oh! hey guys, i’m bonefoot and if i hadto choose one piece of any sort of entertainment media as my favorite it would undoubtedlybe the tanoshii moomin ikka anime series or more specifically the finnish dubbed versionof that. and today i’m here to talk about, as faras i know, the only console game based on that show that came out in europe, which isthis: moomin’s tale for the game boy color. i don’t have the box or manual for this,i’ll explain why in a bit. but i do have the japanese release complete in boxwhich is pretty neat. now, there are also some bad educational moomingames, like this one, but i’m not counting those. and then there was this game called moomin tani no okurimono,
also based on the anime,but this was unfortunately only ever released in japan. i’m currently in the process of playing through this game because it’s pretty awesome,and also because i’m going to make a video about it. you can click here to see that video once it’s done, but i’ll also link to it at the end of this video. now, before i dive into this game i wannagive you a brief introduction to moomins in general. this game was never released in the us, nor was the anime or almost anything else moomins related. so i imagine a decent portion of people who will watch this video are not actually familiarwith them. don’t worry this’ll only take a minute.aaand... go!
in the beginning there was a finnish authornamed tove jansson. she wrote nine best-seller children’s fantasybooks, a highly successful comic strip and multiple picture books about these curiouscreatures called moomins who have lots of adventures with their friends.the popularity of these books and the comic strip spawned a slew of tv series all aroundthe world starting from the late 1950’s, but it wasn’t until 1990 that things reallyshifted into high gear when the third moomin anime tanoshii moomin ikka started airingin japan. the series became an instant hit and in thefollowing years was dubbed and sold to more than 60 different countries.this helped kickstart a time period in multiple countries,
but mostly in finland and japan called "the moomin boom" where the moomins skyrocketed in popularity. the moomin brand was plastered into every product known to man, the largest airlinein finland put the characters on their planes, new moomin comics were made, and in the peakof it all in 1993 even a moomin theme park, moomin world was opened up in naantali, finland.during this time even walt disney tried multiple times to buy the rights to the moominbrand, but tove jansson refused, wanting to keep the rights in her family wherethey still lie with her niece to this day, 14 years after tove’s passing.in finland reruns of the series have been playing non-stop ever since it’s first airingover two decades ago and the popularity of
the moomins has never died down.that was my first time using a green screen, i think it turned out pretty ok.but anyways, now that we’re all moomin experts let me start talking about moomin’s tale.the game was released in 1999 and it was developed by sunsoft.a developer who had it’s heyday during the nes era making awesome games like batman,blaster master and ufouria: the saga, another sunsoft game i want to talk about in the future.moomin’s tale is a pretty rare game boy color game. at the time i’m posting this video there isn’t a single other review of it on youtube, just a few emulated gameplay videos. loose copies of the game have been sellinganywhere between 50 and a little over a 100
dollars.i have no idea what it would go for complete in box because none have been listed or soldon ebay in the last few months, hence why i only have the loose cart.i was pretty excited going into this game, i was about to play the only console moomingame ever released in europe for the first time. so let’s jump right in and see whati saw. oh my god! i’ve been so stoked to play this.so this is the intro screen. looks pretty good visually, but the musicis… not from moomins. and unfortunately that is the case for therest of the game as well. not a single song from the anime is present, it’s all originalmusic.
