There were two new Game Boy games released from December 25-26, 1991.
Ganbare Goemon: Sarawareta Ebisu-maru (Konami) (December 25th)
As the title implies, this is a Ganbare Goemon game in which Ebisu-maru has been kidnapped and you need to save him. It’s listed as an action RPG in some sources, but seemed to just be a beat ’em up from what I played. There wasn’t anything resembling RPG systems beyond some NPCs who give quests. Your basic attack has great range and seems to OHKO everything, so the game is pretty trivial as long as you press attack at the right time. It has some of the best music I’ve heard on Game Boy so far and occasional nice backgrounds, but the main graphics aren’t very impressive. It also has one of the harder to read Japanese fonts.
The game did release in PAL almost a decade later as part of the Konami Collection for GBC, but was exclusive to Japan in this version. It continues our streak of Family Computer scores being much better than Famitsu’s, with the former giving a 22.0/30 and the latter a 23/40. There are loads of posts about it on the modern internet, which is unsurprising since it’s from a famous series and was recently re-released in a Switch collection. Atwiki describes it as an unbalanced game and calls out occasionally high difficulty, the lack of bonus lives, and a hard to understand final boss as flaws. At the same time, they give it credit for generous saves, good music, making effective use of a monochrome screen, and for being easier to play than the NES games.
Rating: 2. A point for the music.
Momotaro Densetsu Gaiden (Hudson) (December 26th)
Like the first Momotaro Densetsu, this is a JRPG based in Japanese folklore. This one takes place after the first game and has you play as three new characters instead of Momotaro. Those are Binbogami, the poverty god, Yashahime, a princess of the oni world/hell, and Urashima Taro, who is similar to Rip van Winkle. Each has their own story, almost like Octopath if they didn’t come together, and each is apparently similar to a different Dragon Quest game. MobyGames describes Binbogami’s strictly 1v1 story as being similar to DQ1, Urashima Taro’s story being similar to DQ2, and the more complex party construction of Yashahime’s story being similar to DQ3. It’s unclear if that is a widely held opinion. Regardless, it’s the first GB game with story selection like this.
Reviewers were generally impressed. Famitsu gave it a 26/40 and Family Computer a 23.1/30, but the game was later ported to PC-Engine and received good scores from a variety of Japanese PCE magazines. Oddly, despite those good scores, it doesn’t seem to have ever been ported to anything more recent than Dreamcast. The IP owners have chosen to focus on the Momotaro Dentetsu spinoff instead, which is the train game we’ve already seen one version of.
I found a couple of playthroughs of it and some guide sites on the modern internet, but no reviews. While there are a lot of videos on it, nearly all of them have under 500 views, so it’s not getting much love there either. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s actually unloved or if it’s just inaccessible after decades without an accessible port.
Rating: 3? It seemed promising, but maybe it’s best experienced on PCE.
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