Welcome back to another brief glance—the briefer the better for some of these—through the game library of the Bandai WonderSwan, an ill-fated portable system that nonetheless found some success dwelling in the chronological gap between the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance. When it wasn't being sandwiched between two boys, the WonderSwan managed to produce a surprising number of games that ran the gamut from disposable anime tie-ins all the way to acclaimed debuts for franchises that are still going strong today, and somewhere in the middle you have a bunch of system-exclusive Squaresoft RPGs and some other obscure treats. I'm hoping to discover five more this month.

The rules are... well, there aren't really any. I just randomly pick five games from my master list of WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color games to feature on here and then discuss my experiences along with the duration I was willing to spend with them. That was the format I had resigned myself to, at least. However, after further negotiations with the powerful Randomizer Union (see Part One), we've agreed to implement a fortuitous new rule: Every seventh game will be one I've chosen, rather than plucked from the list haphazardly. I've exercised that privilege to choose the launch game Gunpey as this feature's seventh game. There's a few other big WonderSwan games I wouldn't mind checking out, as well as a handful with fan translations, so this little bonus rule should come in handy for those. Well, at least for the updates that have multiples of seven in them anyway.

For more on the WonderSwan's history and what I'm doing here, as well as rundowns for the previous five games, be sure to check out Part One.

Anyway, here's WonderSwan:

#006: Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite!

("Meta Communication Therapy: Hey, Listen!")

• Developer: Yoshidayama Workshop
• Publisher: Media Entertainment
• Release Date: 2000-03-01
• Inscrutability: Maximum
• Is This Anime?: Nope.

Field Report: Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! is... uh, I guess I would categorize this as an adventure game, or maybe educational? The idea is that you have this animated stick figure character, named Yuyu, and you talk to it about your day and the things that trouble you. Yuyu then provides a number of canned responses that help calm you down and make sense of things, and then just kinda goes about its business until you have another question for them. "Goes about their business" in this case meaning a bunch of quotidian tasks and chores like vacuuming the apartment or watching TV or preparing food. It's like that old Little Computer People game that pre-empted The Sims and other digital people-watchers. I guess the idea is to provide a virtual confidante for lonely folks who might be feeling overwhelmed by daily life. I'm not really versed enough in psychiatry to know what the deal is with "meta communication therapy" and how it relates to this game in particular—I figured meta communication meant like subconscious gestures and body language, which the game struggles to get across with its lo-fi stick figure protagonist. Either way, it's a weird product. Hopefully it still helped people though.

Yoshidayama Workshop has a few credits but they're mostly in supporting roles. The company itself was a contractor that worked with larger publishers like Namco or Taito and going by their GDRI credits they usually helped out bigger game projects with their sound: music, sound design, and programming sound drivers. Metakomi Therapy looks to be entirely theirs, as opposed to them just contributing part of a greater whole. They have a couple more WonderSwan games they're attached to, including—coincidentally enough—the WS port of Puzzle Bobble, a game series I talked more about on this month's 64 in 64 episode. Media Entertainment is one of those companies with an "SEO poison" name that is hard to dig up dirt on, but they were mostly active during the PlayStation era producing low-budget pachinko games. Work is work, I suppose.

Man, what a game to start on. This might be the most mystifying WonderSwan release I've encountered yet. Naturally, I can't make heads or tails of it given it's all text-based and in Japanese. I just inputted my own name in katakana a few times here and there and the rest of my interactivity was limited to answering questions I couldn't read and watching Yuyu do his (her? their?) thing once I'd let the game idle. It felt like I was trapped in a Don Herztfeldt animation that I understood even less than usual. Realizing Yuyu wasn't about to bust out a deck of cards or an arcade cabinet and turn Metakomi Therapy into a real game any time soon, I said my goodbyes to that amiable stick figure. May they continue to assist the more deserving.

Time Spent: About ten minutes.

#007: Gunpey

• Developer: Koto Lab
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 1999-03-04 (Launch Game)
• Inscrutability: Minimal
• Is This Anime?: No. If anything, it feels more like Looney Tunes.

Field Report: Gunpey, sometimes styled GunPey, is a puzzle game with a wild west theme in which you're having to draw horizontal lines across a grid. However, these lines are all diagonal and displayed as pieces: the goal really is to assemble those pieces so that the line can reach, unbroken, from one side to the screen to the other. The points scored from these lines include bonuses for additional lines—say, if the main line splits at some points into separate smaller lines, which count as long as they all still connect fully between the two opposite sides—or if you're able to add more to the line in the brief window before it vanishes. The blocks in the grid are regularly being shunted upwards where a row of spikes await at the top: if any piece should hit these spikes it's game over. Gunpey received a few more variations on WonderSwan and was eventually ported to Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, and Mobile where it also saw its first official localizations.