the music isn’t horrible, it’s actuallypretty decent, but this is a game based on an anime that had an incredibly memorablesoundtrack so i was pretty disappointed. i would’ve loved to have heard chiptunedversions of those tracks. when you hit start you’re greeted with acutscene explaining the story for the first level. the sprite work on the cutscenes is really spot on with the anime. it’s awesome tosee on the game boy color. so, in level 1 you’re tasked with findingmoominmamma’s important memory filled handkerchief that blew away in the wind.now this quest, however thin and to the point it is, perplexes me. a handkerchief?moominmamma never has an “important†handkerchief
in the show. everyone knows it’s her iconic handbag that she treasures, and there’s even an episode where it goes missing and everyone goes out looking for it. why miss out on such an obvious and easy way to directly connect the quest with the sourcematerial? it makes no sense to me. let’s see what the gameplay is like. i have no idea what this game is even, i think it’s a platformer. ok, so the game is indeed a platformer. once again there’s some nice and big spriteworkon moomintroll. he’s the only controllable character inthe game, which is a little bit of a shame. it would’ve been nice to be able to playas the other main characters from the show
as well, but let’s not be too demanding.in level 1 your objective is to move from left to right while collecting all the questionorbs in your current area, once you’ve collected them all, you can advance to the next area,and repeat. there are enemies and other hazards to avoid,or sometimes to use as jumping platforms. although getting hit is pretty funny too.you lose some of your health and moomintroll gives you this angrily disappointed look andjust sits there until you press a button. if you do nothing he just keeps sitting there,staring you down. not even enemies can hurt or distract himwhile he’s doing it, he’s pissed off and doesn’t give a crap.later in the game this can actually be used
to your advantage in harder areas. on top of enemies there are also mushroom trampolines, tarzan vines and climbable treesto help you traverse the level. it’s all very straightforward and basicplatforming. the controls are really good, jumping andmoving around feels very snappy. so what does the b button do, you ask? it’sthe ‘eat’ button. every time you collect a question orb, a randomfruit gets added to your inventory which you can see on the bottom right of the screen.you can stock up on a maximum of six fruit at a time, and pressing the b button makesyou eat the latest fruit you gathered. all the different fruit restore a specificamount of health, and a few of them, like
the apples and lemons have an added bonusof making moomintroll able to run, which becomes very helpful in later levels.the next time you get hit though it’s back to walking again.when you reach area 1-9 you’ll face the first boss of the game, a grasshopper? what?there was no reason to have any generic bosses like this, the show is full of bad guys tochoose from. the lady of the cold, the antlion and thewitch are just a few that come to mind. i would say the groke too, but she actuallyis in the game, thank goodness. she’s one of the only two bosses that arestraight from the show, but even with her they of course had to screw it up somehow.being the moomin nerd that i am i can’t
let their depiction of the groke slide.in level three where she’s the boss, your quest is to find a hand organ that has gonemissing in the forest because it’s needed for a party. another quest by the way thathas nothing to do with the show, but anyways you go deep into the forest and find the grokeholding the hand organ in her hands and the boss fight begins.to beat her you need to catch the musical notes coming from her playing the hand organ.every time you catch one, her health goes down a bit and every time you miss one, yourhealth goes down a bit. the boss fight itself is pretty fun, but itmakes no sense what-so-ever to anyone who knows anything about the groke.in the show she’s definitely the most infamous
and scary monster that every kid was scared of,but in truth she’s just a lonely and misunderstood creature living alone in the woods that nevertries to harm anyone. although she does have a pretty deadly attributeto her, which is that she’s freezing cold. anywhere she goes everything around her freezes,and she leaves an ice trail under her feet. anything she touches gets frozen solid inan instant, hence why her playing a hand organ is in no way possible, let alone the factthat the forest is not frosted. i went on a bit of a tangent there… let’sgo back to the grasshopper fight. it’s laughably easy, you can just trampolineon it’s head until it dies, but it is the first boss so i’ll let that pass.the first quest doesn’t end quite yet tho,
there’s still one more regular area andthen at the end of that you come across stinky who spotted the hankerchief on top of a talltree and he insists it’s his. so you have to compete against stinky in arace to see who can climb the tree fastest. this is done in a mini game where you mashthe a and b buttons alternately as fast as you can. aaaa! stinky you suck! and smell! there are a few different types of minigames sprinkled throughout the game, which is a nice change of pace. this finally brings us to the end of the firstlevel. the handkerchief is safe and we triumphantlyreturn home to a delicious dinner, hurrah! when moving on to the next level, you’llnotice something has changed.
ohh cool… three dee!this is pretty neat, but soon you’ll realise that it’s just an overworld type of thing.there are no hazards and you only use it to choose which of the available caves you wantto go in and then the game goes back to the sidescrolling view, which is still kinda cool.level 2 is basically a maze level, you need to find the correct caves and paths to proceedand sometimes failing a jump can even send you back quite a ways, which can be annoying,but it’s all in the name of the game. gotta deal with it. oh damn it! no! no! now i gotta... god damn it.
now let’s jump right to level 4 - the secret of the phantom ship, where a ghost ship issailing near moomin valley and moomintroll decides out of pure curiosity to get on boardand investigate it. there is an episode in the anime with a ghostship. no one ever gets on it, but that’s closeenough, i’ll give them a pass on this one. this level is interesting because it introducesanother new camera perspective. whooa! holy crap that’s cool!but that’s not all, the whole level is a pretty neatly designed puzzle.in one of the rooms there’s a globe, if you stand next to it stars come out and transformyou into different things.
