Glory Hunter (Game Boy) Review
With such a wealth of homebrew and aftermarket games releasing for old Nintendo hardware, we thought we’d take a look at one of the most promising examples in this neo-retro Game Boy review. As a reminder, Glory Hunters is not available on Switch, but we’ll be sure to let you know if that situation changes.
For review, George played and took screenshots on Analogue Pocket.
The release of GB Studio in 2019 has led to a series of games for Nintendo’s beloved mega-property over the past few years, but few have been as ambitious or as widely covered as Glory Hunter – the debut game from Mexico-based design studio 2think. Billed as “Game Boy’s unique action-adventure RPG,” Glory Hunters reached its crowdfunding goal on Kickstarter in 2022 and recently launched in both digital formats. download (via itch.io) And physical form, the latter version is provided by Bitmap Soft. But does it live up to the hype?
During its construction, Glory Hunters was often likened to The Legend of Zeldaand immediately we see a large celestial body (Are not a moon!) on impact with land, followed by a positive impact Wind machine-beautiful slideshow detailing an ancient tale – imploring a hero to rise and summon a sleeping god to avert disaster.
But the similarities to Nintendo’s iconic franchise more or less stop there. We’re jumping straight into the action. Something like that. We have a sword but no enemies, just some bushes and a path blocked by a suit of armor and a friendly little NPC who sets the premise that sets Glory Hunters apart from its predecessors. its background. This set of armor is called the ‘Glory Knight’ and progression in the game is achieved through collecting ‘Glory Points’ (GP) awarded by completing ‘glorious deeds’. We can use these to repay the Glory Knights and open up new areas on the map. It’s a kind of leveling up, map expansion, and currency system merged into one.
When we’re stuck and there’s not much left to do, we do what any action-adventure veteran would do. We started cutting down bushes. After five people die, a message will pop up – we’ve achieved a glorious achievement (apparently) called ‘Cut Starter’ and have a shiny GP for our troubles. We could pay and move on but instead we continue to cut back, curious as to what needs to be done to take this even further. In doing so, we were delighted to discover another feat by picking up a certain amount of dropped items.
Learning by doing is a lost art in modern games, but Glory Hunters excels at it. It knows the tricks – we’ll read signs, look down wells, endlessly chop grass – and it rewards us for it. But it also steers us easily toward more obscure achievements, trickle-down points of absorption that encourage repetition and discovery, constantly fueling the urge to keep exploring and trying new things. new. It helps us understand the deal from the beginning – everything in this world is transactional. Brief instructions above, we are then free to explore the open world of Glorianta any way we want, limited only by the number of points we possess and the ants we are equipped with. aware that approaching one of its four corners will allow us to complete our mission.
Easier said than done. Glorianta is a giant. With a 17×19 grid, it’s four times larger than Link’s first pocket adventure – and just as gorgeous as Koholint. In fact, the entire visual and audio presentation of the game is excellent. The boss designs are a particular highlight and there are cute cutscenes sprinkled throughout the adventure. Different regions of the world have a strong sense of identity while the music emphasizes each region perfectly, ringing out national anthems like Megaman powering us through the afterlife while cozy relief is brought as we hustle about the towns to meet the inhabitants. It’s never overbearing and most importantly, very modest. It’s not all that efficient either, with some excellent mini-games sprinkled in to both waste time and collect GP. Double win!
Exploration is hindered by the fact that the overworld map is only accessible in said towns. With such a vast space to explore, it can be a bit overwhelming without a reference point at hand; Luckily, the enemies are varied enough in style and design and the puzzles and hidden secrets are intriguing enough to make exploration fun – although it gets a bit annoying if there are more than two of them. enemy on screen. Saving games and replenishing health are also limited to specific areas, and for a game that relies on repetition to promote exploration, this can be a real problem. Do you remember those bushes that we cut down at the beginning of the game? We chopped them down one hundred times, then die before finding a save point, which means having to chop them 100 more times. This can be quite frustrating at times – especially at the beginning of the mission.
Another annoyance we encountered was that death resulted in us being sent back into the world with the health we had at the last save point, rather than replenishing it. More than once we made it through a difficult passage, were rescued, then faced a difficult challenge or needed to turn back and were locked into a rather dire situation where advancing or retreating was difficult. punish us again and again.
Having said that, the balance between GP earned/required is judged quite well, with the minimal amount of grinding required to continue. But GP is also used as a currency to upgrade armor, swords, health or give hints, so you’re playing a constant guessing game about spending without knowing whether a blockade will Does the Knight of Glory’s big require difficulty- already earned GP and if that is the case then accumulating more GP will be achievable or even enjoyable. Over time, our thinking has adjusted to the idea of chasing points to strengthen yourself, rather than strengthening yourself and then chasing points, but this involves a lot of spinning again and there are definitely times when we just want to get on with it. There are plenty of other collectibles that seem a bit underused, and we can’t help but think that perhaps those might be better suited to the role of currency.
Conclusion
Glory Hunters is a package that has received a lot of love but is still a little rough around the edges. We weren’t always sure when we were taking damage or even killing it – especially when facing larger, noisier bosses, and some beats in the game felt a bit dull. bland. Some translation and grammatical errors also appeared, but these were never significant enough to bother us (we actually thought they added a bit of charm to the proceedings). All in all, Glorianta is a rich, deep world that’s fun to explore and successfully taps into the nostalgia of the Game Boy experience while also delivering on a fresh and exciting formula. Proof, if there was any doubt, that the old boy still had life.
