November 16th, 1990, was a good day for Game Boy games that most of the world never got to see.
Aretha (Japan Art Media/Yanoman)
This is a real contender for the most ambitious game we’ve seen so far. It’s a JRPG that was never localized outside Japan. It features an opening credit crawl that also sets the story, first person portraits for important NPCs, full 8-directional movement instead of a grid system, surprisingly complex music, and has a system I’ve never seen before where walking into a wall results in your movement being automatically redirected to try to navigate around it. That last one is kind of useless, but it’s fun to see the first few times.
Aretha is further notable for having a female protagonist in 1990 (you’re a princess trying to rescue her sister) and for having an early system for capturing monsters to fight alongside you. For all that, it came up a bit short with critics. Famitsu gave it a 26/40 (3 7s and a 5) and the modern Japanese user reviews I could find were mixed. Almost everyone complained about the high difficulty, which I encountered by stepping outside the starting town and being immediately wrecked by two gnomes. The story apparently doesn’t end up amounting to much either.
That said, it’s far from forgotten. It received five sequels, there are walkthroughs all over the internet, and it had a collection remaster released just a few months ago. Not bad for a RPG made by a jigsaw manufacturer.
Rating: 4. It’s highly inaccessible for language and gameplay reasons, but it’s so impressive for its time that it’s worth a look.
Pac-Man (Namco)
It’s Pac-Man. You’d probably expect that to come with a lot of compromises given the infamy of some other Pac-Man ports, but this one is actually pretty solid. The sound and movement feel authentic, although the screen has to scroll to fit everything and D-pad movement was never going to feel as good as the arcade stick. Other than that, you’re really only missing the colors.
Reviews were mostly very good, but the average is only a 74% thanks to low scores from two European outlets. It’s Pac-Man.
Rating: 1. It is a good port, but do you really want to play this version?
Parasol Henbe (Epoch)
This one lacks any acknowledgement on English Wikipedia except as part of the List of Game Boy Games, does not have a MobyGames page, and even Japanese Wikipedia only mentions it for one sentence on the main page for the manga. I found two brief modern Japanese user reviews that amounted to “it’s not very hard, but fine if you want something light” and a few how to play guides, but no reviews from around its release. Naturally, I played it all the way through.
It deserves more than it got. This isn’t an amazing game, but the 15 levels do showcase a good variety of simple platforming challenges that mostly involve dodging various hazards. I might have even given it a 5 here except that it ends with three genuinely awful boss fights, and those really shouldn’t have been in the game. Still, it’s pretty good and is now probably the rarest game completion I have.
Rating: 4
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