Tamagotchi (Game Boy)
Released in November of 1996 and quickly taking off, Tamagotchi handhelds let you raise your own digital pet without a lot of the concerns of a real animal. If it made a mess, you press a button, and it’s all cleaned up. If the Tamagotchi pet dies, you just start over again. For the most part, you just needed to check in on it every now and then, giving it a little food and attention, the appeal being to see how it grows and changes over time based on how you care for it. With the Tamagotchi device being so portable you could keep it in your pocket or hanging from a keychain, it was a low commitment amusement to pull out when you had the time. Perhaps the Game Boy being a portable game system made it seem like a natural fit for this type of gameplay as well. However, since the Game Boy version of Tamagotchi, released not even a year after the original devices, only has your pet grow while the system is on, it quickly shows why the Game Boy is actually a very poor home for the concept.
In this digital pet game, you start off by picking from one of eight eggs for your first Tamagotchi companion. There are four stages to your new pet’s life, all Tamagotchis starting off as either a black or white little blob, but as they get older, the way you treat them will influence what they become. Their second stage of life is basically becoming a larger blob, but your pet will grow out of their Baby and Child phase very quickly and become a Teen where their features start to appear. They will still be pretty basic in design, but they might have a duck bill, a bump on their head, or little limbs. Adulthood is where you finally see them truly take on a unique distinctive appearance. While there is a special final form it can also achieve (and there are even more special last forms in the Japanese version), the Adult stage is the longest period of their life and where they’ll take on forms that can either be close to a real animal or pretty distinct. You have Pochitchi that looks like a dog standing up and Mametchi looks like a little person wearing a bunny ear hat, but then you have some real oddities like Kusatchi, a creature that is more potted plant than animal, and Maskutchi, a nervous looking creature with wide eyes, no arms or mouth, and a body that might be described as a panda’s head with little legs attached.
Caring for a Tamagotchi is an incredibly simple process to keep pretty close in line with the small devices this game is essentially adapting with very little new. Most of the time, your pet here will be doing nothing. It has two major needs, hunger and a desire for fun, and a stats screen will show you just how much it needs to be content and require no further attention in those departments. You have unlimited amounts of food to give them, and while they have favorite foods, they won’t often turn away what you offer unless they’re full. There are two snacks you can serve your pet though, Ice Cream and Cake actually contributing to fun instead of hunger but also something that must be given only occasionally. A pet fed too many sweets will get sick, and while treating any sickness is as easy as trying the syringe or pill options in the medical care section until it’s better, too many sweets will prematurely kill your pet regardless of how often you treat it. Unfortunately, the other way to raise your pet’s fun meter is to play with them, something that should have been entertaining and involved and a place where you can develop a bond with the creature that’s otherwise just a picture on a screen.
Sadly, the only game you can play for fun with your Tamagotchi is something called Smile Game. Smile Game has you selecting whether you think your pet will look left or right for five rounds. You need to be in sync with your pet for at least three of the five rounds to lead to your pet actually enjoying the game, although the anger it expresses when you lose the Smile Game is going to be one of the places where your pet actually shows some interesting personality in their otherwise pretty plain animations. Smile Game would undoubtedly grow incredibly repetitive for the amount of times you’d end up playing it as the only means of entertaining your pet beyond risking its life, but the worst part of the game is it is entirely random. There are no clues to pick up on, no trick to winning. You are just throwing out answers and hoping the pet looks in the indicated direction. There’s essentially no reason to play it properly, you might as well mash left or right as fast as possible to get it over with and hope to win.
If you don’t fill your pet’s Fun Meter, they’ll often just sit in place in a stupor, something that’s not particularly enjoyable to stare at for any length of time. With a bit of fun they’ll start milling about in their small living space, the player not able to customize the area or add anything like toys to it. When they’ve had their fill of fun, they’ll at least be hopping back and forth, although they’ll just keep at this until they want to play some more, meaning it’s not really more enjoyable to watch than the other states a Tamagotchi can be in save for the clear indication it’s at least happy. Beyond fun and food, you do need to make sure to clean up your pets droppings from time to time to avoid them being stressed out, although when they’re old enough you can also swoop in and throw a toilet under them, this at least looking more relaxing than the usual means of cleaning the room, flooding it with a wave of toilet water.
