I want those of you unfamiliar with what The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge is to take a moment and imagine what a video game followup to the original movie would look like. Personally? I’d imagine some sort of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie-esque platformer. The movie shows five holiday worlds that we never see, which would be perfect for a sequel to explore, and in the context of a video game, there’s so much you could do with that. Have each of the worlds be some sort of giant level you can run around and do all sorts of different objectives in. Have Jack get different costumes based on each world that give him different abilities — and then have those abilities be required to get Jiggies/Stars in other worlds to try and encourage the player to give each holiday at least a couple of visits each. Expand on the lore by showing what the five other worlds are like (though admittedly I’d be a bit worried about what’s behind the Thanksgiving door), with Jack going on a culturally appropriate romp through a bunch of cool levels through a story that actively follows up on what’s been happening since Halloween and Christmas found out about each other — that maybe also gives Oogie Boogie the chance to feel at least a little less like a first-draft of a villain. If I’d heard, just today, that there was a The Nightmare Before Christmas sequel for the PS2? I think that’s the impression I would’ve had of what it was.
I would not quite have imagined that The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge would be, of all things, a Devil May Cry game.
And not just, like, a DMC clone. No. Literally a Devil May Cry game. Capcom made this. Many of the people involved in this were also involved with making the first three games in the series. Ideas explored here, allegedly, were then iterated on and employed in successors Devil May Cry 4 and Bayonetta. One core difference here, though (other than, uh, being Nightmare Before Christmas and not Devil May Cry), is that this is still ostensibly a game for a younger audience. You’re not going to be informed that Easy Mode is now selectable after Oogie Boogie shoots you sixteen times in the head and chest region. Falling in lava just respawns you at the beginning of the room rather than game-overing you like Bayonetta and DMC did. You can basically style on/juggle enemies from the start with the SOUL ROBBER, rather than needing to figure out combo routes/actively work to get an A or S grade. It’s more than forgiving in that regard.
Yet not in others: if you want a halfway decent rank for time, you better know where you’re meant to be going from the start. And you better learn how to most effectively fight the enemies you encounter in each level: while the SOUL ROBBER is effective at locking down any enemy you’re in the process of attacking, doing so leaves you open to anybody else in the vicinity, making both positioning and crowd control pretty vital to getting that S rank. And honestly, the grading system makes going for a high score much more enticing than it really should be. At many points, instead of progressing, I looked back and questioned whether I could do it better now that I had better resources and more of a lay of the land. It’s certainly nowhere near as complex as the bits of DMC/the first Bayonetta I did play, but it’s still got the same sorta feeling, and that really does it wonders.
I also love the way the game utilizes music! The original Nightmare Before Christmas might be one of my favourite movies — it’s possibly one of the few movie musicals where you could listen purely to the score and understand exactly the story being told, which doesn’t even go into how almost every song is a certified banger. And when he first heard about this game this was a 13-year-old-me’s dream come true. There’s a Nightmare Before Christmas sequel! And it’s a video game! And all the songs you love from the original, given all new remixes. Boss battle remixes. With whole sections where you and the boss dance battle each other! Again, when 13-year-old me found out about this game, my dude was ecstatic. He went into the Gamesmen a couple times trying to find it in the second-hand section, to no avail. Week by week, he’d go in, check the tub, and he’d only see whatever games like “Shadow of the Colossus” or “Resident Evil 4”, and he’d either head straight to the manga section or leave, dejected. Eventually, that Gamesmen would close down. Later, Persona 4 would become the game I sought instead. Then, I moved house, get depression, and just kinda forget that I actually had a PS2 I could play. Oogie’s Revenge would be all but forgotten…
But actually getting around to playing it about twelve years later, I gotta say a lot of what the game does with music works just as well in practice as it does just hearing about it. Those boss remixes? They’re not just tracks that play whenever you’re fighting a boss; the whole battle is structured around them. Bosses move to the beat. Specific attacks are timed to certain parts of the song. If you look closely, you can even see the boss flapping their lips to their side of the song (though the same doesn’t apply for Jack — sadly, or thankfully, his SOUL ROBBERs or ‘WAAAA-HAAAAA!’s do not interrupt his own end of the duet)! The above-mentioned dance battles are the equivalent of your mid-battle setpiece QTEs — in Oogie’s Revenge, specifically, the game just flat-out becomes a rhythm game for 30 or so seconds, your ability to do big damage to the boss dependent on how well you can keep your combo up. And I love how — compared to say, Metal Gear Rising, where the big musical moments have to awkwardly cut in on what was originally playing — when you reach the conditions for a dance battle to happen, the game actively waits for an appropriate time to, if not make a clean segue from one section of the song to another, at least allow part of the song to finish before doing the jump. It’s a really cool application of its boss music. And, like, genuinely banger boss music, too. They make Sally’s Song, of all things, a boss theme, and it’s just randomly the coolest thing ever? Like, those strings, the way Jack’s voice soars in, that pipe organ just before it loops? Genuinely just as awesome today as it was when I was 13.
