The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge (2004)

Oogie’s Revenge is a very upsetting game for me because I’m a huge Nightmare Before Christmas fan and I was ecstatic to see not one, but two games finally come out about one of my favorite Disney movies—unfortunately, we all got screwed. Oogie’s Revenge is full of badly laid out missions, crappy controls that go from feeling too tight to having Jack slip right off an edge in an instant, an unrewarding combat and level up system, an extremely confusing rating system, and worst of all, a horrendous premise. Let’s start with missions: some are so short and dumb they’re unmentionable: go stop Clown on an out=of-control unicycle or find five vampires in a bullshit amount of time; others drag on for weeks with similar backgrounds and swinging cameras that will get you lost instantly like Oogie’s gauntlet and the Hinterlands. Often you’ll come across confusing mission objectives and when you do find what you need to do, sometimes the game will just refuse to recognize it until you do it “just right” standing in the exact right spot, pushing the button just right which will get you confused and frustrated. There’s no creativity here to the missions like there were in the two iterations of the Nightmare Before Christmas world in Kingdom Hearts I+II—instead every mission is timed bullshit, go from A to B, or find this thing or person in particular for no reason of any consequence. None of the boss fights are creative and the song boss fights simply function like DDR, but with music notes, kind of like a glorified quick-time event fight. How about the controls? I often find Jack sliding off edges after jumps, or just not responding in the way I want the controls to, this makes everything a pain in the ass, the less said about that the better. The combat is very boring, the most complicating move being a whirlwind grab type of move, nothing to write home about, most definitely. It also takes an unprecedented amount of “money” to unlock all four parts of the very unremarkable small combo at your disposal. Just press the attack button four times, woohoo, a combo. Leveling everything to max takes forever and is an extremely boring process. Each level gets a rating because artificial length and you weren’t pissed off about this game enough already. Want to get to the secret stage? Get an S in everything, good luck with that, the game makes up its rules for ratings as it goes along. I’ve done nearly flawless and gotten a B and crappy and gotten S—your guess is as good as mine. Finally, the worst offender: the story. There’s some jumbled bullshit about how Jack temporarily left and Oogie not only took over Halloweentown, but convinced everyone that Jack was a bad guy—I have no fucking clue how, it’s never really explained, they just wanted an excuse for Jack to fight people—pointlessly, I might add—I mean, why am I fighting a giant spider that Sally made to kill me? Sally? Really? The girl in love with Jack? Really? They also take every song from the movie and mercilessly rewrite it to the same tune for dance boss fights—needless to say the lyrics all sound stupid and the only really interesting boss fights are against Oogie later in the game. It’s weird, Jack comes back and suddenly everyone has their hand in the cookie jar except that it’s not a cookie jar, it’s a piranha tank full of cookie-shaped piranhas and everyone wants you to help them fix their fuck-up which they never explain why they did in the first place. It’s honestly completely insulting to the source material. Stay far away from this game, if you’re a big Nightmare Before Christmas fan maybe give it once through if and only if you can find it for under $5.