Game OVA Season 4: Episode 5 — Gulliver Boy

I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

The Property

Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy ("Fantasy Science World Gulliver Boy", sometimes "Fantascience World Gulliver Boy") is an alternative historical fantasy action show with some sci-fi elements by way of anachronistic technology that follows the titular mysterious foundling Gulliver, along with their close friend who is a nerdy engineer type with glasses, as they and their allies get to the root of a mysterious conspiracy to put the lost knowledge of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis to nefarious purpose. It is not, and I must assert this, Gainax/Hideki Anno's Fushigi no Umi no Nadia (a.k.a. Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water) with the serial numbers filed off. Just... maybe kinda similar. In spots.

Gulliver Boy exists only as a 50-episode TV show and a few video game adaptations, which suits our purposes here. We'll be focusing on the first trio of episodes followed by the action-RPG adaptation that the Super Famicom saw (and was one of the earliest fan translations for the console, released back in 2001). No specific reason for choosing this one beyond my curiosity about how much this specifically riffs on Nadia (and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels for that matter), that it's not another sci-fi superhero show since I've kinda tapped that barrel a few too many times this season already, and knowing the SFC game seems playable enough if perhaps nothing too substantial. (I might have an ulterior motive regarding playthroughs on that specific console that will come to light next month.)

The Cast

Gulliver Toscanni: A trainee mage raised in the country of Venice (historically accurate: Venice was its own sovereign state until the Italian unification, or Risorgimento (hey there's me), of 1861 made it part of the new Kingdom of Italy). Witnessing the shocking death of his foster father prompts him to seek the truth behind the murder.
Edison: A bespectacled boy and Gulliver's closest friend. Despite his age he's capable of great feats in mechanical engineering. I'm sure the name's just a coincidence.
Misty: A mysterious (misty-rious?) girl who is trying to elude the Spanish army and joins Gulliver on his journey.
Phoebe: Gulliver's fairy companion. Couldn't go anywhere in the '90s without some fairy following you around.
Budo Muscle: A henchman working for Judo. Has muscles.
Baron Fullmoon/Mangetsu: A more regal henchman with a full moon for a head. More a schemer than a fighter.
King Judo: The show's antagonist, at least for the first few arcs. The current King of Spain. Was behind the death of Gulliver's father for reasons that become clear later, probably. Is pursuing Misty and chased her all the way to Venice.
Hallelujah: The actual antagonist. A millennia-old demon from Atlantis, recently awakened. Is using Judo for her own enigmatic purposes.

The Anime

Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy was created by Ouji Hiroi and Toyoo Ashida on behalf of Toei Animation, and was written by Junki Takegami and Yukiyoshi Ohashi. Ouji Hiroi is primarily a video game developer and is best known for creating the Tengai Makyou (Far East of Eden) and Sakura Taisen (Sakura Wars) RPG series. He has written manga has well, including the historical action manga Samurai Crusader which was illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami (Crying Freeman, Trillion Game). Presumably it was his idea to have games already in development while the show was in production. Toyoo Ashida was a prominent animator, director, and character designer—he performed all three jobs on Gulliver Boy—who, coincidentally enough, polished his more cartoony style while working on the original 1981 anime adaptation of Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump, our subject from the previous episode. Speaking of past Game OVA subjects, he was also heavily involved in the character designs for Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru as well (I knew that show had a familair Dragon Ball vibe to it). Other credits include F-Zero GP Legend, the '80s Fist of the North Star anime, InuYasha, the Vampire Hunter D OVA, and the two '80s Franco-Japanese productions The Mysterious Cities of Gold and Ulysses 31, both of which were formative shows for me.

