There were three Game Boy games released from January 18-31, 1992. They were an SD Gundam sequel, Jantaku Boy, and Twin.
SD Gundam: Sengokuden 2: Tenka Touitsuhen (Bandai) (January 18th)
Like the first game, it’s a tactics game with Gundam characters in the Sengoku period. This one has marginally better graphics, but pretty awful music. The main difference is that battles take place in an overhead Zelda-like view now instead of imitating a fighting game, but there’s not really skill involved in these. You can’t do much except stand right next to each other and mash attack until whoever has the highest DPS wins.
Famitsu gave it a very poor 17/40, with no individual reviewer scoring above a 5. There’s very little else about this game out there.
Rating: 1
Jantaku Boy (Namco) (January 24th)
As hard as it is to believe, this is the first mahjong game since Yakuman released all the way back on launch day. There will be many from here on out, but it somehow took almost three years for anyone to get the idea to make the second one. At any rate, I remain as uninterested in richi mahjong as I am in poker, so I didn’t play much of it. I can’t offer any opinions beyond that the tiles are nice and readable.
Given the flood of mahjong games to come, it’s not surprising that there’s not a great deal of information still out there about this one. Japanese Wikipedia cites a 24/40 review from Famitsu and a 17.7/30 poll from Family Computer, but does provide quotes from either. I found an incredibly long blog post on it that seemed mostly positive. It ended by saying that it wasn’t really still worth playing when there were decades of newer mahjong games available.
Rating: 1
Twin (Athena) (January 31st)
An obscure JRPG that features Adventure of Link-esque sidescrolling segments. You can jump in the side view in dungeons, but battles are still randomly triggered and fought with traditional JRPG commands. It was an odd mix of quality from what I saw. There were some good sprites, but also plain black backgrounds. Music was either pretty good or cacophonous.
The game is mostly forgotten, but I did find a review from someone who also made a whole strategy site for it. That player praised the innovative side scrolling perspective, but criticized it for enemy and boss difficulty that feels unfair. They also called out the password system for having sixty character passwords. The passwords use the digits 0-9 as well as all 48 base hiragana and a handful of characters with tentens for a total of 65 allowed characters. You can only navigate the allowed characters by pressing A and B to shift one character in either direction, so if you need the 37th character, you’re going to be there for a while just to type that in. A random password in this format (and these are almost certainly not random) would have 8×10^90 possible combinations, rendering Twin passwords more effective as certificate keys than the number 4.
Someone on GameFAQs gave it a 5/10. I didn’t find any other coverage.
Rating: 1
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