You've probably seen this floating around the internets lately. Yes, someone is taking Metroid II, the probably the single most disliked Metroid title, and is attempting to use the Zero Mission engine to make it into something the feels more like a traditional Metroid game. Why are people so excited about it, when Metroid II isn't well-regarded?
Well, aside from the prospect of a new Zero Mission-quality Metroid game, I think it has to do with why Metroid II didn't work. Getting the gameplay quality of the original Metroid out of a system with a 160 x 144 screen resolution and four shades of grey fro graphic display just wasn't happening. There's hope burning in every Metroid-loving gamer's heart that maybe Metroid II is actually an awesome game that just needed to be set free of the Game Boy.
Metroid II isn't the only sad story of developers trying to cram too much into a Game Boy game. The following seven titles are all potentially great, but they'd be tremendously better if they weren't Game Boy games. They deserve to be remade for modern hardware.
Rolan's Curse 2
There was a previous Rolan's Curse, but I never played it so I don't care about it. I did play Rolan's Curse 2, which is possibly the single most underappreciated Game Boy title. It's an RPG that was originally published by Sammy-- yes, the Guilty Gear guys-- in the US by their now-defunct American branch.
As RPGs go, it was a little ahead of its time. Rolan's Curse 2 is at first glance a Zelda clone, but instead of gathering up tools, you gather up party members. Only one party member can act onscreen at a time, but the characters all handle differently and have slightly different attacking abilities. They even level-up individually, when you find the right item in one of the treasure chests sprinkled around the overworld map. This means no XP grind, and gameplay that really emphasizes mapping and exploring. To get all the level-ups, you end up engaging in some absurdly complex backtracking.
The problem with Rolan's Curse? The graphics are basically terrible (though great by Game Boy standards), in a way that severely hurts the quality of the boss battles. Rolan's Curse 2 omits dungeons and lets you walk directly in to bosses once you fight your way to them on the overworld. While the boss sprites do attempt detail, they're still pretty blobby. They're very large, so the Game Boy's screen doesn't allow them to do much more than just sort of... move around slowly. Your player characters and the regular enemies fare a bit better, but are so simple as to be... well, a bit abstract, to be honest. Killing things just isn't satisfying, it's either too easy or you have basically no idea what you just beat.
Rolan's Curse 2 would certainly be a game with more of a cult following than it has now if it'd been a SNES or even an NES title. The basic game design allows for tremendous replayability, since it gives you a lot of sequence breaking opportunities. Unfortuantely, it lacks the ability to present memorable or detailed visuals that is almost essential to making players gravitate toward an RPG. It's hard to make gamers want to explore worlds that aren't beautiful or at least interesting, and the Game Boy can't really produce either.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters
The original Kid Icarus and Metroid games were produced off of the same engine. Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, therefore, was almost certainly made using the engine developer for Metroid II. It fixes a lot of Metroid II's basic problems-- sprite size is reduced, you can examine the map while the action is paused, sprites are almost uniformly dark against pale backgrounds-- but it still doesn't really feel like a refinement of the NES Kid Icarus. In some ways it feels worse.
It all comes down to limits the hardware forces on the basic nature of the game. Of Myths and Monsters is, in objective terms, easier to play than Kid Icarus. Power-ups are more generous, monsters are less aggressive, and there's no more auto-scrolling to turn the bottom of the screen into an endless void. Combat and control feels good, although Pit's bowshot range seems to have shrank along with the total screen size. Jumping puzzles suffer from not being able to show you much of the game at once, and require pure memorization at some points.
Of Myths and Monsters is unquestionably a more detailed and better-designed game world than Kid Icarus, but... the problem of screen real estate is tremendous. The world of Kid Icarus felt very large because Pit was a tiny little white blob with pitiful little arrows he could just barely use to fend off Death. The Game Boy doesn't even try to present you with anything like this, while reducing the original's evocative monsters down primitively simple shapes. The Snake sprite is actually less recognizable as a snakes than its NES equivalent, at the cost of being so easy to pick out from the background.
Factor in the lowered difficulty and you have a game that feels like a pale shadow of Kid Icarus moreso than a sequel. It's simply because Of Myths and Monsters takes place in a world that, visually, always feels smaller and greyer and more homogenous than the original title's. Even giving Of Myths and Monsters a revamp with NES-caliber graphics would make it a far more memorable experience.
