First: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 1
Previous: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 5 – November, 1989
December was the GameBoy’s busiest month so far by a wide margin. It got there mostly with a bunch of garbage, but a few of these are at least interesting for reasons other than than being good.
Pachinko Time (Marionette/Coconuts)
Pachinko Time released on December 8th and, unsurprisingly, never left Japan. It’s easily the most obscure game we’ve looked at so far, with neither the game, developer, nor publisher having a Wikipedia article, MobyGames having virtually no information about the game, and even the Japanese internet being pretty sparse. The most I could find came from a blogger who seems to write posts about random old games and had chosen this one in April as one of 30 GB games to get a writeup so far. That post gives the game a 4/10 and a 1/10 recommendation, largely on the basis that it’s simple and outdone by many other pachinko games. I couldn’t find any other reviews.
For my part, this has incomprehensible controls and it took me a good 5 minutes of pressing random buttons to figure out that you have to hold A and left in order to shoot the balls. Once you do, some really basic animations happen and you maybe get points. It’s quite boring, and the only interesting thing I saw was that you can set a timer of up to 999 minutes when you launch the game. Once the timer runs out, it will prompt you to consider doing something else. I’d suggest doing something else in the first place.
Rating: 1
Final Fantasy Legend (Square)
Final Fantasy Legend, released on December 15th, set a ton of firsts for the GameBoy. It’s the first RPG of any kind, the first game to let you name your character, and, among many other firsts, the first of a series of Final Fantasy GameBoy games that have nothing to do with that series. This is actually Makai Toushi SaGa, fittingly the first of that series. Although relatively basic by modern standards, the party building and class selection would have been impressive for the time. It was also Nobuo Uematsu’s first time working with the GameBoy, and while you can tell he hadn’t fully figured out the hardware yet, the music is still very good.
Although contemporary reviews were quite positive, retrospective reviews were scoring poorly as far back as 2000. Very few of them actually say why they dislike it so much, though it’s probably safe to assume it’s down to the barebones graphics and a few unintuitive mechanics. It’s most notable today for the influence it had on other games. It’s obviously significant as the beginning of SaGa, but its move selection and battle screens also foreshadowed Pokemon.
Rating: 2. Interesting as a relic, but not really worthwhile in isolation.
Shogi (Pony Canyon)
December 18th brought us back to obscurity with the uncreatively named Shogi. No developer is credited and it obviously never left Japan, but it’s actually surprisingly fully-featured. You can play normal Shogi, attempt 60 Shogi puzzles, or play “!? Shogi”, which seems to be the same as normal except that neither player can see the other’s general. Both regular and !? support Link Cable multiplayer.
There’s virtually nothing about this game written anywhere, but I did find a Japanese blog that said Famitsu gave it a 23/40 at release.
Rating: 1. !? is kind of cool, but otherwise there’s no reason to revisit a poorly reviewed Shogi game from 1989.
Kaisen Game: Navy Blue (Use Corp)
I’m using the Japanese title for this December 22nd release because it’s more distinct than Battleship, which was its title on release three and four years later in NA and PAL respectively. It’s pretty much what you would expect for a game based on Battleship, although this is one of the variants where every ship has a unique ability. It also supports Link Cable play and a single player mode with progressively more difficult stages and a password save system.
Rating: 1. It’s Battleship.
Fist of the North Star: 10 Big Brawls for the King of the Universe (Shouei System/Toei)
This absurdly titled game also released on December 22nd, arrived in the US in April, and is, for my money, easily the worst game so far. It’s a fighting game with a respectable 11 playable characters, but that’s really the only nice thing you can say about it. It controls terribly, attacks are almost impossible to see when sprites are right on top of each other, the music is ear-splitting, and it apparently doesn’t even have endings. It received almost universally terrible scores at release.
Rating: 1.
Q Billion (Winkysoft/SETA)
Q Billion was the third game released on December 22nd, making it the GameBoy’s busiest day so far outside of its launch. This one is at least unique. You play as a mouse who has to make all the numbers on the grid be 1. They apparently represent stacks of boxes, and while a single box can be pushed around freely, higher stacks can only be pushed at all if you’re standing on a stack that is one shorter. So to push a 2, you need to be standing on a 1, and you can either push that block onto another 1 stack to effectively move the 2 or onto the ground to make a new 1. Later levels reportedly introduce special tiles that need to be eliminated by forming groups, and it has the obligatory Link Cable and editor modes.
It seems to have been little-noticed at release. There’s not much on the Japanese internet either, although I did find one blog that gave it a lengthy post arguing that it’s actually a masterpiece of a puzzle game once you understand the rules. It’s not my kind of game, but I could believe it.
Winkysoft would later work on the Super Robot Wars series and SETA would pivot into making casino games before collapsing in an accounting scandal in 2007.
Rating: 3. I’m inclined to believe that there must be something here if it can inspire passionate defenses 36 years after release.
Boomer’s Adventure in ASMIK World (Klon/Asmik)
This released on December 27th as Teke! Teke! Asmik-kun World. Wikipedia describes it as a “trap ’em up” in the vein of Lode Runner, which I can kind of see. You have to move around a maze full of enemies to find a key and unlock the door to the exit, but your only offensive ability is taking an eternity to dig a hole that will briefly trap any enemies who touch it. It feels terrible to control both because of how long it takes to dig and because it’s very easy to move Boomer out of alignment with the grid, which means you won’t fit through corners.
It received poor-to-medicore reviews when it launched in the US in April. Klon (later dual) never led development of anything very notable, but they are credited on Ogre Battle 64.
Rating: 1
Master Karateka (TOSE/Bandai)
The original Karateka released in 1984 for the Apple II and was highly influential both as an early fighting game and for its use of rotoscope and storytelling techniques. It arrived on December 28th as a GameBoy game that would never leave Japan, and I have to assume it lost more than color in the transition. It sounds awful and movement feels like everyone is trapped in molasses.
This version is hardly acknowledged at all on the English internet, and I can’t find much more than resale sites mentioning it in Japanese. Seems deservedly forgotten.
Rating: 1
The Sword of Hope (Kemco)
This is what I was alluding to when I said Kemco sometimes made more interesting games in an earlier post. It’s an action selection RPG in the vein of old PC games, and it has more story text in the first minute than just about every other game we’ve seen so far combined. The graphics, while limited to a tiny box in the center of the screen, are also pretty good for what it is. That’s apparently where the good news ends, though, because all reviews other than one from Germany have been pretty middling. It later received a port to 3DS and is currently available on NSO, so anyone curious about it can at least give it a go without paying $150+ for a physical cart.
Rating: 2. The consensus seems to be there’s nothing here except nice presentation, but that’s something.
Next time: January and the first North American original.
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