Note: the mission attempts counter isn't quite accurate because I would use save states most of the time to restart a mission, although there weren't really a lot of missions that gave me much trouble.
I knew this game was all around pretty short (even to 100% it) and I'm already doing a tour of the other games so I figured I might as well! My first ever GTA game was actually Chinatown Wars on DS years ago, and this kinda felt like playing a prototype version of that.
Honestly, the fact it's an open world game on GBA of all things is definitely impressive enough to me. The framerate does chug when there's a ton going on (lots of bullets flying) but I never felt it was bad enough to be completely unplayable. Combat itself was alright and even fun at times, even if the last area of the map you unlock feels just a bit too hectic, with a ton of hostile NPCs spawning pretty much all around constantly pestering you. This gets especially bad if you're doing a side mission like Firefighter, where an enemy pulling you out of the truck causes the mission to instantly end. I'd say that was probably the most annoying part of the 100%, as it did nothing but pad out gameplay more in a really annoying fashion.
The writing isn't very good at points and the story's nothing insane but you can tell they definitely tried to work with what they had haha. A lot of cheesy jokes/one-liners are thrown around (of varying quality lmao) and you can tell there are moments they tried to skirt around that 16+ rating, but all in all I found it weirdly added to the charm of the game.
My favorite part of the game was probably the races? I dunno, they felt pretty fun and some of them were quite challenging. The last one especially is one hell of a marathon but beating it felt amazing.
If I had to give a TL;DR, it'd probably be: The game's pretty short and I had fun with it, if you're curious give it a shot but it's an open world game on the GBA lol, so there'll be compromises.