Home > Video Games > Game Boy Advance > Shaman King: Master of Spirits
On 5 February 2005 (which is the date printed on a receipt that I recently recovered by pure chance), I was at my local Best Buy with my family when I saw this game in the store. By then, I had been following the anime Shaman King, which in the United States was being shown on the 4Kids TV programming block, for about a year, and so when I saw that there was a video game based on the series, I was overjoyed and immediately asked my mother to buy it for me, which she did.
I would not really describe this as one of our wiser purchases, however: though initially I made quick progress through the game, soon I started getting stuck at various levels; this happened enough times that eventually I truly could not make any further progress in the game (besides minor things like collecting some more money and supplies). Two stages in particular on which I got stuck, which I recall with more clarity than any others within the game, are the graveyard stage to the top-left of the starting position, which has a very tall and (initially) impassable wall of fire at the very beginning of it, as well as the stage to the bottom-left of the starting position, which features a cave with poison fog that damages you very quickly; both of these stages require abilities obtained later on in the game in order to complete them, but back in 2005 I could neither reach the points in the game where these abilities were found, nor even knew in the first place that these requirements existed. As I didn't have any sort of guide book for the game, and as it didn't occur to me at the time, despite having Internet access in our house, to search online for tips or walkthroughs, I had no other choice but to stop playing the game, having concluded, as a kid, that it was simply unbeatable.
I would return for infrequent intervals to playing this game in 2005 and 2006, but each time I would encounter the same levels where I got stuck, attempt unsuccessfully to clear them, and then stop playing the game very soon afterwards. It was only later—probably sometime in 2007 or 2008—that, I remember, I made my first significant wave of progress in the game since first purchasing it in February 2005: I began clearing levels in the upper-right portion of the game's map, which led me to the ice levels, where I then acquired the specific power that would finally let me advance past the fire wall in the graveyard stage. Ultimately I ended up completing the entire graveyard stage, and even a few subsequent stages, but by then I had largely lost interest in the game, and I did not bother to try to finish it or to play much farther. Today I remember it mostly as that one Shaman King Game Boy Advance game that I got stuck on pretty early on, and which, at least to some degree, I feel was somewhat of a wasted purchase.