Writer Junki Takegami's worked on a huge number of anime and tokusatsu shows, the former including long stretches of Pokémon, Naruto, and One Piece among dozens of others. He was also the scenario writer for the PS1 RPG Thousand Arms, notable for its steampunk setting and a dating sim mini-game that inexplicably tied into its weapon crafting system. Yukiyoshi Ohashi has likewise worked on many scripts, including several for Pokémon and its OVAs/movies, the '90s Berserk adaptation that JeffJeff's Bizarre Adventure was reviewing last I checked, Fist of the North Star (again), and several episodes of the Power Stone anime (that's a real thing, huh; TIL Power Stone had enough of a story that it could be adapted into an anime). Takegami wrote about three-quarters of Gulliver Boy's episodes with Ohashi penning the remaining quarter. As for Toei Animation, I provided a rundown of that studio in the previous Game OVA entry but suffice it to say they made a huge impact on the world of anime with just Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, let alone the hundred other shows they've produced with Toriyama and others.

Episode 1: "A Sudden Desperate Situation"

A voiceover introduction tells us that the Devil made problems in Atlantis—that's Atlantis with a 'tis' not a 'ta'; it wouldn't go down to Georgia for some time afterwards—until the King of Legend and the Queen of the Moon sealed it away, though it vowed to one day return should their descendants ever happen to meet by chance. I'm sure that won't happen. Starting the episode for real (after some classic shounen OP business), we zoom in on an impossibly remote castle where a boy is roused from his sleep by an apocalyptic vision of the future that includes, among others, the death or injury of his closest friend and his own father. Deciding to escape this ominous place, which turns out to just be Crappy Hogwarts rather than some demon lord's bastion, his hand suddenly erupts with magical power which smashes down a wall and affords him an opportunity to get out. He's chased to the edge of the floating island by the guards and some bug-eyed dog tentacled things they summoned but he decides he'll be fine if he uses the same magic hand thing as before while he falls: unfortunately, he doesn't remember how he did that and instead plummets into the ocean surrounded by jagged rocks.

And I thought my university's orientation day was a nightmare. How are freshmen expected to get up there? Levitation's an elective class.Go, Misty! Escape on that legally distinct ratite!

The show then decides it's done with that guy and moves over to a different, cooler guy riding across the vast desert between Spain and Italy (no need to look it up, trust me it's there) on a fleet of tanks. But he's too cool and it's causing a bit of tonal whiplash so we readjust again and now we're following Gulliver's pint-sized pal Edison, who just built a jetpack so he can reach the magical school where they're keeping Gulliver and break him out of there. Edison has a bone to pick with the magicians of the world: he despairs that innate magical talent creates a society of haves and have nots, while science makes us all equal. Why spend years learning a fireball when you can just buy a flamethrower? His attempts to take off don't quite go to plan and he spends the next few moments flying around in a panic and causing trouble for the citizenry of Venice. Not the worst thing to happen to the City of Water that day though, as Judo arrives with his army—he was the cool guy we saw earlier—and starts blasting the crap out of the fortifications. Just before the throng reaches the city, a girl hops out of a hay wagon and rides the rest of the way into Venice on... well, it's a Chocobo. I don't know how else to get around it. Just before this, we see her touch and then conceal the important-looking blue pendant she's wearing and it's like... C'mon now. At least change the color.

The Doge (or I guess just King) of Venice agrees to let his vassal Papa Toscanni meet Judo and figure out why he decided to break the peace treaty the Spanish King spent a fortune to procure. As all that's happening, Edison happens to crash into the girl boobs-first and his delight in getting to talk to a woman is quickly eclipsed by the delight of getting to see actual science at work with the fleet of tanks driving through the streets (?) of Venice. Alas, the Spanish army isn't here for sightseeing and while Judo proclaims that he started this war out of "love", Edison and Misty (as she introduces herself) are captured by Spanish goons and are about to be shot when Gulliver shows up, yells at them to stop (which they do, for some reason), spends the next thirty seconds staring directly at Misty, and then manages to reproduce his weird green hand laser thing and that's enough to stop the villains from executing his friend in broad daylight. Papa Toscanni is less lucky, getting cut down by a clearly unhinged Judo after he accuses the "maze-like" Venice of concealing his true love from him, then vowing to have Toscanni's family (Gulliver) join him in the afterlife so he won't be lonely. After all, separating a family wouldn't be very "loving" of him. He then summons female triplets out of nowhere to weep for this poor soul on his command, which is the kind of power move only the King of Spain could hope to pull off. I hope to see some equally baller affectations from him in future episodes as well.

