The Game Boy games of December 22-31, 1990, are another set of obscure, mostly Japan-only releases, but they are much more interesting this time around.
Hiryu no Ken Gaiden (Culture Brain) (December 22nd)
This released in the West as the absurdly titled Fighting Simulator: 2-in-1 Flying Warriors and is part of a long-running series that is usually localized as Flying Dragon when it gets released outside of Japan, but a lot of the games never were. This one is an odd mix of a brawler and a fighting game. If you play in the ‘action’ mode, you fight your way through a brief brawler level with nice animations and music. The brawler controls are basic and the backgrounds are just the same image copy/pasted repeatedly, but it gets the job done.
Unfortunately, once you beat the level, the fighting game begins. You can also access this directly by selecting single or two player from the main menu, and you’re treated to incredibly stiff controls and ridiculous jumps once it starts. There’s nice music and you can pick from a variety of fighting styles, but the controls are very unintuitive and I wasn’t able to figure out how to attack consistently. Famitsu gave it a 24/40 and it was later remade for Game Boy Color. I didn’t find any contemporary Western reviews.
Rating: 2. The brawler part is fun.
Monster Maker (SOFEL) (December 22nd)
Monster Maker is a Japanese card game that debuted in 1988 and got spinoffs of basically every kind for about a decade after that. This is the first of several Game Boy games made for the series. It’s a fairly traditional JRPG, but with the neat gimmick that all dungeon and overworld exploration is done by flipping over cards that reveal the rest of the terrain. You can also use cards in battle to presumably cast spells or something, but I didn’t find any in my time with the game. The graphics and music are rather poor, and the dialogue has an annoying habit of closing itself without your input.
I couldn’t find any professional or contemporary reviews, but there were quite a few Japanese personal blogs with scored reviews. Most were pretty positive. I can definitely attest to the high difficulty they mentioned – I got oneshot by every monster I encountered in both the first dungeon inside town and the dungeon I found in the first node of the overworld. Thankfully, being knocked out just kicks you back to the town entrance with seemingly nothing lost. I assume I could have used the money the king gave me to buy gear that would have made fights more survivable and that I’d need to grind a while to make any real progress.
Rating: 2. The interface is charming, but I’m not seeing much else here.
America Oudan: Ultra Quiz (Tomy) (December 23rd)
America Oudan was a TV game show that ran for 17 seasons from the late 70s until the late 90s (with a brief hiatus) in Japan. Contestants started in a large pool and had to answer quiz questions starting in Narita Airport and then progressing to new locations across the Pacific and eventually reaching the finals in New York. Japanese Wikipedia is at pains to explain that ‘America’ refers to the continents and not the US, although the vast majority of quiz sites were in the US and some seasons visited other continents. Season 8 ended in Nassau instead of New York, and Season 9 ended in Paris.
Context out of the way, it’s basically a really hard version of the quiz in Fall Guys. You’re presented with yes/no questions like “Is the mouth of the Statue of Liberty bigger than 1 meter?” (no, it’s 0.91 meters) and get kicked back to the start menu if you’re wrong. You have to mash through a bunch of setup to try again, so it seems like winning a run would be quite tedious given the unfair difficulty of some questions. Wikipedia says there were a whopping 1200 questions included, so you weren’t going to be memorizing them, and it was apparently popular enough to sell 240,000 copies.
Despite that popularity, nobody really talks about this version anymore. Seven other games released in this series by the end of 1995 and an eighth came along in 2002, so anyone looking back at the show tends to pick one of the later console games.
Rating: 2. This is definitely not the one you want to revisit, but the history around it is interesting.
The Tower of Druaga (Angel/Namco) (December 31st)
The Tower of Druaga is one of the most extreme examples of a game being received differently in Japan and the West. It debuted in arcades in 1984 and was a huge success, with Wikipedia crediting it for inspiring such series as Ys, Dragon Slayer, and even Zelda. It received follow up series, spinoffs in basically every kind of media, and a whopping 31 ports to other systems by Japanese Wikipedia’s count. It’s a maze game with loose influences from Babylonian mythology, and your goal is to climb sixty floors and save the princess at the top. This also makes it one of the earliest games to use the “go through a giant tower/pit” trope, and since the earlier examples were mostly obscure Western roguelikes, it’s a plausible origin for the trope in RPGs.
For all that importance, it has rarely been ported outside Japan and has received dire reviews on those few occasions. MobyGames has the arcade version at a 40% average and the Wii Virtual Console version at 48%, with the overall dragged down even further by a lone 0% score for the Switch version. It’s a very punishing game that you’re expected to play repeatedly to have any chance of winning, and that design did not go over well.
Most discussion of the game today is about one of the other 30 versions that have color, but I saw Japanese Let’s Plays of the GB game from as recently as yesterday. The game is still clearly loved. It also introduced me to the term “surume”, which refers to a game that grows on you over time. An acquired taste, then.
Rating: 3. It’s not for me, but any game with this significance and fan base that still cares after 42 years clearly has something going for it. The language barrier was non-existent from what I played, and the screenshots I saw of the ending make it seem like the whole game is in English.
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