There were only two new Game Boy games from March 13-19, 1992, but this is another case of a sparse window getting its own post because of an upcoming massive release day. March 27th got six games for some reason.
Yomihon Yumegoyomi: Tenjin Kaisen 2 (Kaze/Meldac) (March 13th)
The first Tenjin Kaisen was an innovative side scrolling shoot ’em up that had you build a party of four characters who all had their own characteristics. This throws that out to become an odd mix of visual novel, adventure game, and card battler instead. It’s very verbose, very slow paced, and written entirely in hiragana, which made it a nightmare for non-fluent me to read. The music and graphics are nice enough. The battle system seemed incomprehensible without the manual.
I’ve mentioned Japanese sources referring to Meldac games as being very rare before, but this is an extreme case. I found one sentence of info on it in English and Japanese sources come down to another sentence on Wikipedia, a Gamesoft post, some resale sites, and a surprisingly detailed guide from a site called GBClover. Gamesoft seemed confused by the change in genre and by the game in general. No one offered a score.
Rating: 1.
Super Street Basketball (C-Lab/Vap)
This 2-on-2 basketball game seems like the best implementation of the sport so far. I say ‘seems like’ because I hate basketball, so I can’t pretend to be qualified to say whether any specific version is what a fan would want. That said, it’s easy to tell where the ball is, movement is smooth, and there’s a special animation with power meters that plays when you take a shot. This is the first time that shooting isn’t just luck. The music is also good, although the graphics aren’t anything special.
It was clearly intended for release outside Japan and is written entirely in English. Despite that, neither it nor the sequel made a few years later ever made it anywhere else. It seems to be incredibly obscure even in Japan and I didn’t find any coverage of it besides from Gamesoft and another personal blog, although both were positive. Kind of a shame that it didn’t do better.
Rating: 2
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