what is that... oh god! i’m a plant?! what the shit! there is some transformation stuff in theshow, but that was always with the magician and his hat, nothing like this, but none-the-lessthis is pretty fun gameplay wise. you can turn into a plant that can jump higher,get shrunk down to a mini-moomin or turn invisible. there are twelve rooms on this ship, somethat are locked, and each one requires you to be in specific form to pass the platformingpuzzles. you find keys in the rooms to open the lockeddoors, eventually leading you to open the boss door back on the deck.it’s a really fun level and quite different
from any of the others.these are the three different types of levels they have in the game, some are used moretimes than others. most levels also have their own unique location,that are all straight from the show and all levels introduce some new enemies or hazards,and have a boss fight near the end. all these different variables really keepthings fresh. now there’s one more moment in the gamei want to talk about that was by far both my single most favorite and infuriating thingabout this whole game, which was the other boss fight, outside of the groke, that was basedon a character from the show. i wouldn’t in a million years have guessedthat i’d get to see this character in the game.
there are quite a few things in the game that are just so outside the realm of the show,but this is one that i’d most like to believe as being completely canon with the anime’suniverse. oh! it’s the… it’s the dra... the boss is the dragon from episode 12 of the show called the last dragon on earth.in the episode there’s been a heavy rain in moomin valley, and moomintroll goes outto catch a grab he thought he saw in a puddle. he manages to catch it but upon closer inspectionhe realises it’s a god damn baby dragon! he decides to keep it, but his constant pamperingand pestering makes the dragon not like him
or anyone else in the moomin house.the only person it likes is the ever-calm snufkin. moomintroll sadly decides to release the dragon and it of course finds it way to snufkin andwon’t leave him alone. knowing that moomintroll loves the dragonand is sad about it not liking him, snufkin decides, no matter how fun it would be tokeep the it, it’s best for everyone to send it away. he gives all the fish he’s catched to a fisherman who is going on a long fishing tripand as a favor asks him to take the dragon as far as he possibly can, preferably to aplace with lots of flies for the dragon to eat. and that is the last you ever see of it in the series.
it always left me wondering what happened to that dragon. did it survive wherever the fisherman took it, and where did it go from there?and now decades later i finally got to see it again, all grown up and looking good, livinginside a mountain. it was super cool to me, and i give the developersa whole lot of kudos for doing that. good stuff! but of course this beautiful reunion doesn’t last long, because the second the dragon wakesup, it starts shooting fireballs at moomintroll and you have to beat it’s ass because it’sa boss fight. and this is where the infuriating part comesin, the fight is one of the most annoying
things i’ve had to deal with in a game inquite a while. i’m almost a hundred percent certain thatthe dragon has no pattern what-so-ever, maybe he has, but i can’t for the life of me see it. there is no fucking pattern! it constantly shoots fireballs, but sometimesafter a fireball takes about a second and a half long break and that’s when you’resupposed to jump on it’s head and deal a miniscule amount of damage, but as far asi can tell there is no way to know when it’s about take that break.you have to go in for the kill the second you’ve dodged a fireball so you can jumpon it during that small break, but if it happens
that it’s not taking a break that time,there is no way to avoid getting hit by the next fireball.so the only thing you can do is keep taking leaps of faith at it and hope that it doesn’tsmoke your ass, which is what it’ll most certainly do most of the time. cmon moomin, you can do it. fuck! fuuuuuuuuuuck! it literally took me an hour to beat it, because every time you lose all your lives, whichin this game is the amount of fruit you have
on you when you enter the boss battle, youhave to start over all the way from the beginning of the level, and this is one of those longoverworld maze levels. by the end i was seething in frustration,yelling at the screen and ready to give up at any second, but then finally luck was onmy side and i beat it. okay! one more hit. one more fucking hit... yes! oh my god! that’s about all i have to say about moomin’s tale. it’s a fairly basic platformer and overall i really enjoyed it.