This is our second encounter with Koto Lab so far, after the inaugural episode's Flash Koibito-Kun, but it's the first game the developers put out into the world and one of the system's four launch games. Koto Lab was the baby of Gunpei Yokoi who already passed away before this game went into production: the game is named in his honor. Console manufacturers Bandai are the publishers here, as they were for more than half of all the WonderSwan games ever made, so I'm probably just not going to mention them from here on out.

Gunpey is... OK? I guess? There's a certain simplicity to it that's charming enough but that also means that it gets dull fast. The longer you waste time with enormous and complex branching lines the quicker the game pushes them into the ceiling of death so it's usually best to not get too ambitious, but that also means being somewhat dissatisfied with lines that are only good enough since it's perilous to get fancy with it. I also spent a lot of time just juggling items lower in the same column as they got closer to the top while waiting for any line piece at all to show up in the adjacent empty columns—it's one of those puzzle games where you really have to hope for some good fortune to come along or you're just screwed. I tried out the default Endless mode first to get my bearings, then attempted the Puzzle mode for a while where you have to use every piece of line on the screen in one combo or else fail, and finally the Story mode that had the game's frog-like protagonist drifter take on a series of bandits to protect some kind of foxwoman or coyotewoman (wasn't sure if it was a Fubuki or a Koyori, in other words) in distress. The Story mode introduced enemy attacks—they mess with your field in some way, such as darkening everywhere except a small area around the cursor—and ?-blocks that served to obscure whatever pieces were behind it. You can gradually fill a power bar to perform your own ultimate but all this appears to do is clear the ?-blocks away, which really aren't that much of a bother. Gunpey's fine but I wasn't willing to keep playing it for long; maybe its two other variants on WonderSwan will find a way to hook me in deeper.

Time Spent: Half an hour.

#008: Densha de Go!

("Let's Go By Train!")

• Developer: Taito
• Publisher: Taito
• Release Date: 1999-03-04 (Launch Game)
• Inscrutability: Moderate
• Is This Anime?: Nope, this is as real as it gets.

Field Report: Densha de Go! is a long-running Taito arcade series that has players carefully driving locomotives through urban areas and countrysides across Japan. The goal is to follow the game's instructions to the letter, accelerating and decelerating to specific speeds when prompted, and coming to a full stop in stations at the designated times. You're scored on your accuracy more than anything else, though players need to be quick-witted to account for unexpected complications on the journey—some of these complications are truly random, not always appearing in every playthrough of a specific route. The original Densha de Go! debuted in arcades in 1997 and quickly saw ports to PlayStation, PC, Game Boy Color, and Saturn. The WonderSwan naturally saw a port too—hence it being here—and a few months later would also receive a port of the game's sequel, Densha de Go! 2.

Taito probably needs no introduction—they were the arcade pioneers behind Space Invaders after all, and I might as well namedrop their Puzzle Bobble spin-off franchise for the second time this episode—but weren't actually all that active on the WonderSwan themselves. This and Densha de Go! 2 are the only games I believe they developed personally; the other WonderSwan games based on their properties tended to be outsourced to contract developers (like Yoshidayama, above). Likewise, this is also their only published game: mid-tier publishers CyberFront published the WS Densha de Go! 2. Still, we've got plenty of "indirect Taito" (why'd I go and make it sound dirty?) yet to explore on this platform.

So, I was moderately pleased to see this pop up on the randomizer because I had a pretty good time playing Densha de Go! 64 a few months back on 64 in 64. However, that game was fortunate enough to see a fan translation which made the process of driving the train a bit more accessible; I was only able to get as far as I did in this one because of that past experience and, well, they aren't exactly easy games in ideal conditions. Like many arcade games the learning curve is extraordinary and it'll be punishing even if you know what you're doing because by design they want you to keep putting in quarters to improve your performance. The thing I always get stuck on is remembering to decelerate way before the station comes into view: whizzing right past it hands you hella demerits, which is fair when you consider the entire concept of public transportation. You also have to know when to sound the horn and I wasn't sure which of the many informational pop-ups was a horn scenario so I just kinda used it liberally. Nothing like terrifying your passengers in addition to making them late and/or physically ill from the sudden speed changes. Either way, for as much as those YouTube videos of long train journeys might be relaxing actually driving the things often proves to be the exact opposite.

Time Spent: About fifteen minutes. I don't feel nearly confident enough playing this in Japanese. Maybe I'll try a bit more Densha de Go! 64 to make up for it.

#009: Final Lap Special

• Developer: Soft Machine
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2001-11-15
• Inscrutability:
• Is This Anime?: No. (The Pole Position cartoon doesn't count, pedants.)

Field Report: Final Lap is Namco's famous arcade "behind the car" racing game franchise, their equivalent of Sega's OutRun or Midway's Cruis'n, which began as an evolution of their older Pole Position series. Final Lap Special serves as a spin-off of sorts, accompanying Final Lap 2000 as WonderSwan-exclusive entries in the series. Loosely based on Formula 1, the goal is to complete courses quickly and efficiently without crashing (well, doy). The two Final Lap games, as well as Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu for WonderSwan, are the only racing games to hit the WonderSwan. (At least, I think that's the case; one of these dozen or so Digimon games might also secretly be a racer, I dunno. DigiMonteCarlo? DigiLeMans? Yeah, probably not.)

