Battle of Kingdom (Game Boy)

 There's a bit of received wisdom regarding handheld games that I've never really agreed with: that they should be designed around being short experiences, never to be played more than a few minutes at a time, like early arcade games. In my opinion, I actually want my arcade-style games on full size consoles, whereas I much prefer playing things like RPGs and such on handhelds. Basically, I prefer handheld games to be something that can occupy a lot of time while I mindlessly half-watch something unimportant on Youtube or whatever.

 

Battle of Kingdom is a game that kind of comes in between those two philosophies. It's a slow, methodical game, but you can't save your progress, and once you're dead, youre dead. And you'll probably be playing for thirty to sixty minutes for one go. Anyway, in it, you play the part of a beseiged kingdom's military commander, who has decided that offence is the best defence, and is waging a campaign across the land. Unfortunately, the kingdom has suffered a bunch of attacks already and its forces are severely diminished.

 

There's an all-enompassing currency in the games called Points, which acts as money for recruiting troops, and as MP for using their skills in battle. Recruitment happens at the start of each stage (and sometimes at certain points within stages, too), and you can spend points on various generic fantasy characters: knights, elves, ghosts, etc. The enemies you'll be fighting are also drawn from the same pool. All the characters have three stats: HP, which is obvious, AP, which is attack power (there's no defense stat, so a character's attacks will always deal one fifth of their AP score in damage), and SP, which denotes the SPeed at ehich they cross the battlefield. They each all have a special power, which I'll get onto shortly.

 

The stages are made up of simple, board game-style maps with squares on them, and you go from square to square one at a time until you reach the end and go to the next stage. Some of the squares have shops or little games of chance, but most of them are battles. The battles all take place on a long stretch of land, with a force starting at each end. You pick one of your troops to go out, and the enemy does the same, then the two walk fowards until they meet. You control your troop by moving your cursor along the five icons at the bottom of the screen. The feet will make your troop walk forwards and the fist will make them stand still and repeatedly attack. The potion spends some points to restore ten of their HP, and the guy shooting lightning will knock your enemy back a tenth of the stage's length. The middle "?" icon utilises your character's special power. Most of these are ranged attacks, some do other things like sending the enemy back to their end of the field, reducing one of their stats, swapping one of their stats for your's, and so on.

 

Going back to the concepts in the first paragraph, this is a pretty good example of what I was describing as a good fit for handheld consoles: it's simple and low intensity, but it can keep you occupied for a decent length of time and though it's far from being mindless or easy, you don't need to be paying it your full attention most of the time. I enjoyed it a lot, and I recommend it! Also, though I played it with a translation hack, it's pretty text-independent, so if you wanted to track down a real cartridge, you could probably play it fine without being Japanese-literate. Finally, I looked up the developer of this game, Lenar, and it seems they had a bit of an experimental streak in them, as along with this, their output included the cute, almost artsy Bird Week on Famicom, and the turn-based PC Engine wrestling game Monster Puroresu, which I've covered here before, many years ago.