It’s, uh,
A pity about the lyrics, though
More than anything, you can really feel Danny Elfman’s absence, both as lyricist and vocalist. Whether it’s for the failings of the new arranger, or whether the act of adding new lyrics to old songs was just a doomed endeavour, a good majority of the boss tracks have at least one moment that really sticks out for the worse. Whether it be a clunky rhyme (among others, Hail to Mr. Oogie attempts to rhyme “right” with “attack”), a part of the original song that did rhyme but now doesn’t (“I’m the Oogie Boogie Man” → “I’m the only Pumpkin King” always felt wrong to me and it took so long for me to figure out why), lines that try to stuff too many syllables in, or even just lines that are out-and-out clunkers. There’s a lyric in the final boss fight where Oogie goes, “you think that you’re a hero, Jack………….. but I think you are not”. Which, like, beyond how inexplicable that line is from him (Oogie Boogie is not exactly a morally complicated figure; guy prides himself on being the literal Boogeyman), it deflates all the mounting tension of the song as we’re otherwise ramping up for the bridge — especially as it uses both “you’re” and then “you are” right next to each other, it just screams that it’s desperately trying to fit a syllable count. I’ve heard of songs shipping with placeholder lines still present and while I don’t necessarily know for certain that certainly feels like the vibe here. While a recent listen through all the boss themes told me that lyrically this was a lot tighter than I’d led myself to remember, there’s always the odd moment where it doesn’t feel up to snuff — lines that only seem to exist to rhyme with the line before, or stuff that really feels like there could’ve been another drafting stage.
Which really isn’t helped when they’re not sung very well, either. While a good portion of the cast of the original Nightmare Before Christmas returned for Oogie’s Revenge, one notable exception was, as mentioned above, Danny Elfman, who provided Jack’s singing voice. Replacing him is Chris Sarandon (who otherwise provided Jack’s non-sung lines in the original movie), and… to his credit, he’s trying. And succeeding! So long as he’s actually allowed to sing. The rest of the time he’s doing this thing called Sprechstimme — “speech singing,” effectively speaking to both a beat and a pitch but without crossing the line into singing proper — which… he is considerably less capable at. In fairness, most of the songs (and specifically, all but… maybe one of Jack’s solo numbers?) in the original musical are performed like this. The problem, more than anything, is that none of Jack’s solo numbers actually made the cut for Oogie’s Revenge. All the numbers that don’t involve Jack — Oogie Boogie’s Song, Sally’s Song, Kidnap the Sandy Claws — did.
What this means — given that all the boss battles are structured around Jack actively singing alongside the boss — is that now all these songs that weren’t originally built to be a duet, or for a tenor voice like Jack’s… are now duets with Chris Sarandon front and center. You can hear what feels like an active struggle to accommodate him. Especially when — when doing Sprechstimme as opposed to outright singing — Sarandon’s performance really sticks out for the worse. More than anything, he’s overdoing it. His delivery is oftentimes way too much compared to the person he’s singing with, which more than anything else honestly undercuts what’s happening. Take Oogie’s Song: you begin with Ken Page, who still mostly manages to sound exactly as he did ten years before… as Chris Sarandon then proceeds to just miss the energy of the song in both directions: the piano coming in hot, functioning as a really rough juxtaposition to Jack just utterly underdoing the vocals, before then proceeding to tell Oogie “I’m SERIOUS!!!!!” much more like a mother threatening to ground her child than a man angry his city has been taken over. And then he starts doing proper singing, and immediately the song feels back on its feet. It’s peaks and valleys: moments where the vocals really make the song feel like something special, and moments where they really just undercut the otherwise incredible work arranging these songs into something new.