The Spanish Army. I guess it's redundant to say that, given the immediately recognizable 'two red diamonds' Spanish flag makes that apparent enough.Papa Toscanni's fatal strike came from a laser sword which is why his wound is glowing like that, but since my mind has been corrupted by so much barely-censored anime nudity I can't help but assume something 'fell out' during the struggle. (Yes, I'm treating this death scene with the right amount of gravity, thanks for asking.)

Gulliver's just about wrapping up what he's been doing, which was beating the crap out of a bunch of Spanish soldiers, but Misty's already made a break for it before Gulliver can bask in her gratitude. Gulliver wistfully remarks about her giant rack before wondering if she left because she was on her period—OK, I realize this doesn't look good, but the guy was trapped in some all-dude magical academy prison for years so maybe this is just a temporary hang-up—and continues to shoot the breeze with Edison for a while until some dude in a pilgrim suit decides to tell him about his dead dad. Dying dad, turns out, as he sticks around just long enough to tell Gulliver he's adopted, hands him a strange snake emblem, and then... disintegrates into the ether like a Jedi? I forgot, all Venetians die this way. It's how they get around clogging the canals with cadavers. Gulliver mourns while swearing his revenge on Judo, while Judo ponders where Misty has got to. I dunno, maybe try the Cerulean City Gym next?

Episode 2: "Fire the Magic Glove!"

Judo, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite anime villains, is still being mopey after killing a guy who clearly knew true love if he had family and tries to get Misty to cheer him up with a smile only to despair at how it's actually just a not-convincing robotic puppet of Misty that he had someone build for him. He then destroys the puppet. You make your own fun when you're the King of Spain, evidently. Gulliver's having a hard time of things too, wracked with new visions of a diamond-shaped blue pendant (we've seen that before) and a pair of red eyes staring at him from the deep. He freaks out Edison with his night terrors enough that the two of them almost tumble off the top of the belltower that they decided would be a cool place to have a slumber party. Hearing the girl's name, Misty, sets Gulliver off again and he decides she's connected to his visions somehow and leaves to find her. Simultaneously, Judo recruits a new henchman—Baron Fullmoon, a little dude who has a full moon as a head and a crashed rocket in one eye like the famous George Melies character—who is just as flamboyant as he is, declaring "Moonstream!" several times as he announces himself. Fullmoon has a henchman of his own: the bulky Budo Muscle, who sorta resembles a Battletoad without the toad parts. The show has made precious little sense so far but I'm very much into it.

Can't imagine why the real Misty decided to get the heck out of there.This character just fascinates me. Was he born with the shuttle in his eye or is that some sort of fashion statement?

Edison goes looking for Gulliver and Misty and quickly finds the latter by walking into her boobs-first again. She's hiding from the Spanish army who have since infiltrated Venice and are searching for her, including Fullmoon and Budo Muscle, and so the last thing she needs is some little goober around making too much noise. She then departs with Edison behind her continually shouting "Misty!" as the entire Spanish army gives chase, which still includes a lot of tanks since I guess no-one wants to Tiananmen square up against those things and tell them to go drive their Hispanic asses back over the Pyrenees already. They manage to lose the Spaniards by dipping down a manhole cover while the rest of the army respectfully clear the streets for Toscanni's funeral. Alas, the pair get cornered by Budo Muscle in the sewers and it's only due to the sudden arrival of Gulliver, who sensed Misty's presence due to her necklace that he's never seen her wear, that he's able to rescue them. Budo then pulls out a laser cannon powered kinetically by a pec deck exercising machine and despite Gulliver's own laser show he's knocked into an aqueduct as the structure collapses.

