Casper: Spirit Dimensions
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 This game isn't lucky enough to be a ghost.
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Casper: Spirit Dimensions is a 2001 action-adventure video game based on the ghost character of the same name. It was developed by Lucky Chicken Games and published by TDK Mediactive for the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2.
Why It Has No Spirit
- The gameplay is extremely repetitive and primitive, with most of the levels just involving the player having to collect all of the parts/pieces of an object in order to advance to the next level, and the rest of the levels just involve you having to do challenges that can be ridiculously hard to complete due to the poor controls, such as the "flying through rings" challenge in the circus level. Remind you of anything?
- As stated in WIHNS #1, the controls are poor. For some reason, when you boot up the game for the very first time, the primary controls in order to move Casper are mapped to the right analog stick, while the camera controls are mapped to the left analog stick, and while you can just change the controls in the control configuration menu, it's still ridiculous for the controls to be set up like this by default.
- Poor sound design, with the spoken dialogue having poor sound quality. Keep in mind that there are other games released for the same consoles in the same years (such as Super Mario Sunshine and Battle for Bikini Bottom, with the latter game also using the same engine, RenderWare) that have better sounding audio.
- Subpar in-game animations, with the characters having very stitled and choppy looking movements.
- The levels are unnecessarily huge despite there not being a lot to do in them, making them feel empty.
- Much like Ninjabread Man, (given the fact that both of these games run on the same engine) the camera is very sluggish and slow, which is especially a problem when you're trying to turn the camera around in order to see when an enemy is going to attack you.
- Casper's in-game model looks pretty uncanny, especially when compared to the other characters.
- The game is way too hard for its target audience, which mainly consists of young children. Some of the bosses can be quite difficult to defeat due to the aforementioned poor controls, with them also having attacks that can nearly be impossible to dodge.
- Much like in Casper and the Ghostly Trio and Casper: Friends Around the World, despite Casper being a ghost, he can't even go through walls, as he can only go through certain objects that the game allows.
- Despite the bosses in the game being generally hard, the final boss with Kibosh can be somewhat anti-climatic, as you just spam fireballs at him the entire time, defeating him easier.
- The soundtrack, while decent, is just recycled from the films, instead of the developers composing original soundtracks for the game.
- The game is quite short, as it can be beaten in less than 2 hours.
- The cutscenes and dialogue are unskippable, even worse is that they last for way too long, such as the opening cutscene.
- If you pause the game during cutscenes, then the characters will repeat their lines, showing how broken it is.
Redeeming Qualities
- The graphics look fairly decent for an early GameCube/PlayStation 2 game.
- Decent soundtrack, despite being recycled from the films.
Reception
Casper: Spirit Dimensions received mixed-to-negative reviews on Metacritic. The PlayStation 2[1] version of the game currently has a 58% on Metacritic via 7 critic reviews, and has a user score of 4.0 indicating "generally unfavorable reviews" based on 8 ratings. The Nintendo GameCube[2] version also received mixed reviews via 2 critic reviews.
On GameFAQs,[3] the GameCube version has a low rating of 1.79/5 via 19 ratings, and the PS2[4] version has a rating of 2.09/5 via 17 ratings.
References
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