone who played Battle for Bikini Bottom will notice that The Spongebob Movie plays exactly like the Spongebob game that precedes it. Yes, both games were made by the same development team, but the comparisons are downright uncanny. Spongebob and Patrick control the same, they have the same talking and collectible animations, and the hand still jumps in to keep them from dying whenever they fall off a cliff. All the developers did to mask the lack of discernibility was change the visuals a bit. Spongebob’s bubble Viking helmet has been shifted into a boxing glove, while the bubble rod base attack is now his red foam karate gloves. Spongebob can also launch a bowling ball and launch a guided missile with an ill guitar lick. You’re not fooling me, Heavy Iron Studio. I can tell that these are the same moves from your previous output with a new coat of paint! The mechanics of Patrick’s moves were at least tweaked considerably. The stupid, but lovable starfish flails his arm instead of humping as his base attack, he slams the ground with his @$$ (sorry, the game censors the name of this move with a dolphin noise) and he can cartwheel endlessly. Patrick can now also attach his tongue to a floating series of ice blocks due to Sandy no longer being featured as a playable character because her role in the movie is practically non-existent. The new mechanic revolving around these combat moves is the ability to upgrade them in a pausable menu. Once Spongebob and Patrick gather enough of the dumbbell/weight currency of differing colors, they can purchase a new upgrade to either these moves or towards another unit of health. All this mechanic did was foster forced grinding for currency because many of the upgrades, while optional, are incredibly useful to progression. Collecting currency for these upgrades becomes rather tedious, especially since the game screws the player over by diminishing the dumbbells by a value of one when revisiting levels.

Speaking of revisiting levels, the player will have to rewind to previous scenes from the movie game in order to collect more “goofy goober tokens,” the golden spatula equivalents of this game. Similarly to Battle for Bikini Bottom, the player will earn one of the main collectibles by traveling to the end of a level along a linear path. Still, the route to the primary goal in Battle for Bikini Bottom wasn’t entirely obvious, unlike the trajectory of every level in the movie game where the walls surrounding the path to victory are so enclosed that it’s more comparable to Crash Bandicoot than Banjo-Kazooie, minus that series emphasis on precision. Any deviation from this path is the additional tasks that vary in objectives. Two common ones are the rickety sponge ball and quasi-psychedelic block platforming challenges which are fairly engaging. The tighter control of the sponge ball is the closest the game comes to an honest-to-god quality-of-life enhancement. Spongebob also fights waves of enemies in a horde mode, and these are rather dull. Other challenges are locked behind a certain move like the throwing challenges for Patrick and the guitar wave challenges for Spongebob. Any level involving the Patty Wagon or slide has to be revisited from the get-go after the first challenge, and the extra activities boil down to time and ring challenges. Are all of these tacked-on extracurricular feats necessary? Unfortunately, yes, as Mindy, King Neptune’s daughter, will restrict Spongebob and Patrick from entering future levels if they fail to meet a goofy goober token requisite, which becomes fairly hefty as the game progresses. She stalled her father from executing Mr. Krabs at the last moments of the duo’s time constraint in the film but here, she’s impeding us almost as if she wants the crustaceous cheapskate’s head buttered up on a platter. Besides the extra content offering nothing of real substance, the developers should’ve stuck with a strictly linear level design rather than attempting to copy Battle for Bikini Bottom’s open format. The levels exist to prolong the exposition of the film, and revisiting past events to gather collectibles totally ruins the immersion.

Even without the challenges off to the side, The Spongebob Movie game is consistently harder than Battle For Bikini Bottom. I should be commending this game for besting the developer’s former glory in the one regard that it lacked, but the higher difficulty stems from artificial means. For one, the slide level, while never matching the mighty curves of the Kelp Vines, are egregiously long (as well as physically improbable considering that they often involve sliding upward. That’s not a slide!) endurance tests. The six or seven enemy types, who all somewhat resemble the robots from Battle for Bikini Bottom, of course, will attack Spongebob and Patrick with a barrage of enemy fire from all angles. The later levels of Battle for Bikini Bottom also compile every accumulated robot enemy, but their forces in this game are so overwhelming at times that it's almost unfair. This bombardment doesn’t become an issue until the level in which Spongebob and Patrick return to Bikini Bottom to find that it’s been transformed into a dystopian hellhole at the hands of Plankton. I lucidly recall having great trouble with this level as a kid and now as an adult, I can state with utter certainty that this level spikes up the difficulty harder than Ms. Puff at a surprise party. The same can be said for the final boss of the game, which is a brainwashed King Neptune wearing one of Plankton’s bucket helmets. Sure, it’s the final boss, but every boss up until this point (the cat lady monster creature and two encounters with Dennis) were repetitive cakewalks that did not prepare me for this in the slightest. The penultimate fight against the king of the sea is just as frantic as the previous level’s enemy squadrons, so I thank the developers for at least providing checkpoints for this duel.

I have a theory as to why The Spongebob Movie game emits sensations of being rushed as well as feeling all too familiar to Battle for Bikini Bottom. Some network executives at Nickelodeon saw the masterful work that Heavy Iron Studios put into Battle for Bikini Bottom and desperately wanted them to develop the game for the upcoming movie. The problem stemmed from the strained development time of a mere year to coincide with the timely release of the film, and that the developers couldn’t be passionate about a source material that hadn’t even been released yet during the process unlike the cartoon series that had been airing for years before Battle for Bikini Bottom was a thought. A mix of stress and lack of artistic motivation caused Heavy Iron Studios to cut corners, which explains why they simply laid out the foundation they already erected. The Battle for Bikini Bottom mold that The Spongebob Movie game was sculpted from is also the reason why this game got a pass from me back in the day because it inherently benefits from copying the previous game’s formula, and I love that game to pieces. Nowadays, the apparent laziness offends me, so The Spongebob Movie game is skating by on its inheritance no longer.