There were three new Game Boy games on December 14th, 1991.
Kingyo Chuuihou! – Wapiko no Wakuwaku Stamp Rally! (Tom Create/Yutaka)
A manga license. Like a lot of these so far, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the original IP. You just wander around an extremely long and repetitive school building and dodge occasional enemies. Sometimes you’re actually supposed to touch the other characters in order to trigger a minigame and get a stamp. I assume the instruction manual made it clear which characters are enemies and which triggered minigames, because it seemed random to me.
There are a surprising number of Let’s Plays of the game, but not many writeups. Gamesoft seemed underwhelmed, particularly by how little it has to do with Kingyo Chuuihou. Nobody else said much of note.
Rating: 1.
Ultima: Runes of Virtue (Origin Systems/Pony Canyon)
Despite being part of a series made by a man known as Lord British and having an American developer, this debuted in Japan and never released in PAL. It’s an action RPG with impressively huge dungeons, but basic graphics and sound. Enemy movement speed is weirdly high compared to the player. It also makes you start with just a sword even if you select the mage character, which seems odd.
Wikipedia says that it’s Richard Garriot’s favorite non-PC Ultima because it was developed specifically for Game Boy rather than being a port from PC. It got a 10/12 from Germany’s ASM, but most other critics were less impressed. It seems to have been widely viewed as a bit standard and repetitive, which is surprising since there’s not really anything else like it on Game Boy so far. MobyGames has it at a 65% average. Just like with the last game, there are plenty of Japanese Let’s Plays, but very little written about it. Gamesoft felt the gameplay had little to do with normal Ultima.
Rating: 3
Yoshi (Game Freak/Nintendo)
A very obviously Tetris-inspired game that released simultaneously for Game Boy and Famicom. The gimmick is that you can swap adjacent columns and you’re trying to create either vertical matches of two or to trap a bunch of enemies between two eggshells. It sold very well on launch, but is much more notable for its impact than anything about the game itself. This was the first collaboration between Nintendo and Game Freak, was Game Freak’s first Game Boy game, and was developed specifically to ensure there was enough funding to make Pokemon. In a way, you could say that this game made $100 billion.
Contemporary Western reviews were largely good, with the Game Boy outscoring the NES version by about 20 points on MobyGames’ tracker. Wikipedia notes that later reviews tended to criticize the game for having too much luck. In Japan, it got a 22/40 from Famitsu and 22.4/30 from Family Computer, the latter of which is actually pretty good.
Rating: 2
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