A flying wizard from his school shows up to fish Gulliver out (as well as save Edison, since no-one else was going to bother) and we hear more about how Gulliver is the chosen child of destiny fated to do this and that and whatever in a conversation between the flying wizard (who is the principal of the magical prison school) and a... I think it's meant to be a white tiger anthro playing up a Chinese mystic archetype but he reminds me too much of the Ronso from Final Fantasy X. This convalescence scene also introduces us to the fairy Phoebe and her racially germane pixie cut, though she's a bit too shy to say much right now. Telling the awoken Gulliver that he lacks the strength to fight Budo Muscle at present, the principal does the empathetic thing as his mentor and instead forces him to undergo the Gom Jabbar test and stick his hand inside a magical lionhead box that brings tremendous pain. I suppose this would've been part of his mid-terms had he stuck around and actually finished his curriculum instead of becoming a dropout by literally dropping out of the hanging prison school castle. Having performed its job well, the lionhead box breaks in half to reveal that Gulliver's hand is now firmly ensconced within a blue glove with a red power gem on the back of the palm. Finally, with a weapon to take on his enemies, Gulliver and Edison take a flying stationary bike back to Venice to look for Misty again.

This exercise machine is both Budo Muscle's main weapon as well as means of conveyance. Spain's truly on the cutting edge of gym tech.Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Misty's found herself cornered at the belltower from before, with a hundred Spanish goons in pursuit—I don't know if the screenshots make it clear, but the Spanish soldiers all kinda look like the mass-production Black Mage soldiers from Final Fantasy IX, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out they have a similar origin—when they're almost all killed by another bolt from Budo Muscle's Gruntmaster 3000. Saving Misty by blasting the ground as they fall, which makes a crater that really only serves to increase falling distance if you think about it, Gulliver marvels at how easily he can control his magic now. Doesn't stop the bell from falling on top of them while they breathe a sigh of relief at their narrowly avoided demise. Trying to finish them off, Budo Muscle gets unexpectedly blasted off again by Gulliver's second magic beam and it feels like we've got something that take on Judo at last. It's at this point that a massive tidal wave sinks the city of Venice, putting most of it underwater. A version of Venice where the streets are replaced with rivers? You hate it to see it. Gulliver and friends escape the devastation on Edison's floating elliptical, but not without heavy hearts.

Episode 3: "Adventure in the Lion's Den"

This show's been a constant hyperactive fever dream so far but maybe we'll get a nice, rational episode now we've established the lore and central characters. Venice is a wash, literally, but Europe's a big place to hide a girl, a pendant, and a magical glove that shoots laser beams if needs must. Before that, though, we're sticking around Venice to see what can be done to help the people of this newly subaquatic country. Due to Edison's nonsense both he and Gulliver make the acquaintance of a young man wearing desert clothes, Lawrence of Algeria (eh, close enough), who was also friendly with Papa Toscanni and hands Gulliver a mysterious book and key and tells them they're the means of accessing an ancient dead civilization with technology that exceeds even Spain's. Gulliver isn't quite so quick to accept this potential new tool to use against his enemy because he's weirded out by how often Lawrence insists on being called "onii-san" but, I dunno, I don't think he can afford to rely on his glove powers alone.

Lawrence and his oddly seductive catamaran.You aren't fooling anyone at this point, Edison. I wonder if this is where he got the idea for light bulbs?

