The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction

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The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction
"Remember when I complained about Arthur! Ready to Race being too easy for kids? Well, this game’s way too hard for kids!"
— shnick1990
Genre(s): Fighting
Platform(s): Nintendo 64
PlayStation
Release Date: Nintendo 64
NA: October 14, 2001
PlayStation
NA: November 8, 2001
EU: December 7, 2001
Developer(s): Asylum Entertainment
VIS Entertainment
Publisher(s): BAM! Entertainment
Series: The Powerpuff Girls

The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction is a 2001 video game developed by VIS Entertainment and Asylum Entertainment, and published by BAM! Entertainment. It is based on the animated TV show of the same name.

Plot

At the Utonium chateau, the Girls bake the perfect little pie by adding together their own mix of sugar, spice, and everything nice, and Bubbles adds Chemical X to make it super. Then Mojo Jojo decides to steal it and feed it to all of the villains and bullies in Townsville! So then the Girls must fight every bad guy in Townsville and retrieve all of the Chemical X before it's too late.

Gameplay

The game plays like the Capcom fighting game Power Stone, where you play as one of the girls and use punches, kicks, and throwing projectiles against your opponent. The aim is to deplete your opponent before they do, in a best of two-out-of-three battle.

Why It's Baked Bad

Overall

  1. The game plays identically to another fighting game from the same developer called Tom & Jerry: Fists of Furry, making it nothing more than a reskin of that title.
  2. Extremely repetitive gameplay: All the girls play exactly the same as each other, with no differences between them at all. Even the villains all play similar to each other as well with no difference in moves or gameplay.
    • The stages are also incredibly small and are just the same arena just with a different backdrop to represent the place where the villain is battled.
  3. It's impossible to unlock everything in the game. Although each Powerpuff Girl can unlock something (e.g., a villain to play as, or a stage) but once you defeat Mojo Jojo, you can't replay it again.
  4. Extremely short: the game can be beaten in less than an hour if the player is experienced enough.
  5. The Multiplayer mode is also very lacking and has a strange character limitation. You can't fight as two of the girls, you can only fight as a Girl vs. Villain, or a Villain vs. Villain.
  6. For some weird reason, the true ending is with Blossom.

Nintendo 64 version

  1. Since there are no cutscenes (due to the N64 cartridge limitations), the story is just told through text, which is very hard to read due to the font used, and it's not really explained well (eg, Bubbles is the one who suggests putting Chemical X into the pie in the PS1 version, yet in this version, it says that all the Girls chose to add it in.)
  2. There is no voice acting. The only dialogue that plays throughout the whole game is random "Oof!"'s and "Ow!"'s that sound like they were recorded by random people.
  3. Only one piece of music plays throughout the game, making it very annoying.
  4. The Girls have an explosion attack that makes the battles way too easy.
  5. Unlike the PlayStation version, you have to rely on passwords to continue playing.
  6. It was released very late into the N64's life, as the GameCube had just come out a while before, which is a bad sign.

PlayStation version

  1. Very unbalanced difficulty and AI with random difficulty spikes all over the place.
    • Big Billy, Sedusa, and Fuzzy Lumpkins are incredibly easy to defeat as they are badly programmed which can make them easy targets.
    • Princess Morbucks can fly for a long amount of time, which can cause easy time run-outs.
    • ACE and Mojo Jojo are the biggest abusers of the poor AI, as they are aggressive to the point of them throwing any nearby projectile at you even if you have don't have any Chemical X, which can barely give you any time to move or fight back.
    • With the villains being bigger than the girls, they can throw objects at you at a longer range than the girls can, making the latters more of a target than the villains being the main targets.
    • The Girls can't home into the villains, unlike the N64 version, only with Chemical X can they do this.
  2. Poor Controls - the characters move incredibly slow with a lack of action applied to their punches and kicks and can be at times can be delayed. The fact that it is a button masher makes it worse, as your hands and fingers can get strained easily.
  3. The CGI animation, while looking good at the time, has aged badly nowadays. The CGI character models are very blocky and cheap-looking.
  4. The computer graphics look poor, even for a late PlayStation game, with backgrounds that lack detail and textures. Not to mention the game can randomly slow down at times.
  5. Sometimes, your character may softlock in place.

Redeeming Qualities

NOTE: PlayStation version only.

  1. The CGI animated FMVs look good for its time, depicting the game like it's an episode of the show itself, complete with a recreation of the intro and the opening title card.
  2. The music is pretty good, with some neat remixes of tracks heard in the TV show.
  3. Each Girl does have a special move you can use once you beat the story mode.
  4. The death animations are decent.
  5. The dialogue is quite good such as "He's stolen our baked goods and made them baked bads!"

Videos

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