The Game Boy games of December 20-21, 1990, are very obscure.
Kininkoumaroku Oni (Winkysoft/Banpresto) (December 8th)
This one didn’t come out on the 20th or 21st at all, but I forgot to cover it earlier. It’s a JRPG from a series that, as far as I know, has never released outside of Japan. The entire series seems to have quite a poor reputation in Japan, with Wikipedia’s statement that this game’s reputation ‘cannot be said to be good’ coming from a book “Game Boy kuso games” and the DS entry winning an award for 2007’s kuso game of the year. One review I saw listed nice battle animations as the only positive point among a sea of QoL issues that I didn’t play long enough to see. I agree that the battle animations are nice, but that review didn’t mention how bad the music is. Maybe it goes without saying, because it did call out that the game only has six (six!) tracks for its entire run time.
From what I saw in a search, this post will possibly be the second page on the internet that says anything useful about this game in English. That said, the other page is a highly detailed 2014 GameFAQs guide that some absolute legend wrote. I’m not adding much next to that.
Rating: 1.
Ponta to Hinako no Chindouchuu: Yuujou Hen (Naxat Soft) (December 20)
This game is another one with barely any coverage in English, and many of those have the name incorrectly written as “yuutou hen” because they copy/pasted from Wikipedia. I corrected the reading there, but even with the correct name, there’s hardly anything in Japanese either. Coverage amounts to a couple of very brief atwiki posts, some Youtube let’s plays, resale sites, and a weirdly large number of dead links that return a 403.
It’s a character platformer with decent music, but a really low frame rate that makes it kind of hurt to look at. It also has a lot of dark enemies that blend in with the background (there is a flame spirit about to hit me in the screenshot) and the sprite work is pretty rough. It’s not hard to see why it was forgotten.
Rating: 1.
Battle Unit Zeoth (Jaleco) (December 21st)
Battle Unit Zeoth breaks our streak of games with no coverage in English. This one released everywhere, but to poor reviews. It’s a side scrolling shmup where you play as a roller skating robot and generally zoom about and shoot things. It looks great (aside from screen flashing), has fun music, and actually controls pretty well. Unfortunately, you die in two hits and only get one life. Famitsu gave it a 19 and other critics came in the 50-60% range. Most contemporary reviews criticized it for being too hard and short, but some more modern ones have said it’s too easy and short. At least they agree on one thing.
Rating: 1.
Capcom Quiz Hatena? no Daiboken (Capcom) (December 21st)
A quiz game that, contrary to what you might think from the title, is not about Capcom. Hatena? no Daiboken was an existing Capcom quiz game series that started on PC Engine, and this is a Game Boy port of that with Capcom characters randomly added to parts of the UI. The quizzes are general knowledge stuff and seem to cover a wide variety of subjects, although I didn’t get any about Capcom or video games at all. Seems like a decent time, but the timers are short and you’ll need to be able to read Japanese pretty quickly to play. Screen translation might work with a pausable emulator. Famitsu gave it a 24 and Family Computer went with a 21.06.
Rating: 3
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Sunsoft) (December 21st)
A movie tie-in character platformer that is basically like all the others. The music seemed decent and the sprite work is pretty good, but reviews were exactly as middling as you’d expect. In the US and Japan, anyway. European reviews were actually surprisingly strong and pull the MobyGames average all the way to a 76%. The only other interesting thing about this game is that the move tie-in was seemingly made by a different company for basically every platform, so you get a ton of different games in the results if you search for this. Sunsoft only made the Game Boy one.
Rating: 1
Ishida Masao: Tsumego Paradise (Pony Canyon) (December 21st)
A collection of Go puzzles. Not really much else to say about it.
Rating: 1.
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