September 20-27, 1991, brought three new Game Boy games.
Winner’s Horse (NCS) (September 20th)
This is the second horse racing prediction app for Game Boy. This time, it also comes with an actual game attached. The game mode has a whole lot of settings that used lots of horse racing vocabulary I don’t know, so I just mashed through to get to the race. Racing is largely out of your control except for being able to hold A to do a boost that drains stamina. There’s good public domain music, but the graphics are quite bad.
The game hardly exists on the internet anymore. A lone atwiki post was all I found for useful pages on it, but that was admittedly one of the longest atwiki posts I’ve ever seen. Someone basically detailed every mode and option in the game in one massive guide. It’s probably safe to assume that that person still likes Winner’s Horse, but they seem to be alone.
Rating: 1.
Aretha II (Japan Art Media/Yanoman) (September 27th)
The sequel to one of the first big JRPGs on Game Boy. This one takes place a few years later featuring all the same characters, but it has a lot of strange design decisions. It is far ahead of its time in having a opening cutscene rendered in gameplay, which I believe is a first for a Game Boy RPG, but most character dialogue is displayed as a full screen featureless white box. Only major characters get portraits, and even those are smaller than the wonderful portraits from the first game. It maintains the strange but fun “fuzzy navigation” system whereby you continue walking in a random direction if you walk into a wall, but it has slowed down movement in towns to a level that can only be described as “tortuous”. Also, character dialogue pops up automatically if you get close to an NPC, so if one is in a narrow hallway, they are as much of a roadblock as a Snorlax. It also retains the same ridiculously strong enemies right outside of town. The first game was also one of the earliest GB games to use kanji in text, and that continues here, but the choice of which ones to use and where is even stranger than before. It reads like it was intended specifically for early grade schoolers who would only have been taught the most common characters.
Famitsu gave it a 23/40. Wikipedia says the main issues cited were the movement speed, repetitive environments, and excessive dialogue. Hardcore Gaming 101 covered the whole series in 2019 and stated that this was received well in Japan, but Wikipedia has an interview with the creator saying the response was ‘lackluster’, and the lack of information on it on the Japanese internet suggests his version is more accurate. I found some walkthroughs and Let’s Plays, but no reviews. Aretha would get one more sequel on Game Boy before moving to SNES for three more games. Note that searches for “Aretha II” tend to bring up the completely separate one for SNES first.
Rating: 1. As cool as some of its ideas are, it’s just not playable.
Shounen Ashibe: Yuuenchi Panic (Takara) (September 27th)
A licensed game that, as the title indicates, features Shounen Ashibe in a theme park. It’s a very simple RPG that takes place across a handful of tiny zones. There’s very little going for it outside of the fun enemy designs, and there is hardly anything written about it. Atwiki had a partial playthrough and Gamesoft criticized it for an excessive encounter rate. Wikipedia mentions it in an article about the IP, lists a bunch of reasons it sucks, and then concludes with “for these reasons it was not scored well as a game.” And so it remains.
Rating: 1.
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