The Game Boy Studio program by Chris Maltby has inspired a whole new generation homebrew Game Boy developers. David Marin is one of them, having published Pokettohiro! last year through Broke Studios. It’s now available for download on the David Marin’s website here, as well as through the Steam and Switch stores. Truly dedicated Game Boy aficianados can also buy it in Game Boy Color cartridge form with a pretty nifty box here from Broke Studios directly through their new platform Homebrew Factory.
All of this is well and good, but what sort of game is Pokettohiro! anyway? Well, to put it simply, the game is an explorative side scroller, spiritually closer to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link than Metroid. Take that as a compliment or insult as you will. Without question, Pokettohiro! looks and plays a lot nicer and a lot smoother than either of those games. It makes great use of the Game Boy Color, and what minor issues may exist with hit detection are just that- minor issues. The game is easy enough it’s pretty simply to look past those problems.
Where Pokettohiro! falters in terms of difficulty is that while the battles themselves aren’t difficult, hitting the right event flags for progress is. Given how many NPCs there are, and even the presence of a fortune teller, it’s a little surprising just how obtuse Pokettohiro! often is when it comes to progression. As the game’s manual helpfully explains, there are six heroes you can play as throughout the game, with new ones after the first being unlocked upon completion of a dungeon. The first such dungeon lies at the end of the Forest of Illusion…but the game never actually tells you this. It kind of hints that the only thing the forest is hiding is a secret shop.
The Forest of Illusion is already a questionable start, since while you can brute force your way through that puzzle, it’s still not that intuitive how to solve it. But even completing the dungeon isn’t as satisfying as it should be, because Archer isn’t really a character so much as just…an archer. The NPC dialog is actually pretty flavorful, so it’s a bit of a disappointment that none of the playable characters have any kind of personality, even indirectly. Pokettohiro! is generic like that, not exactly wrong to the spirit of the Game Boy Color era, yet so obviously and easily improved upon it’s a disappointment that the game doesn’t even try.
As fun as the game is in short bursts, the backtracking can be surprisingly annoying, and plentiful save points can worsen the situation for a player who realizes they’re on the wrong side of the world entirely for what they’re trying to do. Automatically warping back to town after finishing a dungeon is likewise more harmful than you’d think, since there may have been some critical place you were supposed to go on the way that you might have missed. The entrances to locations unlockable with new characters are fairly clearly telegraphed, but it’s quite easy to, say, not notice that there’s someplace aside from the dungeon that you need to go underwater or else you’ll get stuck when you get to the next place on the map you suspect you need to go.
There is no map, incidentally. Pokettohiro! could have solved much of its annoyances by including one. Features like a bestiary feel especially unnecessary when it’s so easy to get lost or stuck. Still, Pokettohiro! has undeniably cute design, parsable on actual hardware, and straight up exceptional on modern variations like the Chromatic. It’s far from unplayable, even if the clunky pseudo-Japanese title makes the game fairly difficult to search for if you’re stuck. While probably not worth the premium Game Boy Color box price, Pokettohiro! is more than charming enough to warrant a download at its online store price.
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