Mole Mania
Mole Mania is remembered, insofar as most people remember it, for being one of Shigeru Miyamoto's more obscure projects. It's actually an incredibly good puzzle game in the Adventures of Lolo vein, but larger and more sophisticated. There's more to do on each map and the puzzles can get quite mind-bending. It came out right as the market for action-puzzlers that weren't of the falling block variety was cooling down, and arguably, it was a game doomed from the start.
Personally, I think Mole Mania would have left a more significant legacy if it had only been released for some system other than the old Game Boy. Mole Mania asks you to do some profoundly absurd things, and the absurdity would feel enjoyable if the graphics allowed objects to be more... recognizable, shall we say?
The problem is the lack of color, which is surprisingly important to intuiting your surroundings in an action-puzzle type game. It's especially important in Mole Mania, where puzzles ask you to move around maps on two different planes: the surface and an underground world that's all black with the odd light patch of boulder. Likewise, the enemies you battle on the upper world are often totally unidentifiable, and some of the designs are... uh, questionable.
Everything else about the game is quite good, and gameplay is smooth once you orient yourself in your surroundings. When you adjust to the world's monochrome nature, it even starts to feel kind of natural after awhile. Still, how much better would Mole Mania feel with vibrant colors and higher resolution sprites? You'd have cabbages that looked more like cabbages and baby moles that didn't just sort of look like lumps. In my mind's eye I see this game being remade with Mario vs. Donkey Kong style graphics, and it would be absolutely gorgeous.
Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge
Belmont's Revenge is generally regarded as the best of the Game Boy Castlevanias. Rightfully, it should be regarded as one of the best Game Boy games, squeezing better music and graphics out of its miserable hardware than almost any other game. It's also quite good as an action game by itself, which is no mean feat on a tiny screen with no color.
The controls lack the sluggish quality that marred other GB Castlevanias, although getting Christopher to be as spritely as the GBA and DS heroes is probably just impossible. The plotline is actually imaginative enough that it's still well-regarded today. The progression through a series of different castles, which you can basically pick in any order, is also an interesting twist. I suspect it began largely an excuse for Konami's designers to try and make some backgrounds the Game Boy wouldn't choke on as hard as Castlevania's classic, gothic look.
And there's so much of the classic Castlevania look that the Game Boy chokes on, which is really why Belmont's Revenge made the list. In order to keep everything roughly to the same scale it is in Castlevania games, the enemies become unavoidably blobby. There are a few detailed sprites, like the great rolling eyeballs, but plenty of inexplicable dark masses that could be damn near anything. Bosses in particular are at a very weird sense of scale given Christopher's sprite, striving to be Konami-large when actually they can't do very much onscreen. Even projectiles have to be toned down, since it's not possible to make them more identifiable with bright colors.
Actually playing Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge feels very good. The controls are, in fact, note-perfect for a Castlevania action game, the level designs are incredible, and the music is fiendishly catchy. It's the stripped-out graphics and tiny screen size that hurt the game the most, and everything it's good at would shine even better with GBA-quality graphics that allowed for properly-sized bosses and enemies. Then Belmont's Revenge might stack up as one of the greatest Castlevania games, period.
Mega Man V
Plenty of people fling poo at Capcom for the utterly unoriginal way in which it's flogged the Mega Man series. The first few NES titles were quite unusual and innovative for the time, but that creative formula somehow ossified into something hopelessly rigid and increasingly doofy (Dust Man? Really?). There is a single shining light of original thought in the original run of classic Mega Man games, and it showed up-- of all places-- at the tail end of the Game Boy titles.
Where previous Game Boy Mega Mans (Mega Men?) had just strip-mined the NES titles for bosses and ideas, Mega Man V went into a bizarre and intriguing new direction. It postulated Dr. Wily finding a source of alien technology and then devising a group of nine Robot Masters called Stardroids, named for planets of the Solar System. For the most part, they had surprisingly original designs and interesting pick-up weapons for Mega Man to gain after defeating them. The story wrapped up with a few plot twists and, in some ways, seems to be a direct ancestor of the Mega Man X series.
Where Mega Man V suffers is control, and to some extent, the graphics. Much of what the game tried to do with the appearances of the Robot Masters and their levels was just beyond the grasp of the humble Game Boy, even as late in the machine's lifespan as MMV hit. The game commits a lot of basic errors like putting dark sprites against dark backgrounds. Mega Man himself controls in a weird way. He's not quite sluggish, but something about his slide and jumps just doesn't feel right.
