Batman: The Video Game on Game Boy is a surprisingly solid action-platformer based on the iconic 1989 film. Despite the hardware limitations, it delivers a decent approximation of Batman's power and abilities, with wall-jumping, punching, and limited Batarang usage. The levels are varied, taking you through Gotham's gritty streets to the Axis Chemical plant, and the difficulty is challenging but fair. While the graphics are simplistic and some bosses can be frustrating, it's a worthwhile experience for retro Batman fans.

Preview image for this game is the wrong Batman game lol

Great music, fun gameplay kinda unnecessary space shooter levels. This is fairly comparable to Mega Man. Ya jump, ya shoot, and ya get powerups (albeit in a Contra kind of way, not Mega Man. You don't kill Joker and get a Joker power). The tiny Batman sprite is hilarious to me, especially because every enemy is twice your size, if not more. I assume this was done for balancing, it'd be a really hard game if you were Batman sized.

Giving him a gun is kind of weird, but I don't exactly go to a Game Boy Batman game to have the most true-to-form Batman adaptation.

spinning bat symbol jumpscare

JOKER, THE EVIL LEADER, IS DEFEATED

A close friend of mine recently came across her old GameBoy stuff in a closet while visiting her parents. Super super kindly of her, she actually sent me the whole bundle as a gift! (She said she was more than happy knowing that they were going to someone who’d enjoy them ^w^). Among that pile of GameBoy goodies was this game~! I’d heard of this game’s NES sibling before, so I knew I was in for a pretty decent if quite challenging time, but I was very surprised to learn that this game is actually completely different from its console big brother! I was super sleep deprived one morning, and a bit lost on what to play next after finishing the last Pokemon Stadium game, so I just popped this in and decided to give it my best shot. Despite how sleepy I was, I managed to beat its 9 stages and 2 boss fight stages in a little over an hour playing the UK version of the game via my Super GameBoy.

This game loosely, VERY loosely, follows the plot of the 80’s Batman movie. Batman overhears there’s a break in at a chemical factory, he goes there and inadvertently creates the Joker, he goes to the museum, he flies the Batwing for a while, and then it’s off to the church for the final battle. This is a 1990 GameBoy game, so there’s virtually no story here in the first place, but the little cutscene shots do look very nice at least, and its an entertaining enough adaptation of the film’s plot, even if it’s not a terribly close one XD

While this game’s NES big brother is more of a Ninja Gaiden-type game, the GameBoy iteration of Batman is much closer to a Mega Man game! You have four worlds with two or three stages in each, and you run from left to right platforming over pits and shooting bad guys with your big bat gun. It’s very clearly a gun and not batarangs, which is pretty weird for a Batman game, admittedly, but it’s just a video game, so I don’t think it matters terribly much XD. The one exception is the Batwing section, where the game briefly becomes a shmup for two stages, where you can mercifully hold (instead of mash) B to shoot backwards and A to shoot forwards.

It’s a pretty damn hard game, as is to be expected from a Sunsoft game of this era. Batman’s jump physics take a little while to get used to, though he does have a good deal of play control to help you out, and you’ll be seeing tricky jumps that can easily lead to your death as early as the first level or so. That said, it’s still put together really well. You can collect powerups to increase the amount of bullets you can have on screen at a time, and there are a pretty good handful of different gun types you can pick up (though they do replace the gun you’re currently using, Contra-style), and different ones have their respective advantages and disadvantages in regards to range and power. It’s also a remarkably forgiving game, as not only do you keep your powerups after dying, you even keep them after continuing (though I didn’t get a chance to test how many continues you get). Batman even has four hits between him and death as opposed to just one! While this is a pretty tough game (especially in the boss fights), it’s more than forgiving enough to still keep it fun and not punish you too much for failure, and I really appreciated it for that.

The aesthetics are absolutely fantastic. The graphics are pretty good, having very pretty cutscene frames as well as very well done little Batman and enemy sprites. The game also thankfully runs great, and I never experienced any issues with chugging frame rates due to things being too busy, even in the auto-scroller levels. The music is the real star of the show here, though. The whole sound track kicks mad amounts of ass, even for a Sunsoft game of the era (for whom awesome soundtracks were nothing rare). The music is so good that I wanted to keep playing more if only to hear successive stages’ music tracks XD. While I’m hardly a walking encyclopedia of GameBoy music, this has easily gotta be one of the best sound tracks on the system, which is doubly impressive for a game that came out barely a year into the system’s life span.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it’s a bit short, this is still an awesome little action game for the platform. The hard difficulty may be a turn off for some, but the forgiving death mechanics go a long way towards making that a lot more easy to deal with. If you’re a big Mega Man fan like me, this is totally a must-play. While there are no enemy powers to steal, the overall fun of the gameplay scratched that classic Mega Man itch in a way I really appreciated, and I imagine it will for you as well~.