The Game Boy games of May 18-31, 1991, have all been outdone by later games.
G-Arms: Operation Gundam (Bandai) (May 18th)
Another Japan-only release that’s been largely forgotten everywhere. It’s an action game that controls really poorly and has extraordinarily tanky enemies, to the point that I got bored before managing to kill any of them. Japanese Wikipedia was the only source I found with any useful information. Famitsu gave it an incredible 17/40 (4/5/6/2), which I believe is their lowest score so far. Wikipedia’s long list of reasons people disliked this game includes that it’s hard to read due to being written entirely in katakana (very glad to know that’s not a me problem), that it’s poorly explained, and that enemies respawn when you visit your base, which can make the game go on forever.
It does not have a MobyGames page, but has a 3.5/5 from 14 reviews on GameFAQs. There is nothing else of note written about the game in English anywhere, though, and I’ve noticed several other deeply obscure Game Boy games with similar ratings/counts there, so make of it what you will. Japan certainly didn’t like this one.
Rating: 1.
Game Boy Wars (Intelligent Systems/Nintendo) (May 21st)
Sometimes this is called the predecessor of Advance Wars, but it’s all the same series going back to Famicom Wars in Japan. This version lacks a story mode or the cartoonish commanders of later games, but most of the core gameplay of the series is otherwise present. I like that you can set the CPU difficulty mode when you’re setting up a battle, but I didn’t play much because I don’t really enjoy this series.
Japanese Wikipedia is oddly uninterested in these games and just links back to English Wikipedia for most of the series. It got an 84% average from three German critics and clearly remains popular in Japan today given several positive atwiki reviews and plenty of tutorial sites and Let’s Plays. Still, it was definitely overshadowed by the sequels that came a little later in the Game Boy’s life.
Rating: 3 for significance.
Asmik-kun World 2 (Cyclone/ASMIK) (May 24th)
The sequel to Asmik-kun World has almost nothing to do with the original game, which was a trap-em-up. This is a game that can be generously compared to Pipe Dream about laying out a road from the starting point to the level exit. If you accidentally place a road that creates a dead end like I did in the screenshot, you appear to just be stuck. None of the buttons did anything at this point, so you may have to reset the system entirely.
I found very little about the game. One Japanese blog gave it a 3/5 and another suggested it could be fun if you could deal with the balance issues. Once again, GameFAQs has 3.5/5 from 17 ratings. I suspect there are approximately 15 people who just rated every GB game on there in a way that balances out to 3.5/5. GameFAQs also claims it takes 18 hours, which seems highly unlikely for a game with four worlds. I’m going to stop reference that site unless there are substantially more than 15 inputs now.
Rating: 1
Snow Bros. Jr (Dual/Naxat) (May 24th)
The only game from this batch to release in NA or PAL, it’s a port of an arcade game that was kind of like Bubble Bobble with a big emphasis on co-op. This version does not support Link Cable, so they apparently had to change a lot of the game to work in single player. This was apparently the right call, because its 78% average score makes the GB version the best reviewed platform for the game, albeit only by 2% over Genesis.
Rating: 2. It’s neat that they put so much work into it, but there’s little reason to go back to this version now that Snow Bros. Collection exists for modern platforms.
Legend: Ashita e no Tsubasa (Quest) (May 31st)
Despite having almost no presence in English, this is indeed from the same Quest that made Ogre Battle. It’s a JRPG that wears its Dragon Quest influence on its sleeve. It scored a decent 25/40 in Famitsu, but does not seem to have fared well with users. I saw a couple Let’s Plays, a detailed walkthrough that gave it a 19.5/30 while providing no explanation, and a detailed review that gave it a 2/5. The latter praised the graphics and music, but knocked it for having a very high encounter rate, slow menu navigation, and for balancing money so poorly at the start that you end up not needing the available weapons anymore by the time you’ve grinded enough to afford them.
The GameFAQs stats are the same suspicious numbers as always, but someone did make a brief walkthrough and upload maps of each region.
Rating: 1
Leave a Reply