August 10-12 1990 offered three very different Game Boy games. None of them are masterpieces, but they pass the test of at least being interesting.
VS Battler (Copya Systems/Use Corp) (August 10th)
Released as Bionic Battler in North America in 1992, this is a game about trying to find and defeat evil robots in a maze before they do the same to you. It’s surprisingly twitchy for a GB game and I believe it’s the first GB game with co-op multiplayer against bots. I can’t find reviews or much info about it anywhere, and even the usual Japanese sites don’t have much more than the box art and release date. Death comes a little too quickly to be fun in single player, but I could see it being a decent time with a friend. It reminds me a bit of a game called Space Beast Terror Fright in that it’s a tense exploration game until you get killed by a monster in two seconds before you have time to react. Maybe not good, but funny.
I had to take a screenshot of the most useless options menu of all time. I have absolutely no idea what this turns on or off, but the whole game is completely identical in both languages, so it’s not a translation error. You get to chose the music regardless of whether you go with OFF or ON, and your choices are the enigmatic ‘C&W’, which is presumably some form of ancient sound-based torture, ‘Japan’, a generic traditional track, or ‘disco’, which does not sound like disco.
Rating: 3. I really do think multiplayer would be funny.
Hong Kong (Onion Software/Tokuma Shoten) (August 11)
Another implementation of mahjong solitaire. The music in this one is not nearly as good as Shanghai, and the denser board definitely results in some crappy looking kanji. Still, if you liked this particular mahjong version and wanted to play it on the subway, I’m sure this was an acceptable way to do so.
Rating: 1. Lots of other ways to play it now.
Dragon Slayer I (Falcom/Epoch) (August 12th)
A port of the 1984 original that released on FM-7 and PC-88. This is undeniably a tremendously influential game, as it was Falcom’s first real hit and paved the way for Ys to popularize action RPGs a few years later. This is much closer to a roguelike, although enemies can move even when you don’t, and in shocking news to me, it’s actually the first game of the Legend of Heroes series that continues to this day. There’s barely a story here and the gameplay is obviously nothing like the LoH games we have now, but they’re nonetheless directly descended from Dragon Slayer.
All that said, the game is pretty bad by modern standards. The movement buttons don’t do anything most of the time, which may be because the game is too busy handling enemy movement to respond to you. Combat is inscrutable, and there’s no direction on how to play or what you should be doing. That’s all standard for the time, of course, but it’s hard to recommend today.
I couldn’t find any scored reviews in Japanese and the only contemporary review tracked elsewhere is a 50% score from a French outlet. That said, there are tons of strategy guides and playthroughs available in Japanese, so it clearly remains popular. A physical copy will set you back quite a lot, though – one price aggregator had the current average at nearly 10,000 yen.
Rating: 2. I have to give it a point for significance, but most of that significance is in the 1984 original.
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