Mercenary Force is fucking awesome, and easily has got to be one of the best forgotten gems for the Game Boy, though while reading about it online, it seems a lot of people in the West understandably picked it up thinking it was a fire fighting game from the cover, only to discover it's a hori shmup, a fairly challenging one at that! Nonetheless, the game was a massive flop outside of Japan.

The basic premise of the game is that you hire four mercenaries to march through six different stages based in Medieval Japan. You have five options to choose from: a servant, a samurai, a ninja, a monk, and a mystic, each with their own unique bullet-fighting skills, health bars, and special attacks.

There are a lot of aspects that makes Mercenary Force so special. Money plays an important part in the game, with each mercenary costing a different amount to hire, buying healing items from stores, as well as being able to buy new members after each stage to replace those that didn’t make it. But! You need to balance your budget! You start with ¥5000, but quickly find it’s not too much to play with when hiring mercenaries can range from costing ¥500 to ¥1200. Killed enemies drop coins worth ¥10 each, so you also need to balance your initial mercenary purchases against what you might eventually need to spend. Coins will disappear after a while though, so there's this nice dynamic of needing to get close to enemies before you kill them, but still needing to avoid taking damage. You can stay safe at the back of the screen, but at risk that you’ll miss out on grabbing the coins.

The mercenaries themselves are like weapon modules for a ship, but made up of four independent sections. You’re able to change the formation of the group, allowing you to choose more defensive or offensive strategies. Some formations can cause massive enemy damage but make you a bigger target, while others shrink your overall size but require you to get creative on how to hit enemies.

Everything is based around Medieval Japan, with the bosses often being based around different Japanese mythological monsters. I have to give big kudos to them for not removing this aspect when so many other games from the time were quick to do so. There’s an oni level, Kasa-obake boss, and of course, the constant temples and Eastern religious references, my favorite being the daibutsu that allows you to revive a party member if you’re lucky!

There’s three endings, based on if you have the right mercenary at the end for the True Ending, skip too many sections with the monk's special attack for the “Bad” Ending, or just finish it regularly for the Normal Ending. Like most shmups, Mercenary Force starts fairly difficult but becomes very doable once you learn the enemy patterns, making replays to get all the endings short and enjoyable!

My only critique is that there’s no undo button if you accidentally add an unintended mercenary to the lineup, resulting in wasting money or even messing up a really good run! It bothered me enough that something so simple wasn’t included, that I’m going to have to dock half a star. Overall though, Mercenary Force is an awesome Game Boy game, and I can’t recommend it to retro handheld fans enough!

4.5/5