- Cult Classic: An amazing game... but it doesn't have the fame to go along with it. Still, it was good enough to be used as the model for the Astro Boy licensed game.
- Fridge Brilliance: The Final Boss music is titled "World's Strongest Robot". This both refers to Pluto, as he's the leader of the "World's Strongest Robots"; and Garon, who the Character List refers to as "the most powerful super robot sent to Earth".
- Funny Moments: Most of the endgame cutscenes are serious, but the secret post-credits scene offers some levity:
- The Big Bad of the game, Sharaku has escaped and is now hiding on Fire Vase Island. While he swears to return, Pook points out that they did their best and still couldn't beat Astro, then innocently asks him to consider doing something more manageable, like opening a café.
- The revelation of Sharaku's fate: He approaches Wato and orders her to become his wife. Puzzled, she notices his third eye, mistakes it for a wound and concludes that he is hallucinating due to a head injury. She then proceeds to bandage it, much to Sharaku's horror, as this seals his powers and makes him docile.
- Game-Breaker: When maxed out, the Machine Gun special can stunlock every enemy for far too long while erasing bullets. The immense difficulty of Hard mode comes from how it limits you to a mere 3 super moves, but even then you should be able to gain enough meter to use the Machine Gun four or five times in a row.
- Jerkass Woobie: Drake is a tragic villain, having been pushed over the edge entirely by the belief that his daughter was kidnapped and killed by a robot, leading to his hatred of robots with him vowing to do everything in his power to avenge her death.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- The surprise appearance of the Death Mask, which proceeds to lay waste to the entirety of robotkind, including Astro himself. The entirety of the game's second half is devoted to figuring out a way to prevent the cataclysm by means of time travel.
- Tobio's death. It's brief, but every bit as horrific and gut-wrenching as it can be for a parent to watch their child die in such a tragic accident.
- Nintendo Hard: As in other Treasure games, you get a nice overpowered moveset, but the enemies are relentless. On Hard, enemies will tear about half of your HP with the lightest of attacks, you can have only 3 Supers, and there are MANY things that can kill you in a single hit. What's worse is that there are very few recovery items in each chapter and some of them are supposed to be the level ups that only work once.
- No Problem with Licensed Games: This game was critically acclaimed and is fondly remembered as one of the best action games on the GBA. Given that it was developed by Treasure, which is famous for its high-quality third-person shooter games, this is no surprise.
- That One Attack:
- Epsilon can call a whale that quickly moves into the screen and is an instant kill if it hits Astro. This is designed to be unpredictable, as she might summon hard-to-dodge urchins or dolphins instead, with the latter attack having a random chance to also call the whale at the end.
- Pluto has a Spin Attack that is unpredictable, nearly instantaneous and kills in two hits. In the Rebirth loop, it pulls Astro towards Pluto instead of holding him in place and lasts for long enough to be unavoidable depending on the situation. The air dash is ineffective against this. Pluto can shoot four guided missiles at once and even repeat this multiple times in a row if the CPU is spiteful enough, which is hard to dodge and distracts from whatever attack Pluto does next. He also likes dishing out minor damage by very quickly slamming his knee on Astro, with two of his attacks also dealing Collision Damage before actually triggering due to using this same step animation.
- That One Boss:
- North in Hard Mode, mostly because his first phase basically forces you to waste all three of your Supers to get it over with. His instakill counter grab is even changed to trigger faster and hit you out of the Laser Super if you didn't make a frame-perfect input. For the second phase, he counters the player's attempts to spam the Laser Super by either blocking it with an energy shield or trumping it with a powerful laser of his own that lasts longer than Astro's.
- Pluto has a sizable variety of incredibly powerful attacks and can be one of the most frustrating fights in the game. During Rebirth mode, his already unpredictable Spin Attack drags Astro towards him and kills in two hits.
- Atlas, when fighting him with Dr. Black Jack at the bottom of the map, which leaves you with less space to fight him.
- The jousting duel with Blue Knight, which requires landing several hits in a Quick Time Event while being a One-Hit-Point Wonder regardless of your life level. There is even a confusing element to this fight in that you are required to press and hold the A button from the moment the prompt to attack comes up to when the Blue Knight is shown taking the hit. Just tapping it will get you killed.
- That One Level:
- The level aboard the Marine Express features two combat sections in a very cramped enviroment that hides enemies from the player's view. In Hard mode, you must perform perfect crowd control here to not get killed in just two hits. This is also the only level that is made up of both minor enemy encounters and a boss fight, in this case Rock and a large robot. It is a blessing that the Machine Gun Super can cheese this Dual Boss even on Hard Rebirth mode, because Rock and his robot are specifically designed to complement each other and overwhelm Astro both at close and long ranges.
- The very final level requires Astro to navigate across a meteor belt that spawns in random positions around the screen, with each meteor being too large and Astro's hitbox being too finicky to get a grasp of how to move while avoiding damage (the air dash is disabled here). Thus the ending of the game becomes an awkward Luck-Based Mission.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Princess Sapphire gets very little spotlight, and her romance with Rock that redeems him is only shown through a title screen and a quick line of dialogue with him. She really could have used some extra scenes to develop this further.
- Kimba/Leo the White Lion, one of Tezuka's most famous creations, is reduced to one of Pook's transformations, and doesn't get a character data sheet. On the other hand, one must ask, where else would they have put him?
- The Un-Twist: Blue Knight being President Rag. The gratuitous flashback makes it screamingly obvious.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/AstroBoyOmegaFactor
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