The Emperor's New Groove is an animated Disney film about an Emperor who is accidently
turned into a llama during an assassination attempt by his advisor, Yzma.
He meets a friendly peasant named Pacha, whose village he wants to destroy in order to build
himself a summer getaway in its place.
The two go on a journey to get Kuzco turned back into a human, Kuzco learns a lot about
friendship and compassion along the way, and at the end, everyone's totally cool with
him because, in spite of being a tyrannical despot, was nice enough to not tear down their
homes and destroy their lives.
Political commentary aside, the Emperor's New Groove is a great film, and if you haven't
already seen it, you probably should, because it is hilarious.
In this video I'm going to be reviewing the video game adaptation of the film released for PlayStation and PC
in 2000 to coincide with the release of the film.
I played through part of it as a kid, and never actually managed to fully beat it, it was
a little bit hard for me at the time.
Now, I'm gonna beat the whole thing, and hopefully make a decent review of it while I'm at it.
So, let's get straight into it.
Let's start with first impressions.
The game controls… badly.
I'm not sure exactly how to put it into words, all I can say is it's just really awkward.
It's not so bad once you get used to it though – I mean, it's still more responsive
than Super Mario 64, which was hailed critically as one of the best games of all time, so go figure.
Weirdly enough the controls were configured wrongly right after installing the game –
the bindings for the up and right arrow keys were the wrong way around and I had to fix them manually.
You hit X to jump, Z to attack and also to talk to NPCs, and A and S manually rotate the camera.
It was great being able to do this, though much like the controls, the camera felt janky
and unresponsive a lot of the time.
Pretty early on in the game you'll also learn about Kuzco's other abilities, which
include holding down the space bar to charge, and pressing enter to enter look mode, where
you can spit grape seeds to stun enemies or solve puzzles.
You can also pick certain items up and carry them on your back, which is essential to passing
many of the puzzles and obstacles in the game.
Overall the game has enough different abilities and mechanics to keep things from being monotonous
or boring so I gotta give it credit for that.
Kuzco has 5 health points, represented by a crown at the top of your screen.
If your health hits zero you get a game over and have to start the level you're on from
the beginning – unless you have one of these pink plush toys called Wampys – in which
case you only go back to the last checkpoint you passed.
Normally you get these in secret areas throughout the levels.
You can also find red crowns, which restore one hit point, and gold crowns which fill
your health back up to max.
Red idols are used like keys to unlock doors, golden llama heads refill your charge bar
and grapes give you more ammunition for spitting.
There are also coins, but your only incentive to collect them is that getting all the coins
in a level unlocks a piece of low-res concept art you can view from the map screen.
At the beginning of each world the game plays a brief cutscene which is actually a clip
from the movie, but with a different music track dubbed over it for some reason.
The clips are normally completely irrelevant to what's happening in the game and in some
cases even completely contradict it.
It seems pretty clear to me that these are only in the game so they could slap
'WITH REAL SCENES FROM THE MOVIE' on the box.
I mean, I don't have the box for this game, but I assume that's probably on there somewhere.
Whatever the case, the PC emulator I'm playing this game on has a lot of trouble with these for some reason,
so I normally just skipped past them. Not like I was missing anything.
So, about that main character.
If you thought Kuzco was a grade-A cock in the film, oh, just wait till you get a look at this game.
Guy won't let you get past this big door?
Why not smash all his statues and destroy his life's work?
This kid's kind of annoying, let's break his new toy horsey.
Oh, and let's ram this guy face first into a fucking mountain side, just for the heck of it.
And of course, Kuzco can't seem to stop repeatedly pointing out how much he thinks
Pacha is fat and dumb and horrible.
This game's writing manages to capture all of Kuzco's narcissism and douchebaggery
but with none of the nuance or character development of the movie.
I mean, if you want to teach your kids the all-important lesson of "being an asshole
gets you what you want", then by gosh, is this is the perfect game for your family.
As you progress in the game, you'll come across sections where you touch a magic potion
to transform into a different animal.
In the first world, the village, you turn into a turtle to race against Kronk for a red idol.
According to the game's credits, some of the actors from the film do their character's
voices in this game, including Patrick Warburton as Kronk, but this sounds suspiciously like
Kronk's voice is brought to you by the vocal talent of discount Patrick Warburton.
If this actually is him then damn, sounds like he was really phoning it in.
And Kronk's running animation is just too good not to mention.
Once we've finished humiliating Kronk, this delightful segment is followed up by –
you guessed it – a stealth mission.
Wait, did you actually guess that?
Cause, y'know, that'd be pretty impressive.
Yes, that's right, in this section you need to follow Pacha out of the village without being spotted.
He turns around every so often, and if he sees you, you'll be sent to the last enclosure pen you passed.
Naturally you can just jump right out and give it another go.
Haha yes, did you catch that Metal Gear reference?
You guys get it, you get my gamer humour, haha, yeah, funny.
Anyway, after you've followed Pacha, you meet up with Yzma who becomes the game's first boss fight.
