There were only two new Game Boy games on April 27th, 1991, but I didn’t want to make a multi-month post, so here we are.
Karakuri Kengoden: Musashi Lord (TOSE/Yutaka)
This is a Zelda-ish game based on an anime that ran for about a year from October 1990 to September 1991. You journey through various regions while fighting enemies and solving some basic puzzles. It’s fairly basic stuff, but the graphics are decent and the music is actually pretty good. I definitely prefer it to the usual crummy platformer that every licensed game got.
The anime certainly seemed to be remembered in Japan if the massive Wikipedia page is anything to go by, but there’s not a lot written about the game. The only review I found suggested it would be fun for fans of the anime, which is faint praise. That said, there are a lot of Let’s Plays available and some have quite a lot of views. I also didn’t find any professional Western reviews, but it does have a 3.5/5 from GameFAQs users and someone cared enough to make a detailed guide there, so it has fans.
Rating: 2 for effort.
Torpedo Range (SETA)
A game about sailing a submarine. You pick one of a handful of countries to play as and then set sail from their capital to find missions all around the world. It’s a neat idea, and the first game to represent a full world map on Game Boy, but the missions themselves are horribly balance. Movement relative to attacks is always either too fast, making hitting anything a complete crapshoot, or too slow, making dodging anything a complete crapshoot. Some mission styles have amazing graphics and some look like Atari 2600 games. The only consistent point is decent music.
It got a 67% from one German critic and has a 3/5 on GameFAQs. I found almost nothing in Japanese, oddly. There was an informational atwiki post, an informational gamesoft post (although being far longer than their usual post probably implies liking it?), and a site that ranked it the 30th best shooting game on Game Boy without providing any context for that score. I’m surprised that it got an NA port five years later considering it was seemingly overlooked in Japan.
Rating: 2. Interesting, but very poorly balanced.
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