Oh, but if you could salvage this game with the engine used for the NES or SNES Mega Man titles, you'd have possibly one of the greatest Mega Man titles ever made. There are some really great level and enemy designs in MMV, thyey just aren't realized very well thanks to hardware and memory limitations. The same approach taken with color, a bigger screen, and rearranged music would be absolutely fantastic, a great way to produce a "classic" Mega Man title that still felt like more than just an iteration of a formula.
Kirby's Dreamland 2
The original Kirby's Dream Land hasn't aged well. It's intentionally easy and lacks the copy ability later Kirby games introduced, and that eventually became Kirby's signature ability. Kirby's Dream Land 2 is the game that sits as the missing link between the seminal Kirby's Adventure and classic Kirby Super Star, and it really shouldn't have been a Game Boy game. Kirby's Dream Land 2 is desperately trying to present Kirby fans with a more challenging game than Dream Land or Adventure, while also introducing entirely new gimmicks.
Making this work would've been tricky even on the NES, but on the Game Boy you end up with a game that feels cramped. This is frankly surprising, since just about every other Game Boy title with Kirby's name on it did a very clever job of making something that worked perfectly with both the Game Boy's tiny screen resolution and lack of color. The controls in Kirby's Dream Land 2 are fine, but it's when you get into the increasingly complicated level designs and giant animal sidekicks that you'll really find yourself wishing for color and a more expansive view of the world around you.
What's interesting about Kirby's Dream Land 2 is that all of its more challenging aspects are purely optional. In each world you can look for a hidden Rainbow Pieces that can usually only be found by combining a particular animal buddy and copy ability. If you get them all, then after the final boss battle, you get treated to a second, very satisfying fight against a secret boss. This is a very clever way to give veteran gamers more to enjoy from Kirby without alienating the first-time gamers the series was designed for. It's a shame all of the Rainbow Pieces are... well, monotone greyscale.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to enjoy the process of ferreting out all of the Ranbow Pieces. The animal sidekicks you need to get to them make Kirby's sprite relatively large while the Game Boy screen, as most of this list has stressed, is very small. Maneuvering them feels a little clunky. The lack of color is also jarring when there's so much more going on during any given moment of Dream Land 2 than there was of the relatively sedate Dream Land. If remade as even an NES game, Kirby's Dream Land 2 would be an extremely memorable platformer. It's somewhat memorable as-is, but hard to appreciate when it's not really any better than Kirby games that can be played on far more appealing hardware.
Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land
While Wario Land II is the better of the two Wario Land games, it also got a proper Game Boy Color remake that makes it entirely accessible. This leaves the original Wario Land languishing, forgotten by all but nostalgic Game Boy and Nintendo enthusiasts. In many ways Wario Land was a truly revolutionary platformer, and some elements of its gameplay are still unique. It's also just different enough from its sequel that you can't really argue it's not a game that anyone "needs" to play.
The controls for Wario Land feel a lot like the controls for a top-notch 2D Mario platformer, a SMB3 or SMW. The level designs are interesting but nothing too out of the ordinary for a Mario platformer, while the actual plot of the game is refreshingly amoral. You are Wario, gathering up gold coins because you want to be rich, and also I think you're trying to steal a statue of Peach or something. It doesn't really matter. What does matter is Wario gaining superpowers from various adorable hats and fighting Captain Syrup again.
Wario Land actually does a very good job of struggling with the screen size problem that stymied a lot of the other games in this list. Sprite resolution is its main issue that needs to be desperately addressed. In the last battle Captain Syrup has no facial features save for two dots for eyes, and this is frankly disturbing. Similarly, a lot of the enemies and background features Wario runs into have a squished look to them. Nothing is blobby or outright indistinct, but often key features are missing that just make the game kind of look weird.
Wario Land does so much right. It has a basically accessible difficulty curse, and then, much like Kirby's Dream Land 2, a bunch of optional collectibles that grant better endings but are quite a bit more bitchy to get hold of. The only thing that makes it hard to appreciate is the lack of color, which makes landscapes that would otherwise be appealing very bland, and the restrained number of pixels available per sprite. Given SNES-quality visuals, Wario Land would be right up there with Yoshi's Island as one of the most fondly remembered Mario spin-offs. Instead, it seems to be slowly sliding into complete obscurity.
