This video was not quite a Labor of love. A Patrol Labor, that is.
Game Boy World makes its 2017 debut today. I would like to say the subject at hand is inspirational and sets a great precedent for the year, but that would make me a heckin' liar. On the contrary, this latest Game Boy release is all kinds of mundane. Not wretched, not enjoyable, just kinda there, a legacy of a publisher's willingness to peddle a fairly popular license without giving much thought to the quality of the problem attached to it. It's a shame, because I really like the Patlabor franchise and think it could make a heck of a game in the right hands.
To add to the sorrow: This YouTube video has unfortunately been blocked by Bandai in Japan due to my inclusion of some footage from the anime franchise being covered here. If you happen to be one of the rare few who watch Game Boy World from Japan, I apologize. You can watch via Libsyn instead:
Either way, you're in for an 11-minute video of which about 7 concern how cool Patlabor (the anime) is, while the rest kind of offers a perfunctory critique of how tedious Patlabor (the Game Boy game) turned out to be. I scraped as much game discussion as I could out of this, but there's a weird element to the game in which you're given a password after completing a stage which does not function as the password for continuing the game. I had intended to take the time to translate the dialogue in an attempt to figure out what I needed to do in order to advance, but time constraints kicked in and this is as far as I made it. Patron Max Smith shared a Nico Nico link that shows footage from later in the game and... it's all the same thing. Just dull turn-based robot fights from start to finish. So, no great loss.
Next episode concerns a game that maybe isn't great but is definitely weird and comes from an interesting developer, so I'll try to make up for this episode's shortcomings there.