Gulliver can't make heads nor tails of the book since it's written in Atlantean hieroglyphs or something, which also means he has no clue where the key goes either, but I suspect figuring it out this early into a 50-episode TV show would probably make things too easy. Thankfully, Gulliver is pretty dumb so they're going to milk this whole Atlantis thing for a while longer, clearly, maybe waiting until they find a cryptographist the next few towns over. After dropping the book after handing it to Edison to take a look at and it slides down the roof of the building they're on, Misty catches it and starts reading from it no problem. Ah. Cool. Before she can get much further Edison also slides off the roof and bumps into Misty boobs-first—starting to think he's doing this on purpose—and then the three decide to hunt down the first clue from the book: there's something to be found at a lion rock in the sea around Venice. Throughout this episode we keep checking in with Phoebe too: they're actually NB right now as fairies only decide on a sex to match their treasured human and Phoebe has yet to meet theirs. That's why they're currently buzzing around looking like an androgynous Gozer the Gozarian.

While the trio are screwing around talking about how there's a bunch of weirdos that eat raw fish in the distant land of Zipang—next you'll tell me they eat food with sticks!—they miss the crucial part of Misty's translation where she talks about how the lion statue is protected by an enormous fish guardian. Right on cue, the fish (or rather a sea serpent) shows itself and attacks the group, almost eating Edison. Remembering the mighty forces of magic at his disposal, and by "remembering" I of course mean "forgetting", Gulliver jumps on the sea serpent's back and just starts going to town with his fists on one of its many eyeballs for a lack of any better means of destroying a colossal sea monster. Edison hands him one of his grenades and he feeds it down the beast's gullet, skeletonizing it in seconds (these bombs are all meant to be EMPs by the way), and the crew decide it's probably not important that this statue gateway to the almighty powers of Atlantis is now unguarded. Right then, they're attacked by another sea beast, covered in mussels: wait, it's actually muscles! It's Budo Muscle, who miraculously survived getting laser blasted and drowned by that tidal wave, and he quickly sets off after snatching Misty. Coincidentally, he's heading directly for the mouth of the lion rock they're already there to visit. Inside the cave is a group of narrow stalagmites poking out of a field of lava: the "lion's fangs" that the book mentioned. After a brief shootout with Budo Muscle's lasers, the pillars start collapsing one by one due to a cave-in and Budo Muscle is sent spiraling into the magma below, but not before ominously promising "I'll be come back!" in broken English as he falls. I guess now we'll never figure out who he was supposed to be homaging.

I can't believe they killed off such a promising villain as 'guy who is ripped'.New ship get.

Stranded in the middle of the lake, Gulliver tells his friends to hold on tight and never let go "even if they die" in what was probably meant to be a reassuring pep talk, before using his magic glove to propel himself and the others across to the opposite side of the cave. However, the instability has caused the magma to build up like a tidal wave! Somehow! So that means they've got to escape through a door at the back. Gulliver pushes and pushes the door to no avail—Misty can't help either, since she dropped the priceless Atlantis book somewhere despite holding onto it being her one job, though to be fair she did get kidnapped by a muscle-bound freak and it's been a very trying day for a great many other reasons too—and doom looks certain for them all. Then Edison has the smart idea of actually trying to pull on the big door with handles and it... really, that's what they needed to do? Just pull on the door? OK. So anyway, they survive. They still need to find out where this key goes though, and find it shortly afterwards (it's inside another big lion head, of course) and their prize for all this Goonies shit is the mythical golden submersible, the Sea Lion. I guess I could see that coming in clutch if your whole show is about finding Atlantis.

Anyway, we'll leave the young adventurers here for now, right at the part of the RPG where they unlock the first vehicle and can finally reach more places on the world map. That last episode was a bit more of a conventional adventure serial with its cave full of traps and treasures but so far Gulliver Boy's been more than a little surreal for the type of straightforward globetrotting action show it presented itself as through its opening animation and song. Stuff like the evil King summoning crying wenches for his fallen opponent was way too much like that one Simpsons goof about a weeping widow hiring service and made me unsure how seriously I'm supposed to take such a pivotal character death. Definitely unclear what to expect from the games, whether they maintain the same silly sense of humor or go a bit more straitlaced and stick to dry plot developments. Let's find out.

