The Game Boy games of April 19-20, 1991, represent the first entries in the system’s third year. They include some real innovators.
Cave Noire (Konami) (April 19th)
Another Konami hit. This one is the Game Boy’s first true roguelike, featuring simultaneous movement grid movement, random dungeons, and all the other key features of that genre. It has five playable dungeons with various difficulty settings, and once you’ve selected both, the game generates a layout for that dungeon, a quest to complete in it, and random stats and equipment for you. Completing the quest unlocks the next difficulty for that dungeon.
It’s often credited with being far ahead of its time. I can certainly see why, but I couldn’t play very far because I was being out-damaged by every enemy even in the first dungeon. It might be user error, or it might be some key advice I needed from the manual. Either way, it’s a game that has fans. Famitsu gave it a 29/40 and Wikipedia cites a ton of gushing modern reviews from Western outlets. Family Computer only gave an 18.9/30, however, which I believe is the biggest difference they’ve had with Famitsu so far.
It has never released in other regions or even had a port in Japan, but it does have a fan translation patch available. That said, it’s one of the least necessary patches ever. There is minimal text in the game, so translating yourself is easy with either basic language skills or a screen reader paired with memorizing the icons.
Rating: 3.
Chacha Maru Panic (Human Entertainment) (April 19th)
This is basically a Mario Party minigame released as its own title, for some reason. You’re a guy sliding around a very slippery ice block with some enemies on it. Your goal is to push all the blocks at the edge of the island into the water without falling in yourself. That’s it. The island layout and shape does change from level to level and there are apparently bonus stages and a final boss, but it’s not enough to make this interesting.
Famitsu gave it a 21/40 and Family Computer an 18.3/30. I can’t find anything written about it more recently in Japanese, and it barely exists in English. Despite that, there are tons of Japanese Let’s Plays on Youtube. Not sure what that’s about.
Rating: 1.
Little Master: Raikuban no Densetsu (Zener Works/Tokuma Shoten) (April 19th)
This is basically Fire Emblem, which had its first game release almost exactly a year before. It’s so similar to FE, in fact, that I can’t really think of anything to add to that. It has good overworld music, but really annoying sound effects when units are fighting each other. The combat animations also take about 10 times longer than they should.
Famitsu gave it a 25/40 and Family Computer a 22.1/30. Somehow, I have only just noticed that Family Computer scores are actually the results of reader votes and not true reviews, which explains the extremely specific scores. It’s not well-known in the West, as far as I can tell, but has plenty about it on the Japanese internet and seems to still be popular. It received two sequels, the second of which was on SNES. No game in the series has ever left Japan or been re-released. It may also be a hard game to find if the lack of MobyGames collectors and Japanese resale sites is anything to go buy, but there are copies on eBay for $30, so who knows.
Rating: 3. It’s too slow for me, but it gets points for basically being the first handheld FE game.
Super Robot Taisen (Banpresto) (April 20th)
It only took a day to get the next Game Boy SRPG with the first game in the massive Super Robot Wars series. You get to pick a lot of settings and unit configs before you start the battle, but it’s all pretty standard after that. The only interesting bits I saw are that you can pick from multiple attacks when you hit an enemy and that the movement ranges for all units are absurdly wide. They have to be, because the map is massive, but that has the effect of making unit placement largely irrelevant. Everyone can just attack whoever they want because you’re only working with six units and everyone has six movement points.
In another case of Famitsu and Family Computer readers not agreeing, the former gave an abysmal 22/40 (including a 3 from one reviewer) while noting that it wasn’t anything new, while the latter gave a fairly high 20.6/30. The series is still going strong 35 years later and has started to release in the West, it certainly worked out in the end.
It’s somewhat difficult to look for contemporary opinions on this game because game in the series has a very similar name and it’s not even the only one on Game Boy. There are certainly still people writing about it and posting Let’s Plays, but the one detailed review I found was pretty negative.
Rating: 1. I don’t see any reason to play this one unless you’re a hardcore fan of the series and want to see where it started.
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