Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird GB (Game Boy)

So, I was attracted to this game due to it being a vertically-scrolling shooting game on the Game Boy, which is pretty unusual. The Game Boy does have some surprisingly great shooters, of course, but they tend to scroll horizontally, like Nemesis II, for example. It's also interesting because instead of a ship flying up the screen, you're piloting a giant robot, walking up the screen.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do a very good job of representing vertical shooting games on the Game Boy, on account of it being rubbish. The problem is not just that it's easy, but it's also boring. You trudge up the stages, easily killing the occasional enemies (that mostly don't even really look like anything besides abstract shapes). You can take eight hits before getting a game over, but after you've taken one or two, you can rely on a nice convenient power-up to come along and restore you back to full health.

As a result, I completed Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird the first time I played it. Then I completed it again to take screenshots for this review. The thing is, before you start playing, there's a character select screen, with two characters to pick from, and the title "select your level". Whichever you pick, there doesn't appear to be no difference at all, either in the character you're controlling or in the difficulty of the stages. Mysterious. Either way, the game's about ten minutes long, and they aren't even ten particularly exciting minutes.

I don't recommend wasting any time on this game, unless you really need to play every Game Boy shooting game, or if you're completely obsessed with the anime on which its based and need to experience everything to do with it. Otherwise, don't bother.