The Game(s)

The game we're focusing on this time is Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy for the Super Famicom, released in 1996. Bandai was the publisher but the developer is a little harder to pin down: contract developers Amble seems to have done the bulk of the work (they'd later go on to develop the Duel Masters CCG adaptations for GBA) with some art assistance from Magitec.

For the most part, the SFC game is a straightforward action-RPG that has some mild resemblance to Secret of Mana and its family of games. All attacks, normal and otherwise, have cooldown gauges and you typically have three characters that can switch between at any time. Rather than having the others be CPU controlled, they sort of disappear into subspace to regenerate HP and expedite their attack gauges which encourages you to switch between them often, as does the fact that they have different strengths and weaknesses. Gulliver is a reliable damage dealer who accumulates different special attacks throughout the game, Edison can destroy monster nests with his bombs though they take a long time to recharge and have a brief timer that makes them impractical against moving targets, and Misty's role switches between support, offense, and just mostly being useless depending on the current stage of the story. Healing items are few and far between but not so rare that you won't head into the endgame with a decent stack of them, and you can save/heal any time at your vehicle, so its challenge level is very much on the fair side barring a few nasty boss fights. Let's have a closer look at it:

Welcome to Gulliver Boy! I forgot to mention it but that is what the world looks like back there. A disc on top of a big tree. That'll be important later.The game immediately fast forwards to approximately where we left off with the show, after the death of Papa Toscanni and the Spanish invasion of Venice.We've even been introduced to Lawrence, Phoebe, and that blue lion dude whose name I've already forgotten. The game really isn't interested in taking things slow and introducing people: we've got bad guys to beat up.Naturally, Edison's coming too. We're going to need that dweeb, sadly.And here's the good baron with his messed up eye. I wonder if we meet another henchman later who's just a train that drives at you very suddenly.After a bunch of cutscenes we finally have control of Gulliver and Edison. As you can see across the bottom there, there's three characters total and each of their UIs looks slightly different owing to their role. All Edison has are his grenades (the red balls) but Gulliver has room for all kinds of weird shit.And here's the combat. Gulliver attacks with his magic glove, which produces a curved arc just in front of him. It's easy enough to hit enemies with it, at least more so than Edison's bombs right now.We already went and got the Sea Lion before the game started so no need to make our way through that cave full of magma. Probably for the best, I dunno how to do platforming in this game yet.We never got to see inside the Sea Lion but it has its own sassy AI unit, Edokko, who vaguely resembles a middle-aged Japanese man. He'll heal us and save the game whenever we visit him, provided we aren't about to move to the next destination.The way XP works in this game is that enemies drop colored canisters with a number on them (usually 10) and you need to collect it with the right character. The color matches their hair: Pink for Gulliver, green for Edison, and yellow for Misty. It's sometimes worth the time to stick around monster spawners farming, especially if there's tough enemies around.Phoebe's decided Gulliver is 'the one' and permanently switches to female. She's still not quite his type, being about a foot tall, but she'll keep trying.We did say the whole Lion's Den arc was concluded but Budo Muscle is still kicking around and is our first boss fight. He's actually kinda tough, as he quickly flies around the stage diagonally like a DVD screensaver and it's not as easy to predict as you'd hope. Still, he is just the first boss, and we can always switch between Gulliver and Edison to give the other one a chance to recuperate.Our reward is recruiting Misty! Yay! Unfortunately, she has no abilities and is completely useless. Boo!Now we're done with Venice we can go to Rome and visit... well, this is either a member of FOXHOUND or an actual eagle person with hammers for hands. I know which one I'm rooting for.Oh... it flies? I thought it was a boat. Actually, I guess this is more convenient for us.Since Rome is surrounded by a giant steel wall, Edokko has the bright idea of flying right into it instead of, I dunno, flying over the wall and landing behind it. That created a lot of noise and now Misty, Edison, and Phoebe are stuck in prison for the rest of this arc.We're introduced to Judo here as well as the three lieutenants he has guarding Rome, since Spain conquered it not too long ago: Eroica, Gorgos, and Multis are their names. We'll be tackling them individually before too long.Yep, this is pretty much what I remember Rome looking like. We can't leave in the Sea Lion since most of our group is still in prison but we can always go there to save.In this arc we're introduced to the Majin, an Atlantean mecha that almost but not quite responds to Gulliver's glove. Instead, we're going to go have to find Hammer Eagle in a different cave.First, though, we're attacked by Multis in the game's second boss fight. He mostly just whips his chains around: he's so easy to avoid that his boss fight is the only one with a 'no-damage' condition for the game's RetroAchievements set.Hammer Eagle is here, presumably moonlighting from being one of the Mavericks from Mega Man X, and gives us the Eagle Disc. Now we're cookin'.Ah, right. I guess I do need to break out those goobers already.Having the Eagle Disc is enough of an upgrade that we can use the Majin now, and after activating it Gorgos challenges us to a fight at the arena.He's, uh, a bit on the tough side since he can kill us in three punches. Since we're in full on Real Steel mode here I'm going to need a bit more of a HP base before I can deal with this fight.If you go to the colosseum normally you can just fight random gladiator goons to your heart's content. I boost up a bit then go back to the Majin cave to trigger the boss fight again.After Gorgos you're immediately forced to fight Eroica right after, so I'm glad I didn't try to tough out that first encounter. Like in any Punch-Out!! game you want to alternate fists to keep them stun-locked. Too bad your dream wasn't to play a bad version of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots for five minutes, because I managed to fulfil that one for you.After defeating the trio and springing our buds from pokey, we cannot leave Rome quite yet without finding another one of these blue moonstone things. Each one adds to Misty's repertoire too, making her finally useful.She's also Judo's sister! That makes... a lot of what we saw earlier very suspect. Well, I suppose what do you expect from an European royal family?I'll jump ahead a lot from here on out, since you have an idea of this game's about now. Droid is... actually, I never could figure out what this guy's whole deal was. It's a fun fight though?I hate these conveyor belts with a passion.Defeating Judo in Spain just has us chasing this new bad guy, Hallelujah, for the remainder of the game.Gulliver continues to acquire new abilities, like Sonic and Axe and Plasma. Most summon one of these guys who then goes on to destroy everything in sight.Here we are at the Inn on the edge of the world. We're going to move onto the 'lower moon' next.And this is the final boss. She's mostly invulnerable for the whole fight until we get some eleventh hour upgrade and toast her with it. Gotta love when that happens.Our plan to stop her reviving again is to 9/11 the lower moon directly into the world tree, the source of her powers. What catastrophe will result from this amount of destruction?Oh, it just turns into the Earth. Well, that's convenient, my house is there.