What also doesn’t help is that — for a game that otherwise puts a lot of effort into its music and soundtrack — the audio is really bad? My experience playing this game, in part, was having the same sounds spammed at me for 13 hours. There are three distinct battle themes for regular enemies throughout the game, but until you reach Christmas Town — right at the end of the game — you’ve only got the two, both of which begin with a chorus of “HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN!” Given this happens literally every time you start a battle, it gets grating real quick. Also grating is part of your combat moveset: primarily, you are using two of the four face buttons to attack enemies. One is your usual combo starter, while the other is a grab move: important both for locking a specific enemy down and then using said locked-down enemy to bludgeon and stunlock other enemies. It’s frequently used for platforming as well — functioning as a grappling hook either to get you across a gap or to rappel to a higher spot — and to throw items on the ground, whether to solve a puzzle or for combat purposes. In-game it is known as the Soul Slam. You will soon associate it with the SOUL ROBBER (which is actually what your other basic attack string is called) because Jack will yell it every time you use it. Through this game’s thirteen-hour runtime. And it’s not even the only case where one of your basic moves has only the one voice line attached to using it!
It’s a running theme. The shopkeeper only has the one voice line for when you buy something. The guy who saves your game will continually do the same unskippable monologue every time you talk to him. You refight a boss, and, despite the fact that the other person in the duet isn’t even present, the game just… uses the exact same song, unaltered. Especially weird when another boss fight actually does show the capability to cut the vocal track when context calls for it. The same problem exists with the Lock/Shock/Barrel minibosses — whichever two you’re not fighting will sing and take part in Hail to Mr. Oogie despite not being there — but at least they alter the song and cut out Jack. Who is there. And who actively has verses playing off each individual kid. It just feels a little bit baffling that they went to the lengths they did for the soundtrack, and then just don’t have any variance in any of the other many things you’re going to hear. Especially for a game that goes on for as long as this one does. I streamed this for Discord friends, and even just a couple of hours in, they were genuinely going feral every time a battle started or every time I used my SOUL ROBBER. I’m not even a guy who tends to notice this sort of stuff. But it’s the type of thing where if it’s bad, it’s really noticeable. And this one very much starts feeling like a drill to the skull sooner rather than later.
Maybe I have to make it clear that, overall, I actually lean positive on this game. I suppose what I like about it is far simpler to talk about than the parts I feel fall short. Broadly, it really strikes a balance between its Devil May Cry structure while also keeping itself accessible for the presumably younger audience playing it. Combat is much more of a beat-em-up than a hack-and-slash — and can at times maybe feel a bit too simple — but it’s never unengaging. Actively getting to the point where you’re mashing everything in sight to death is your reward for good positioning and strategic play. Most bosses ask you to survive their onslaught and play with the environment before you’re able to attack them yourself, and the rhythm game sections pretty quickly ramp up in difficulty — one in particular took me upwards of ten tries to eventually full combo. The rank system encourages replayability really well: going back through specific levels now that you know where to go and what to do, trying to hit that sweet spot where you can avoid unnecessary battles (for a good time and a low damage score), yet still engage with enough enemies for a high “exclamation mark count!”, and find at least one part where you can rack up a massive combo. It’s solid stuff. Maybe a quarter longer than it needs to be — that section between Casino Clash and Christmas Town really drags — but much like its hack-and-slash ilk, it’s much more about the replay, and the process of taking that rather shoddy first run and shaving off all the imperfections until you get that S-rank. I went back and played a little bit again to refresh my memories on how the game played, and I ended up getting sucked into trying to S-rank some of the bosses I’d only managed to get A’s on during my initial playthrough. It’s genuinely addictive stuff.
And ultimately, even if it might not be the sequel I was hoping for — it’s still primarily about Halloween and Christmas town; the other holiday leaders are mentioned (and apparently present) but not seen — it’s still a fascinating thing on its own terms. If for nothing else, I’m happy to live in a world where I can say “the Nightmare Before Christmas sequel is Devil May Cry: The Musical” and have that just be, like, true. It’s a shame that it perhaps falls short in the areas it feels it should shine most — the soundtrack is perhaps not as perfect as it was when I was thirteen, and I could honestly see the repetitive audio being a dealbreaker for some people — but with what it is and what it’s trying I don’t think I’d ever be able to find it something less than captivating, even regardless of all the things I think the game legitimately does well. If you’re a fiend for this era of licensed games, if you’re one of those people who gets fascinated by inane choices to adapt into a video game just by virtue of how it’s a real thing that exists, and you somehow haven’t heard of this one? You gotta play Oogie’s Revenge. It’ll worm its way into your head. One way or another.
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