The only other major consideration is to turn out the lights when the Tamagotchi is ready to sleep, and you can at least speed up time by selecting the clock a few time so you don’t need to wait out sleep. However, this does loop back to the fact the game is leaning towards real time during most of the experience. While the game at least heavily reduces the time it takes to tend to a Tamagotchi to account for the fact it’s on a less portable device, a pet aging the equivalent of a year in one in-game day and an hour is equivalent to something close to a real life minute. Despite the time crunch to make sure you are not burning your Game Boy batteries for days on end just to see a pet go from baby to adult, the fact the game requires you to have the system on to advance time still means you are left with your game console on but not really doing much. You wait out the timers on hunger and boredom and then quickly feed or play with your pet, then you don’t really have much to do and your pet is making no effort to be interesting in its behavior either. It’s essentially a pet without any of the perks, the Tamagotchi not showing much love for you and lacking in ways to interact with it save for praising it or scolding it. It will often be confused if you do it at times that don’t immediately follow something, like you can get it to accept praise for using the toilet properly or scold it during a rare tantrum, but otherwise, even this way of engaging with the digital pet feels hollow.
There is something to work towards in Tamagotchi on Game Boy though rather than just trying to keep your very easy to manage pet alive for a while. There are two other minigames outside of the awful Smile Game. Study Game is definitely the worse of the two, the game displaying a math equation on screen and then your pet needs to run to the answer as depicted on some cards on the ground. You might think, since your Tamagotchi won’t move until you press a direction, you’re helping to influence its pick, but that isn’t true. Your pet’s actions are influenced solely by its IQ score, something it will increase should it do well enough in the Study Game. Study Game has three difficulties and your pet will need to tackle all three to max out its IQ, something that it can do in a single in-game day pretty easily, especially since your input is just for show rather than requiring any thought. Sports Game is the rare time you actually get to more directly play with your pet, in that you now find yourself in a little area where your pet tries to catch ten baseballs falling from the sky. You can press left and right to make it jump between the five available positions, your pet sometimes jumping on its own as well. The requirements become tight for this game as you go up its three difficulties, the balls needing to be reached fairly quickly so you’ll likely miss a good deal just because by the time they’re visible, you can’t possible reach where they’re heading in time. Again, an in-game day’s worth of persistence is probably enough to fully fill up the related Body stat, although both IQ and Body fade after sleep and require a little more play to build back up.
Neither minigame is very interesting to engage with, but IQ and Body do influence what a Tamagotchi can grow into and more importantly contribute to the game’s competitions. There are three competitions, and your pet can only compete in one per day. The Knowledge Tournament is, unfortunately, just the Study Game again but with stakes and again only the illusion of influence. The Race at least looks new, the player not holding any influence here either but the still essentially random results are a bit more interesting to watch in this context than seeing your pet that should know better fail at math. The last contest, Beauty, is the strangest, because it depends on the game’s oddly named Deed stat. When you praise or scold your pet at the right moments, the Deed meter increases, and while you might as well max out Body and IQ before their contests, it’s not so easy to do so for Deed, especially since many pets won’t even make it to age 15 no matter how attentive you are. The Beauty contest is completely random, you and three other pets will perform a silly animation based on their Deed and you will win or lose based on whatever the game decided to throw at you, but it is at least the contest to most likely be satisfying to clear as your pet’s required stat for success is something directly tied to your close relationship and care for the pet.
