Lady Sia - Reception

Reception

Lady Sia was one of the earliest games released for the Game Boy Advance, leaving it without much competition (in terms of platformers for the GBA) when it was released. The game was received well by the press, getting grades ranging from "good" to "great". In particular, it was praised for its beautiful, anime-inspired, hand-drawn graphics that often had a slightly cartoonic feel to them. However, the press also considered this one of Lady Sia's weaknesses, as it often was considered to be hard to see what was part of the background and what belonged to the interactive part of the game.

Another aspect Lady Sia was praised for was its solid gameplay that IGN described as "a decent balance between" standard platformers and Final Fight clones. Sia herself has a remarkable number of abilities at her disposal. Although this prevented combat from being too repetitive, most reviewers felt Sia's abilities could have used a little more fine-tuning. For example, some reviewers thought Sia's elemental spells were a little hard to cast, as performing them required a button combination involving the control pad. Thus, the player needs some room to move, which, due to the platform structure, isn't always an option. Some of her sword combos had a similar shortcoming. GameSpy wrote: "They often cause her to slide off platforms or into enemies." The reviewers also criticized the fact that if Sia hit a checkpoint, it saved her current magic and health status. This made the checkpoint practically worthless if activated when the player only has a little bit of health left. GameSpot considered this and the combos to be the game's only two weaknesses.

In the end, most reviews were quite positive about Lady Sia. IGN summarized it with the quote, "Lady Sia's a good one," and GameSpot did so with: "Thanks to its solid control, clever puzzles, and stellar production values, Lady Sia is easily worth a trip to the local game shop." Gamespy concluded that there were some better platform games on the market, but that Lady Sia was still a worthwhile game.