With such a wealth of homegrown and aftermarket games being released for the old Nintendo hardware, we thought we’d take a look at one of the most promising examples in this neo-retro Game Boy review. To reiterate, Glory Hunters is not available on Switch, although we’ll be sure to let you know if that situation ever changes.
For review, George played and took screenshots on the analog pocket.
GB Studio’s 2019 release has resulted in a flurry of games available for Nintendo’s lovely big brick over the past few years, but few have been as ambitious or as wide-ranging as Glory Hunters – the debut game from Mexican design studio 2think. Billed as “the one-of-a-kind Game Boy action-adventure RPG,” Glory Hunters smashed its Kickstarter crowdfunding goal in 2022 and recently launched in digital downloadable form ( via itching.io) and physical form, the latter coming courtesy of Bitmap Soft. But does it live up to the hype?
During its build, Glory Hunters was often compared to The Legend of Zelda, and right at the beginning we see a large, celestial body (not moon!) on a collision course with the earth, followed by a Wind Waker-esque presentation detailing an ancient story – calling on the hero to rise and call upon the sleeping God to avert disaster.
But the similarities with Nintendo’s iconic franchise more or less end there. We are thrown straight into the action. Somehow. We have a sword, but no enemies, just bushes and a path blocked by armor and a friendly little NPC, setting up a premise that sets the Glory Hunters apart from their ancestors. The armor is called ‘Glory Knight’ and progression in the game is achieved by collecting ‘Glory Points’ (GP) which are awarded by completing ‘deeds of glory’. We can use them to pay off Knights of Glory and open up new areas of the map. It’s sort of a downgrade, map expansion, and currency system all in one.
At a dead end and with little to go on, we do what any action adventure veteran would do. We start chopping the bushes. After the five bite the dust, a notification pops up – we’ve achieved a glorious feat (obviously) called ‘Cut Starter’ and we’ve got some great GP for our trouble. We could pay and move on, but instead we keep cutting, curious as to what it takes to further this achievement. In doing so, we discover, to our delight, a different feat by collecting a certain amount of dropped items.
Learning by doing is something of a lost art in modern gaming, but Glory Hunters excels at it. He knows the tropes — we’ll read the road signs, peer into the well, relentlessly mow the grass — and he rewards us for it. But it also effortlessly steers us toward more obscure exploits, feeding points to encourage repetition and exploration, constantly fueling the compulsion to keep probing and trying new things. It sets us up to understand business from the start – everything in this world is transactional. The concise guide is complete, we are free to explore the open world of Gloriante in any way we want, limited only by the number of points we possess and armed with the knowledge that reaching one of its four corners will allow us to complete our quest.
Easier said than done. Glorianta is a behemoth. With a 17×19 grid, it’s more than four times the size of Link’s first pocket adventure – and just as gorgeous as Koholint. In fact, the entire visual and audio presentation of the game is sublime. The boss designs are especially prominent, and there are cute cutscenes scattered throughout the adventure. The different regions of the world have a strong sense of identity as the music perfectly accentuates each area, throbbing Mega Man-like anthems propel us through the overworld as we’re given a pleasant relief as we hustle around the towns and meet the residents. He is never overbearing and most importantly, very humble. It’s not all business either, with some excellent mini-games to while away the time and collect GP. Double victory!
Research is hampered by the fact that the map of the overworld is only available in the mentioned cities. With such a vast space to explore, it’s a bit crushing to not have a point of reference at your fingertips; luckily, the enemies are varied enough in pattern and design, and the puzzles and hidden secrets are engaging enough to keep exploration interesting – although it does get a little annoying if there are more than two enemies on screen. Game saves and health refills are also limited to certain areas, and for a game that relies on replay to drive exploration, this can be a real problem. Do you remember those bushes we cut down at the beginning of the game? We chopped them up a hundred times, then died before finding a save point, which meant cutting them down 100 times again. This was quite discouraging at times – especially at the beginning of the quest.
Another gripe we have is death which results in returning to the world with the amount of health we had at our last save point, instead of regenerating it. More than once we’ve gone through a tough stretch, bailed out, then faced a tough challenge or had to turn back and find ourselves in a pretty tough situation where advancing or retreating punished us time and time again.
Having said that, the balance of GPs earned/needed is fairly well judged, with minimal amounts of grinding required to proceed. But GPs are also used as currency to upgrade your armor, sword, amount of health, or give advice, so you’re playing a constant guessing game about spending without knowing if you’re in for a big block of Glory Knights that would require a hard – acquired GPs and if gathering would be more feasible or even enjoyable if that were the case. Over time, our thinking adjusted to the idea of chasing points to make ourselves stronger, rather than getting stronger and then chasing points, but that involved a lot of backtracking and there were definitely times when we just wanted to get on with it. There are a whole host of other collectibles that seemed underutilized and we couldn’t help but think that maybe they would be better suited for a currency role.
Conclusion
Glory Hunters is a pack that has had a lot of love poured into it, while remaining a little rough around the edges. We weren’t always sure when dealing damage or even dishing it out – especially when facing bigger, noisier bosses, and some of the game’s beats felt a bit flat. There were also some translation confusions and grammatical errors, but they were never significant enough to bother us (in fact we thought they added a bit of charm to the proceedings). All in all, Glorianta is a rich, deep world that’s enjoyable to explore and successfully embraces the nostalgia of Game Boy experiences while providing a fresh and interesting take on the formula. Proof, if there was ever any doubt, that there is still life in the old Boy.
