The Game Boy games of June 28th, 1991, were led by Seiken Densetsu and not remembered for anything else.
Aerostar (Sigma Pro-Tech/Vic Tokai)
A shmup that is, if nothing else, original. The core gimmick is that you are a tank that can also fly like an airplane briefly, but you can only shoot when in tank mode. Tank mode also restricts you to moving on the road surface at the center of the screen, which is frequently broken up by gaps. You’re supposed to use your jump to carefully extract yourself from difficult positions and get to other parts of the road, but everything moves too slowly and it all just ends up feeling needlessly restrictive.
Famitsu gave it a very poor 18/40, with the highest individual score being a 6/10. MobyGames shows an 84% average, which would be incredible, but it’s only from three European critics and excludes much lower scores it got from other Western reviewers like Gamespot. Aerostar is also the name of a common bus made by Mitsubishi, which makes it a little harder to search for than it would otherwise be. Still, I found a few Let’s Plays and one neutral-sounding Japanese blog, but little else. GameFAQs has a single 4/10 written user review.
Rating: 1
Seiken Densetsu (Square)
Released as Final Fantasy Adventure in English-speaking markets and later renamed Adventure of Mana, this is the first game in the Mana series. It’s closer to a Zelda game than Square’s traditional JRPG fare, but does feature elements of the latter genre like levels, purchasable equipment, and it even kind of has party members. It’s far beyond anything released so far on Game Boy in the West in terms of story and music. The graphics are also impressive, and its 10-11 hour runtime made it much better value than most of the competition. Although it initially received some criticism for having little to do with Final Fantasy, later reviews generally considered it one of the best games on the system.
In Japan, it was an immediate smash hit, selling 500,000 copies and easily setting the Game Boy review records for Famitsu and Family Computer with a 33/40 and 25.4/30 respectively. MobyGames has an 84% average from 24 reviews and GameRankings had a similar score before shutting down, but later reviews tended to be more positive as mentioned before.
Rating: It has to be a 5. This is another one I intend to come back to and play fully.
Jinsei Game Densetsu (Takara)
Jinsei Game is the Japanese version of the board game Life, and is basically the same thing except that it includes childhood and has some extra events. The Game Boy would eventually get a few versions of the standard game, but this strange fantasy variant came first. It’s a strict roll-and-move game that doesn’t really present any meaningful choices at all except for occasionally getting the option about whether or not to buy something. Otherwise, spaces seem to be one of an automatic change in your money, an event that simply happens, or a ‘battle’ that comes down to just picking a random number. Japanese reviews say that it takes around 30 minutes to play and that most of that is spent watching the computer do its thing with no input from you. You’re not even allowed to stop the movement spinner like in Mario Party.
I didn’t see any contemporary reviews, but both atwiki and the Retro Boy blog consider it a kusoge. They mostly have the same complaints I did, but atwiki further points out that the computer is seemingly set to always say ‘yes’ when given a choice, which results in it any job change events it gets taking forever. I liked that Retro Boy’s section on good points just reads: “I’m sorry. I didn’t see any.’ Wikipedia’s footnotes pointed me to a Game Boy retrospective book published in Japan that awarded it the title of second worst game on the system. We’ve actually already seen a lot of their top 10, including Master Karateka (1), Tasmania Monogatari (3), Chibi Maruko-chan (4), and that Fist of the North Star fighting game (6). Two of their 10 are actually GBC games, so that only leaves three more.
Rating: 1.
Leave a Reply