The Game Boy games of March 1-8, 1991, kicked off a couple of big franchises on the system.
Doraemon Taiketsu Himitsu Dougu (SAS Sakata/Epoch) (March 1)
The first of many Doraemon licenses on Game Boy. This one is a maze game with surprisingly quick movement and responsive controls. The graphics are basic, but the music is nice and I particularly like that you move backwards without changing your facing for a few seconds when you reverse direction. That makes it easy to kite enemies without having to constantly turn around. There’s a lot of dialogue as well, as you’d expect for a licensed game, but I didn’t bother reading it since I don’t know anything about Doraemon.
It earned a mediocre 24/40 from Famitsu and a decent 20.43/30 from Family Computer. Although extremely obscure in the West, it seems decently well-known for a 1991 Game Boy game in Japan and the modern takes I saw were at least somewhat positive.
Rating: 2.
Super Momotaro Dentetsu (Hudson) (March 8)
Momotaro Dentetsu is an incredibly long-running series of games that play sort of like a more complicated Monopoly on a map of Japan. I previously posted a detailed review of a much later edition here, so I’m not going to rehash the gameplay details. This is largely the same except with much less of everything. There are far fewer cities, fewer events, fewer cards, less art, and so on. The gameplay is very recognizable, but there’s no reason to revisit this when you can have the same experience with more content on a system with color.
Still, reviews at the time were quite positive. The PC-Engine original scored very well, and the Game Boy port managed a strong 26/40 from Famitsu and 22.3/30 from Family Computer. It is technically another game I played to completion, but that’s only because I set the player count and game length to the minimum.
Rating: 2. I’ll give it a point for being an early version of a famous series.
Ninja Taro (NMK/UPL) (March 8)
A top down action game that draws a lot of comparisons to Zelda, but the slow pace and maze-like overworld reminded me much more of Rolan’s Curse from a few posts ago, which was made by the same team. It’s a weird game that starts you with no weapons equipped even though you do actually have two in your inventory. The music is so incongruent with the game that I thought this must be a localization change, but it’s the same in all versions. The translation did trim the text length down by about 90%, though, so that’s something. I’m guessing the English version is probably a pretty confusing story.
Despite getting an NA release, it seems to have attracted almost no attention. Neither Wikipedia nor MobyGames have any reviews, and the only English review I could find from anyone was a 9/10 score from a GameFAQs user decades later. The only professional review I saw in any language was the 23/40 score it got from Famitsu, although there is a decent amount of positive coverage about it from modern Japanese users.
Rating: 1. There may be some neat ideas here, but I can’t get past how slow you move.
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