The second you said this was a Japanese game and part of a longer running series I thought this looked familiar and saw it's Kawaii Koinu, which is related to Kawaii Hamster which I played on GBC when studying Japanese solely because the name was hilarious to me. The amount of interactivity? Yeah, about equal to this game. I later found out that Hamster Paradise 3 was the far superior GBC hamster raising game.

"GBC hamster raising game" is a surprisingly bountiful genre btw, there's like ten of them, there's more hamster games than Mario games on that system.

Honestly that fact is more interesting then anything Dogz had going. That's a lotta hamsters.

I still have had Dogz installed on every PC ever since I got the adoption floppy disk off a friend in school. There are so many Petz websites on Neocities today, but never seen any devoted to the GBA games... now I know why!

Here's hoping the other Petz games are a bit better (I don't have hope)

The lack of character options are a massive disappointment tbh since I'm one of those "never play as the human" types of RPG players but I can't lie and say that the isometric pixelart graphics recreating a fully 3D game charm the heck out of me, it's part of why I love the GBA Spyro games (well, Season of Flame and Attack of the Rhynocs anyway)

It's just even more strange considering the Elf character from the console game is on the bloody cover! Just weird. I think I had one of the Spyro GBA games as a kid (Season of Flame sounds right!) but yeah I've seen videos on the Spyro/Crash crossover games and those look... well, at least they're short.

Great review thank you, I've only played the original BG but I was looking for a simple Diablo-like recently so this one will definitely go on the list.