the platforming and controls feel great, and there’s a lot of gameplay variety with themaze levels, puzzle solving, mini games, boss battles and all that.the difficulty is from easy to average, but it does have some challenging parts.the game is only about 2,5 to 4 hours long depending on your skills and how lucky youget with the dragon boss, but they packed that playtime full of so much variety, whichincreases the replay value tremendously. i’ve played through the game three timesalready, and it’s just as much fun every time. the presentation visually, now i haven’tplayed many game boy color games, i begged my parents for one when i was a kid solelyso i could play the pokã©mon games, but i
think this game looks brilliant on the handheldwith the nice big sprites, the animation, the cutscenes, the sometimes scrolling backgroundsand all the different camera perspectives. now, in terms of it being a moomin game, thereis sometimes this odd disconnect with the show with some of the generic bosses, thequests and the lack of music from the anime is a big shame, but i think overall they succeededin making it feel like a moomin game. most quests, even if they aren’t straightfrom the show, have a lot of similarities with events that do happen in the show.the cutscenes include a wide selection of the large cast and all the locations featuredin the game are straight from the show. so i can easily recommend this game to bothplatformer fans and moomin fans.
the price is the only iffy thing, perhapspeople who aren’t too familiar with moomins wouldn’t feel like it was worth it,but i think moomin fans will find it a fun game to own and pick up and play through everynow and then. it is the only proper moomin game releasedhere in the west, so i think that counts for something as well.now let me take a moment to talk a little bit about this japanese version.the reason i bought it was because i love the moomins and i’m a game collector so i wantedto have it. i think the box looks awesome and the arton there is a hundred times better than on the european version.i didn’t actually mean to play it. i assumed
it was the same game but with japanese text,but holy crap was i wrong. after already having planned most of thisvideo, i thought i’d pop it in for a second to see if there were any otherlittle differences and then this intro came up. meet... the... moomins... and join the adventure. why didn’t they have that in the pal version? it's already in english. then i was in the main menu and thought, ok this looks the same, but then... snufkin?!it was at this point that i realised i had to start recording and play through the wholegame.
there are so many differences between theversions or rather the pal game is a very cut down version of the japanese game.i could talk about it for another ten minutes, but i figured i’d just give you a quicksynopsis of some of the bigger differences. instead of being a basic from level to levelplatformer like the pal game, in this one between every level you get to freely explore the moomin house and the whole god damn moomin valley, and you can talk to almost every characterfrom the show, which is incredible. i’m sure this is the reason why the palversion lacks this feature, there is just sooo much dialogue text that they probablydidn’t think spending the time or money to translate them all was worth it.they also cut multiple different mini games,
one of which actually features the antlioni was hoping to see. all the cutscenes are longer and some evenhave proper animation to them instead of just moving mouths.the title screen made it look like you might be able to play as snufkin, but it turns outhe just comes with you for those overworld maze-levels and gives you tips.some of the generic bosses from the pal version are just regular enemies that you can passby. then there is this freaky moment. what isthat? and then when you get home this thing is outside your window!aaaaa! why?! that is not from the show, it’s scary. and lastly there’s an odd difference in
that this version has credits at the end whenyou beat the game, whereas the pal version just says "the end".i guess they thought europeans don’t care seeing the developers’ names, which is kindasad. they even give special thanks to tove jansson’sniece sophia jansson who owned the rights to the moomins back then and still does.those were some of the more notable changes, but there are so many just little touchesthat make the japanese version a much fuller moomin experience.there are still of course those generic bosses and i’m guessing the stories are largelythe same, but with all the extra moomin flavor that is in this version they don’t seemnearly as big of a deal as in the cut down
pal version.all of these additional things made the playtime over an hour longer compared to the pal version,and that was with me fast forwarding all the japanese text because i couldn’tunderstand it. when i go back and replay this game in thefuture i think i’ll still go with the european one. it is easily the more streamlined and pick up and play friendly version of the two.the japanese version is much more slow-paced and while it’s cool exploring the moomin valleytalking to all the different characters, i don’t understand what they’re saying,so that kind of defeats the purpose. but i am very glad that i got this becauseit is the definitive full version of the game
that the developers wanted to create.i think all hardcore moomin fans like me should get both versions, but for everyone else ithink just the pal version will do just fine. and that is it for this video. i really hopeyou enjoyed watching it. i was very happy to finally get to talk aboutmoomins and this will definitely not be the last time.i’m currently working on a video about this game and even beyond that i will always havesomething more to talk about of the moomins. so stay tuned for more videos and thanks forwatching, take care! i hate you guysyou guys are assholes especially kennyi hate him the most
cmon, you know the words oh hey guys, i’m bonefoot and i’m here today to dakka dabba kiiaa waa that was the wrongdialogue. la la laa. oh, i climbed in the cannon.holy shit. that’s awesome! wee! wow... wait what… that made me fail!god damn it! you can't do that! that’s bullshit!
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