Does it do right by the anime? I guess so. It moves through the story of the anime (I assume) at an insane clip, condensing some twenty-plus hours of story into a fifth of that. One character shows up, says a few words, dies tragically, get resurrected by the bad guy and you're forced to fight them, then gets changed back into their good self all within a couple hours. Great if you want a Cliff's Notes version of a 50-episode anime with some decent enough top-down combat but it's probably not the ideal way to absorb that narrative, if indeed it was even good enough in the first place to warrant a more thorough delivery system. You could do a lot worse for an anime tie-in RPG, I'll say that much in its favor.

Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy: Kuusou Kagaku Puzzle - Puritto Pon is the sole Game Boy appearance of this series and, taking advantage of the platform, has switched to being a puzzle game similar to Puyo Puyo and Dr. Mario. It was also published by Bandai though its developer is less clear, unless Bandai chose to develop the game themselves. From what little I can pick up from the story, Edison enters a science contest which seems to involve dropping pairs of blobs into a field with the goal to match up four in any combination, creating chains with nearby colored blobs, before the field is completely filled with unremovable trash. There might be some nuance I'm not picking up but it seems like a speed-focused puzzle game where you want to set up chains without necessarily slowing down and letting your opponents take advantage of their unique powers: the opponent will do stuff like freeze the blobs as they fall so you can't move them, or make them fall quickly, and completing the requisite amount of clears before they can hit you with those powers too often is the key to victory.

