The Game Boy games of July 11-12, 1991, were Ganso!! Yancha Maru, Castlevania II: Belmont’s Curse, and Vattle Giuce
Ganso!! Yancha Maru (Irem) (July 11th)
This is a Japan-only entry in a series that was occasionally localized as Kid Niki. There’s not a great deal written about it in either English or Japanese, but it has 461 players on RetroAchievements and someone made a GameFAQs guide. It’s yet another side scrolling platformer. The only unique piece is that you attack with an incredibly short range shuriken that comes back to you like a boomerang. Both you and most enemies die in one hit. The last two levels introduce a couple of two-hit enemies, and bosses always take at least three hits.
I found two Japanese reviews that give it a 5/10 and a 3/5, as well as one English review that came in at 6.9/10. I played all the way through since it was fairly short with just 12 levels, and the latter two ratings seem about right. It is mostly free of the cheap deaths other Game Boy games relied on to have staying power, but the graphics are relatively bland and it heavily overuses the few pieces of music it has. The game also seems to have at least a small speedrunning community in Japan, with times typically around 9 minutes. It was closer to an hour for me with a lot of save states and interruptions.
Rating: 3. It’s nothing innovative, but you can do a lot worse than this for Game Boy platformers.
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge (Konami) (July 12th)
Castlevania‘s second Game Boy outing arrived about a month earlier in Japan than in North America. It’s a side scrolling platformer that lets you pick any order to do play the first four stages. Other than that, it’s pretty close to what you’d expect from Castlevania. The graphics and music are quite good for the time.
It received a surprisingly poor 23/40 from Famitsu, with no individual reviewer scoring higher than a 7. Family Computer readers gave it a decent 21.4/30, however, and Western critics broadly adored it. Later user reviews have also been strong, at least in comparison to the average Game Boy game. It owns a 3.4/5 on MobyGames and a 3.62/5 on GameFAQs. For me, however, the walking speed is too slow for it to be much fun.
Rating: 2.
Vattle Giuce (Information Global Systems) (July 12th)
This horribly-named game is a pretty generic vertical shmup. It has incredible background graphics, but the music loops quickly and all the moving sprites have dramatic outlines that were probably intentional but look awful. The boss I saw looked much better, but was fought against a white background.
The game has been largely forgotten everywhere. MobyGames does have an entry, but there’s not much there except for a few screenshots. Wikipedia doesn’t mention it at all, atwiki only has basic information, and GameFAQs has one written review that gave it a 4. Beyond that, I only found a few Japanese blog posts that summarized playthroughs without giving a score. One was much more interested in the suggestive images of anime girls that pop up after level completion.
Rating: 1. There are just so many better shmups even at this point in the GB library.
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