She throws potions at you that you need to avoid.
To beat her, you need to bait her into hitting the 5 markers on the floor, which opens the
door to exit the level.
After that's done, all Yzma can do is angrily jump up and down in impotent rage as you walk
on through, finish the first world, and move onto the next; the jungle.
So, what does the jungle hold in store for us?
Well, there's a statue we have to put together to drain some water to get past, the kid on
the toy llama is back again, so naturally we break it again.
There's a fish we have to hit with our grape spit to get it to blow a balloon until we
can reach it so we can grab that and attach it to a wooden platform to use that to float across a pit,
and after that we knock spiders down into freezing water to turn them into platforms
we can jump across.
The whole game's full of this weird imagination and I gotta give it points for that, for all
its flaws, I can't reasonably call this game boring or uninventive.
The boss for this world is actually a segment based on a scene from the film where you need
to mash your jump and action buttons to run from hungry jaguars while using the arrow keys to steer.
When I played this game as a kid, I could NOT beat this part on my own, I think in the
end I only beat it by calling my dad in to help.
Today, though, I have my advanced gaming skills on my side, so naturally I was able to outrun
the jaguars without a lot of trouble.
After another REAL SCENE FROM THE MOVIE, we end up in the next level, where you have to
control a log as it floats down a river, which thankfully isn't as boring as it sounds.
This world lasts for four whole levels and took me about 20 minutes to get through all in all.
As Pacha so keenly lampshades, 'This scene was much shorter in the film'.
As much as this line made me chuckle, It was kind of irritating how fixated the writers
for this game seem on breaking the fourth wall every two minutes.
I mean, I know they did it a couple times in the movie, but there comes a point where
you're just overdoing it, and I'm pretty sure this game crossed that line.
So, after beating Yzma's army of, err, evil balloon animals, we find ourselves back in
the jungle again.
Except it's daytime now.
This level's noticeably a lot harder that the ones before it – there are a lot more
dangerous enemies about that won't be taken out with a simple roll or jump kick.
You've got these wasps, which you need to dodge and then hit when they touch the ground,
these big piranha plant looking fuckers that will stop attacking you for a bit if
you feed them grape seeds, and-
Oh, oh, oh no no no, no, I'm- I'm sorry,
this- this is making me a bit too uncomfortable.
Stop- stop it, just, stop- stop the review, I- I don't want to do this, just stop-
Hey everyone, welcome to my review of the games on The Emperor's New Groove DVD.
Now, there is an Emperor's new Groove video game adaptation for the Playstation 1 and PC, but why
waste your money on that when there's a fully-fledged game right here on your Emperor's New Groove DVD?
A lot of people don't know about it, but you can get to it by going into the special features menu.
There's a few things here, but what you wanna do is go down and hit option that says 'More'.
Then it's right there at the top of the second menu, just press it and you're ready to play.
The game follows the plot of the movie. Kuzco has been turned into a llama by his advisor Yzma,
and you have to help him get back to his castle by answering trivia questions about the movie.
Watch out though, if you get a question wrong Yzma will start to catch up to you.
If she gets you, you lose.
Once you've answered the questions, you finally get the chance to turn Kuzco back
into a human by combining three potions in the right order.
It took a bit of trial and error for me, but after just a few minutes it's done!
You won!
It's over!
No more suffering, no more pain, no more horrifying wiggly dick vines, n-no more-
Oh God, I still have to review the actual game, don't I?
So back to the jungle, the game introduces a new kind of stealth segment where you have
to navigate through a maze without being spotted by the guards patrolling it.
This is a pretty straightforward matter of figuring out their patterns of movement, waiting
until their backs are turned and sneaking past them.
Throughout the game, you'll find what the game calls 'secrets'.
Normally this is a hidden area with a few extra coins or some health.
You know when you've found one, because, well, the word 'secret' pops up on the screen.
These aren't always areas, though, in some cases it's just a matter of completing a
hidden task, like say, beating a boss where you knock a guy off a tower, but instead of
letting him lay unconscious in peace, you, keeping with the game's habit of rewarding
you for being an asshole, give him a jump kick to the stomach.
I kinda wish the rewards for finding these secrets was a bit more substantial – I didn't
really care for collecting the coins just to get the concept art, and extra health's
only really useful if you're missing any in the first place.
In some cases the so-called secrets are actually necessary to beat the level, which kind of
defeats the whole purpose.
I love finding hidden areas in games, but they've gotta give me a reason to be interested
in them or else it's all just kinda boring.
On one level in the jungle, there are actually 2 separate secrets that lead to the exact same area.
In the level after this, we get another transformation potion, this time turning us into a… frog?
As a… frog, you have the ability to jump further on each successive jump, with the
third jump being the biggest one.
If you wait a short moment without jumping, your jump distance will move back down to
that of the second jump, and then back to the first jump, indicated by what would normally
be your charge bar.
There's a few puzzles where you have to take advantage of this ability to hit buttons
in the right order or within a time limit by timing your jumps to be the right distance
for the job.
