PlayMagazine:
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road (or Riz-zoawd as it was known in Japan) keeps telling me that it's a DS game, but I would swear to you that the entire time I played it I was certain I was back in the days of the Dreamcast. Sure, it probably has something to do with the fact that in my mind, the DS is a return to that "let's be daring!" mantra that fueled Sega's final console, but I just can't shake the ability to see myself, DC controller in-hand, playing Oz. Mybe not even the stock controller: upon telling a friend how I felt like this could have ben a Dreamcast game, after agreeing with me he said he wouldn't have been surprised had somebody been crazy enough to make an official rollerball controller to bundle it with.
gamrReview's Xavier Griffiths: "Movie tie-in games have a reputation for being notoriously bad and shoddy, doing both a disservice to the original film and videogames as a medium. More often than not the movies that get adapted into videogames are high octane, action-oriented summer blockbusters and the aim is simply to extract as much money from the market as possible. Realistically no one expects games based on trashy films such as Catwoman, The Cat in the Hat, or Eragon to be good in the first place, but what about games based on films that have garnered recognition for the highest award in cinema?"
A list saluting horribly wonderful movie games like Street Fighter: The Movie and The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.
In a cluttered RPG market on the DS there isn't any real reason to recommend The Wizard of Oz. The new story is generic, the exploration hampered by unnecessary backtracking and the dreaded locked door puzzles. An interesting combat system is ruined by the default party actions and clunky menu navigation. This certainly isn't what L. Frank Baum had in mind, there aren't even any flying monkeys.
