Tag: japan-only Page 1 of 2

Parasol Henbee

A Chubby Cherub-esque platformer based on a short-lived Japanese animation by the creator of Doraemon.

Aretha

Yet another busted and tedious attempt to bite off Dragon Quest‘s success.

After Burst

A fun idea—a puzzle platform shooter, with robots!—falls short of its potential here thanks to janky programming.

Soreyuke! Amida-Kun

A fast-paced arcade action game based on the classic Japanese amidakuji puzzle.

Monster Truck

An extraordinarily poor racing game based on the question, “What if Excitebike but unplayable?”

Roadster

A pleasantly playable top-down racer that almost makes up for Monster Truck.

Pop’n TwinBee

Konami’s cute-em-up series suffered a few compromises en route to Game Boy, but still managed to offer a good time.

Astro Rabby

A top-down platformer with plenty of personality and better playability than you might expect.

Lunar Lander

A wacky, inexplicable, one-of-a-kind take on the ancient PC moon-landing simulation.

Battle Ping Pong

Before Ogre Battle, there was… Battle Ping Pong? Sure, why not.

Patlabor: The Mobile Police

Another mediocre Game Boy release based on an anime. It’s a shame; Patlabor was great, and deserved a much nicer interactive adaptation.

Dragon Slayer I

A seminal action RPG comes to Game Boy, despite some original design choices making it terribly ill-suited for the platform.

Hong Kong

Another game of matching mahjong tiles. It has a twist, but the only interesting thing about it is its backstory.

Puzznic

Oh. It’s another puzzle game. This version is distinct from the NES adaptation, and also from the soft-porn arcade versions.

Shisenshou: Match-Mania

Irem makes its Game Boy debut with this adaptation of Tamtex’s arcade Shaghai variant, losing the original version’s color (and its smut) in translation to the portable.

Volleyfire

A promising premise for a game — two players go head-to-head in a shooting match — crumbles beneath lousy programming. A throwback to an older time, in a bad…

Card Game

So, yeah. It’s a card game.

Ayakashi no Shiro

The first of approximately half a dozen first-person RPGs ever to appear on Game Boy, Ayakashi no Shiro plays by the rules laid down by Wizardry but switches…

Blodia

Based on Diablo—no, not THAT Diablo. Blodia draws its track-arranging concept from a 1983 ColecoVision game which in turn probably took cues from Konami’s Loco-Motion. Whatever its heritage… it’s…

SD Lupin III: Kinko Yaburi Daisakusen

The classic manga and anime comes to Game Boy in the form of… a generic, by-the-numbers puzzler. Because that’s precisely what one of the most beloved (and stylish!)…

Space Invaders

A bare-bones but admirably faithful rendition of the arcade classic. While Taito made some compromises in order to squeeze the game into the tiny handheld, they did so…

Trump Boy

Where SD Gundam was offensively awful, Trump Boy is merely unremarkable in every way. A quick and dirty compilation of four different real-world card games, it lacks any…

SD Gundam: SD Sengokuden: Kunitori Monogatari

  Game Boy gets its first strategy game and its first Gundam game… and Kunitori Monogatari is pretty lousy at being either. Rather than depicting a cool Gundam, this…

Flappy Special

  Another old-school PC conversion. Another Soukoban variant. DB-Soft and Victor definitely were not on a mission to radically change the way we thinking about Game Boy software…