Namco's another like Taito and Capcom in that they had an early and persistent presence on the WonderSwan platform but mostly through intermediaries like Soft Machine, a Japanese contract developer who worked behind the scenes on several NES, SNES, PS1, and WonderSwan games. According to GDRI Soft Machine has credits on the Top Pro Golf games for Mega Drive/Genesis and the deeply strange Lovecraftian PS1 horror game ...Iru! ("...It's here!"). We'll be seeing them a few more times on here: one of their weirder games in particular is going to be a future "Lucky 7s" pick if the random chooser doesn't beat me to it. Bandai were of course the publishers. Might be worth pointing out that these two weren't Bandai Namco yet: that happened in 2005, years after the WonderSwan had already ceased production.

I don't really care for racing games but at least this is arcade-style and not simulation-style. I swear playing those F1 sims for N64 almost killed me (with boredom). Final Lap Special is so named because it features the standard open-wheel F1-style cars as well as GT vehicles, which I understand to mean "Grand Tourer" (as in, suited for a mix of endurance and speed) and not "Giant Truck" so I'll admit to some disappointment. The GT mode has more of a progression to it as you upgrade models from one successful race to the next, while the F1 mode gives you a near-full selection out of the gate with the usual differing ratios of speed, grip, and acceleration. I won the first few races on the Rookie Championship mode of the F1 cars before hitting a course with more hairpins than an entire branch of Supercuts. I didn't even get as far as "won the first few races" with the GT mode: I suspect because of the progression factor it's better suited for veterans. It's going to take a while to get better at the game and I've no real interest in doing that, but I didn't hate playing it at least.

Time Spent: Let's say 25 minutes.

#010: Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!?

("Detective Conan: The Western Detective's Greatest Crisis!?")

• Developer: Tomcat System
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2000-07-27
• Inscrutability: Maximum
• Is This Anime?: Sure is.

Field Report: Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? is the second of three WS games to be based on Gosho Aoyama's Meitantei (Detective) Conan manga and anime franchise, about a highschooler genius detective who gets de-aged to an elementary school student by an experimental poison created by a powerful criminal organization and decides to keep his identity a secret while still solving mysteries and uncovering more information behind this sinister cabal. He apparently insists on wearing a bowtie throughout this process, so we're talking a construct that's somewhere between a Young Sherlock and a Young Sheldon. As you might suspect from that synopsis, the Meitantei Conan games are invariably adventure game whodunnits that have you gathering clues and evidence from various zones and gradually putting all the pieces together.

Tomcat System's an eclectic bunch that have worked on a number of licensed games, ports, and original creations from the 16-bit era to the present. Some of their games include the comedic photography PC Engine game Gekisha Boy (fond memories of that one) and site-favorite Sanrio World Smash Ball! for SFC. They also developed all three Meitantei Conan games for WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color, as well as another WS game I hope to show off eventually.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to say here. I'm vaguely familiar with the license—though I haven't watched any of the Funimation localizations, which renamed the show Case Closed due to licensing issues with either the Barbarian people or the O'Brien people—but for as much as I like the venerable "Satsujin Jiken" (Murder Incident) genre of Japanese adventure games there's no point in playing one if it's entirely in a language I can barely comprehend. A few things though: before you're allowed to play you have to fill out an ID card that includes your full name, D.O.B., blood type (very important), and phone number. The game even switches to a vertical mode to make the data entry that much easier. The other is that many of the clues Conan was given became "keys" that fly off into a different part of the UI: the idea is to take those keys and, I guess, combine them to make important deductions. I've seen a few other detective games do something similar to this, though I'm blanking on them right now. Maybe those Miles Edgeworth spin-offs? Beyond that it looked kinda cheap and cheerful, like you'd expect an anime tie-in to be if it was one of three near-identical games that were all released within eighteen months.

Time Spent: Ten minutes. Much of that was digging up the Voicemail Dumptruck number.

Current Ranking

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this.)

1. Flash Koibito-Kun* (P1)
2. Magical Drop for WonderSwan* (P1)
3. Gunpey* (P2)
4. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition-* (P1)
5. Final Lap Special* (P2)
6. Densha de Go! (P2)
7. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (P1)
8. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (P2)
9. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (P2)
10. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (P1)

A swan sandwiched between two boys?? I thought this was a family establishment!

I wondered if you were doing a bit when explaining Meitantei Conan — I foolishly assumed it was yer olde Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy/Kid Detective situation, but of course that's much too basic for a classic manga.

Another fab feature on the books, looking forward to these continuing wonderventures/swan shenanigans!

This makes me think that I need to check out the Densha de Go! games. They look relaxing.

I wanted a WonderSwan cuz I loved Detective Conan and I'd see commercials of that game when I was watching the show.