It was honestly kind of satisfying to figure out.
Look- look at him though - I mean, that's not a frog, right?
With the jungle finally out of the way, we move onto the mountain, and the first thing
we see when starting the first level is this little moment.
God, can we just, can I just take a moment to talk about how fucking often this game
throws jokes at us about Pacha being fat?
I mean, sure, him just nonchalantly crossing the bridge as it falls down behind him is kinda funny.
Sure, it's novel.
But these snarky allusions to Pacha's weight are non-fucking-stop.
There's about a dozen instances of this and that's not even counting dialogue I
might have missed or jokes that just generally make references to him being slow or lazy or heavy.
No, that's twelve whole instances of Kuzco just going out of his way to call poor Pacha a fatty.
I don't know what was more grating; this or the constant fourth wall breaking.
I mean, both of those things got a chuckle from me at some points, but overall the jokes
were definitely more miss than hit.
Also, Kronk's back, and this time you get to challenge him to an ice skating battle.
Because why not?
After the mountain, the last three worlds to deal with are the city, the catacombs and the lab.
This video's getting a bit long, so I won't go into too much detail here.
What I will say is that, like the worlds before them, these all introduce a ton of new elements
that keep things interesting and dynamic.
The biggest new introduction in this part of the game is the roller coaster segments
in the catacombs, where you steer a cart to avoid falling off the tracks before you reach the end.
These were a massive departure from the main gameplay and I probably would have found them
a lot of fun to play – if they weren't such a pain in the ass.
The main reason these were such a pain for me is these green tiles here.
At first I didn't fully understand what they did – all I knew is that every time
I hit one, I'd lose control and go flying off the course.
Naturally I assumed these tiles were a one hit kill deal that made you spin out and fall,
so I avoided them at all costs.
But then I came to a section in a level where they were impossible to avoid, no matter how
hard I tried to.
It wasn't until watching some other people on YouTube playing these levels that I realised
the green tiles simply reversed your left and right steering buttons – and I was actually
steering myself off the course in my desperation to avoid falling.
Why didn't the game at any point think to tell me this?
I mean, Pacha points out that the corner arrows make you turn every time you start one of
these segments, so why not tell me what these weird green ones do so I'm equipped to deal with them?
Save for that one issue, these sections were a pretty cool way of translating a scene from
the film, much like the jaguar boss and the river world from earlier in the game.
Also you get to turn into a bunny.
You jump really high and collect carrots to open a carrot door.
That's about it.
Also there's this horrifying thing.
The final world in the game is Yzma's laboratory, where the climax of the film takes place.
Even the guards transformed into animals are here as common enemies.
All three animal transformations from earlier in the game make a return here, so you get
a bit more bunny, turtle and frog action before the game's through.
Once you've escaped Kronk's comically oversized net, defeated Yzma's comically
oversized hammer, and braved the also comically oversized final level of the lab, you're
finally ready to face Yzma in a final showdown of epic proportions.
Uh, okay, what?
I mean, fine, I get the bait and switch, but this just felt like a big letdown.
I was all hyped up for a big boss fight, and what we get is…
A mindless, hold-right-to-win, 2D race to the finish.
Seriously, you just hold down right and spacebar to charge across the track and jump every
so often, and once you get to the end the game's finished.
I mean, I'm sure I've played a more unsatisfying final boss at some point in time, but I'm
hard pressed to think of one off the top of my head.
When you're done you get an ending cutscene, and –
Hey Kuzco, you look… good.
Uh, are you sure you drank the right potion, buddy?
No one seems to notice Kuzco's horrifying malformed appearance, there's some dancing,
some fireworks, the credits roll, and that's it.
Oh – did you notice the door on the side in the final room where you grab the potion?
Might be a cool secret right?
Let's go back, play through the final level again and – oh.
You can't go in there.
It's an invisible wall.
Hooray.
I'm not 100% sure what to make of the Emperor's New Groove game.
There's a lot I liked about it, but a lot I disliked too.
The controls are subpar, the graphics are average, but at the same time the level motifs
are pretty creative and use a lot of cool elements.
Bizarrely enough the polygonal look of the PS1 graphics is actually pretty compatible
with the overall artstyle.
I can't complain at all about the soundtrack – it's actually quite good, with a lot
of rhythm and attitude to it.
Overall it really captured the mood of the film and is pretty damn solid in its own right.
I take this piss out of the writing tropes, but this game's writing isn't all bad.
It's annoying at some points, yet manages to be charming and funny at others, so I can't
really say it's terrible through and through.
I think the most important thing to take away from this is that the game is fun.
It never stops throwing new and unique elements and challenges at you, and it spite of its
flaws, I enjoyed playing it through.
If you're into PS1 era 3D platformers and you haven't played this one yet,
it might actually be worth giving it a go.
I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind about the game,
but, as for me, I give it 3 stars out of 5.
Also, I forgot to say so in the video but if you haven't already done so, please feel
free to subscribe to be notified when the next video comes out.
Kay thanks bye.
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