If this was all Tamagotchi had it would be an incredible bore. Watching your pet do nothing and waiting for the moment it might need a toilet or a carrot isn’t really gameplay, and unlike the dedicated Tamagotchi handhelds that can last over a month, a Game Boy’s batteries will last about a day. There’s not often much reason to check in on your pets unless you hear the beeping that means something’s about to happen like a growth spurt or sickness, and relying on real time play instead of something like a clock that runs when the system is off means you can’t even just turn on the Game Boy from time to time to see how the pet is doing. However, if you do want to be a touch more active and want to have managing the pet be a bit more of a handful, there is something Tamagotchi on Game Boy wisely added. You are actually able to raise up to three Tamagotchi at a time, the pets unfortunately kept entirely separate, but this can make managing them a touch more active. By the time you finished and played with one pet, another might want some food, or maybe it needs some time on the toilet. It’s a bit more work to train up a pet when there’s two others who want your attention from time to time, and while there will still be some inevitable and lengthy downtime (especially if your pets sleep at different times), you can at least start to find more reason to play your game rather than staring and begging for something interesting to occur. In fact, beyond perhaps a first time with a single pet to learn the ropes, it feels like playing with a set of three is going to be the way to eke anything close to entertainment out of this game, some difficulty sneaking in and it becomes a bit more likely you’ll get surprise Tamagotchi species since it won’t be so easy to balance stress and bodily traits when you have a whole trio of little creatures vying for appropriate attention.
THE VERDICT: Tamagotchi on Game Boy shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of the digital pet franchise it is adapting and pet games in general. It must be actively played to advance time, yet your pet can’t be bothered to do much of interest, and there’s little affection to be given or received from a creature that repeats the same basic animations most of the time. The minigames where you can “play” with it are often entirely random save the Sports Game where the contest to pay off the training is random instead. At best having three Tamagotchis at once is a bit more involved than staring blankly at your pet and hoping it might get hungry or bored so you can press buttons, but otherwise, you really shouldn’t play this game even over the most basic Tamagotchi handheld or most any other game you can put in your Game Boy.
And so, I give Tamagotchi for Game Boy…
An ATROCIOUS rating. Some way to track real time passing when the Game Boy is off would help Tamagotchi to work more as a sort of idle game, something you return to in order to check on your pet like you would with the devices they originate from, but that’s just not how this game works sadly. You must leave your system on for your pet to grow and need things, and sadly, the original Game Boy this was designed for really isn’t great for taking places with you while leaving a game passively on and follow up systems that could play this game like the Game Boy Advance had even less battery life making this form of play less feasible. Tamagotchi on Game Boy coming out around 7 months after the first ever Tamagotchi handheld was a horrible idea, there was no time to really reflect on what could be improved and not enough time to incorporate improvements made to the threadbare offerings of the first model Tamagotchi. It’s hard to get invested in a little image on screen that you barely interact with like the pet it supposedly is. You can’t pet it, you can’t play any games of real substance with it, you barely ever do things together or with other Tamagotchis. When a pet dies, it’s hardly heartbreaking, even before the game undermines the little scene of it drifting around as an angel by having a UFO show up to take the pet back to its home planet somehow. People want to care about a pet, not just care for it by doing the occasional menial chore. At least when there are three of them there’s a bit less downtime, and trying to influence a Tamagotchi’s growth in a new direction is a touch interesting even if deliberate neglect can sadly be part of that experimental process. Unfortunately, this game really is just trying to ride on a fad and so only the most basic elements were included to make this close to the popular new digital pet devices despite it being worse than them simply because it can’t be played with the hands-off method of checking in occasionally.
The Tamagotchi brand needed time to grow just like the creatures you raise in those digital devices, Tamagotchi on Game Boy essentially just the Baby in a series with a lot of expansion left to do. Even other basic pet games at least will let you do things like bathe or pet the animal, get them toys or otherwise show some love to this thing you’re going to spend time raising. Tamagotchi on Game Boy didn’t even want its pets to move in too many unique ways, leaving you with a mostly lifeless waiting game where the few goals to shoot for aren’t even that satisfying to clear because of the empty actions and randomness involved in getting your pet to actually do anything of note.