Welcome to Puritto Pon. That sure is Edison looking pleased with himself. Guess he didn't think he'd get his own game.I have no idea what the story's about, I just assumed at the whole science competition thing. Could also be a watermelon eating contest going by that sign.Yep... this sure looks like Dr. Mario Puyo Puyo. Phoebe's our first opponent for whatever reason. I guess because she's tiny and easy to beat up.Case in point. You only need to reduce the opponent's HP to 0 in order to win. It goes down faster with chains and bigger combos.Misty didn't put up much of a fight either, but her ability of causing my pieces to fall faster did lead to some tense moments.Finally, we have our own bestest bud Gulliver. Despite his name being on the box he's kind of a pushover too, though he can freeze your pieces so you can't turn them around (which is what he's doing here). I never figured out what's going on on the bottom left there with the four slimes.OK, so it's Edokko next. I'm going to take my leave here: a superintelligent AI from an ancient civilization seems like a tough fight.

Does it do right by the anime? Not really. You could make a game like this from anything, but having a longer show like this does at least make it easier to source opponents for Edison to conquer. Puritto Pon is the very acme of a licensed quick cash-in, where any block-stacking puzzle game variation can see itself hosting the characters and aesthetics of any given license that the publishers had lying around. Happened to Puyo Puyo itself plenty of times too. Maybe Bandai figured this was more Edison's speed than anything action-heavy like the SFC game?

Finally, there was a turn-based RPG simply called Kuusou Kagake Sekai Gulliver Boy that utilized FMVs clips taken from the anime. It was released on the PC Engine CD-ROM and Sega Saturn, two of the more prominent CD-based platforms of its release year of 1995. These two games share a developer (Hudson Soft) and look similar enough so I'm inclined to believe they're the same game, with the later Saturn port/remaster offering a few improvements beyond the extra memory and resolution. The PCECD game actually came out so early into the show's run it seems very likely that the two were created together: the Game Boy game too was released only a few weeks after the show began airing. I couldn't get too far into this one since it's a text-based RPG but here's a smattering of screenshots from its opening:

The Saturn game's opening has a bunch of scenes I've never seen before. I've heard that this game picks up around the second half of the season but it's still introducing everyone.Like here, there's a fight scene where Gulliver fights off a bunch of Venetian goons hassling Edison, using only a wet towel. It's clearly before they've met Misty or picked up that magic glove, yet it wasn't in the first few of the episodes of the show. Were these cutscenes made just for the game?I've no idea who all these plague doctors are either. They weren't in the show nor the SFC game. It's making me real curious what sort of continuity we're following now.But then the FMV ends and Gulliver wakes up in class. I guess we're in the floating school from the first episode of the anime? It didn't quite look this... pedestrian though.We can't leave because class is in session and this hall monitor dude ain't budging. This is one of those 'have to talk to all the relevant NPCs before we can move on' scenarios, clearly.The menu UI suggests a pretty straightforward turn-based RPG, should we ever get to the point where we're fighting stuff and it doesn't look like we will.

That's going to do it for the Gulliver Boy games that I could find—the PC Engine CD game is just the Saturn game with slightly worse graphics—so we'll wrap it up here. It's definitely way more goofy than Nadia, the Grandis Gang notwithstanding, but feels much more generic and disposable in turn. I've no idea how they stretched that show to fifty episodes but the strange and sudden left turns the video game took would make more sense in a longer serial format. Either way, I was addicted to these types of animated adventure serials as a kid thanks in large part to Disney's DuckTales and Gummi Bears so I bet I would've got a kick out of this show too had it been localized for international audiences.

Next time: The finale of Game OVA Season 4! Ugh, I suppose that means I'll need to make more of an effort too. Ugh. Hard work. Ugh.