Gummy Bears: Magical Medallion

"My favorite part about this game is F\*\*K!"— Scott the Woz

***Gummy Bears: Magical Medallion*** is a 2011 platform game developed by Clockwork Games and published by Storm City Games for the Wii, Nintendo 3DS, and Microsoft Windows. It is the successor to *Gummy Bears Minigolf*, which was also published by Storm City Games. The Wii version was only released in North America.

## Why It Sucks

1. Much like *Gummy Bears Minigolf* previously, the graphics look terrible, even for that of both 2011 and Wii/3DS/PC standards, as they look akin to that of a PlayStation 2, iPhone or Dreamcast game. Even other Wii games that were released in the same, or earlier, years (ex. *Kirby's Return to Dreamland*, *Metroid Prime 3: Corruption* and both *Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2*) look better in comparison.
2. Extremely stiff, but also very simple controls. You use the D-Pad in order to walk left and right, and press the 2 button to jump, but the problem is that the gummy bear walks very slowly, and the "double jump" isn't even a double jump at all, as you just jump about an inch higher than your normal jump.
3. Terrible level design that makes the levels drag on for way too long, possibly in order to artificially extend the game's length.
4. Numerous amounts of bugs and glitches. For example, it's very easy to get stuck bouncing back and forth between 2 enemies, leading to cheap and unfair deaths.
5. The way the camera moves can actually cause **motion sickness** for some players.
6. For some reason, the gummy bear protagonist on the box art is brown, but in-game, it's purple/pink, despite the main flavor of the gummy bear candy being red raspberry flavor, meaning that it would have made more sense if the protagonist gummy bear was red instead.
7. Speaking of the gummy bear, it doesn't even look like a gummy bear at all. Instead, it looks more like a teddy bear, due to the fact that it's not transparent, nor does it bounce, or expand, like an actual gummy bear.
8. The soundtrack, while decent, is rather repetitive, as it's just the same song playing in a randomized order in a loop on every level.
	* Speaking of which, most of the soundtrack is just recycled from *Gummy Bears Minigolf*.
9. Some of the enemies in the game, such as a muffin, giant bees and a fly enemy, feel somewhat out of place for a game that takes place in a world called Candyland, and look more like rejected characters out of *Pac-Man World* or *The Muppets*.
10. King Sour Berry, the main antagonist of the game, barely appears in the game at all other than the opening cutscene, and instead of there being boss fights against him, more on that in a bit, he just gives you pathetically easy "challenges" that take no skill or effort to beat.
	* Speaking of the challenges, they are repetitive, as all 3 of them are just the same "collect all of the objects before the timer runs out" type of challenges.
11. Long loading times that last up to 15 seconds. It even takes this long just to load **the main menu screen**.
12. No boss fights whatsoever. This is beyond unacceptable, as at this time of this game's release, video games, excluding racing games, have had proper boss fights.
13. *Gummy Bears: Magical Medallion*, the title of the game alone led many people to think that this game was based on the 1985 Disney TV animated series titled *Adventures of the Gummi Bears*, due to it being about gummy bears searching for a "magical medallion", but it actually isn't.
14. The game is very short, as it can be beaten in about an hour, due to there only being 12 levels, 15, if counting the King Sour Berry challenges.
15. The Wii version, much like a lot of other third-party games on the Wii, has a pretty poor implementation of motion controls.
	* In order to get past the rock in level 1, you have to shake the remote. However, the game does not tell you this, and it can take quite a bit for the meter to fill up.
16. For each level, there are doors that can only be unlocked by solving a puzzle or playing a memory card game. These doors serve absolutely no point in the levels and are only added as filler, and again, to also artificially extend each level's length.
	* And sometimes, even after you complete the puzzle, the door won't open, meaning that you would have to do the puzzle again.
17. The 3DS version is even worse than the Wii and PC versions, as the graphics are even worse, and it constantly suffers from frame rate issues.
18. The minigames and King Sour Berry challenges on the main menu can literally just be played straight from the Story Mode.
19. A 100% completion of the game doesn't give you any sort of reward for doing so, other than a few useless achievements.

## The Only Redeeming Quality

1. The orchestrated soundtrack is pretty decent, and is probably the only thing good about the game, despite being repetitive.

## Reception

Much like *Gummy Bears Minigolf* previously, *Gummy Bears: Magical Medallion* received mainly negative reviews on Metacritic. WorthPlaying cited "Don't let the bright, colorful cover art fool you into making a poor purchasing decision. The artwork doesn't convey the awful design sensibilities and the poor platforming adventure contained within the box."

Nintendo Life gave the game a 1/10.

The game was nominated for ScrewAttack's "Worst Wii Game of the Year" awards of 2011.

## References

1. ↑ https://www.metacritic.com/game/wii/gummy-bears-magical-medallion
2. ↑ https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/eshop/gummy\_bears\_magical\_medallion
3. ↑ https://roosterteeth.com/watch/sagys-2011-worst-wii-game-nomination