Twin

Twin came out in 1992 for the Gameboy and was published by Athena.  Athena are the same guys that published Lutter for the FDS.  As games go, Twin has some interesting gimmicks.

There's several characters in the castle who differ by meer pixels from the hero.

The plot of the game seems to be that some sort of evil was sealed away.  Your hero was summoned to try to do something about it.  After talking to the king, you can do the usual stocking up at the various store and head into the tower of evil.

The town is shown in a side scrolling manner, but in the cave, you can leap in the air.

Once you’re in the cave, there’s a number of towers you have to conquer to unlock deeper areas of the cave.  On the way there’s battles which play out like a typical Dragon Quest style combat. The towers themselves are laid out like the castle and are typical exploration.

Inside the tower, the hero finds a chest.

There seems to be some plot involving people in the inn and unlocking access to deeper dungeons, but mostly the game is a simple combination of grinding and exploration.  Later in the game, you can start buying golems to provide more defense in battle.

The 176HP character below the hero is the golem.

The actual game play is a little clunky, since jumping feels a bit like a poorly programmed flash game.  However, you never really need to jump with a huge amount of precision.  The menus are mildly awkward to mess with.  As best I can tell, there’s a warp out of the dungeon option, but there’s no really easy way to zoom to exactly the tower in progress.  There is a grindy aspect to the game, since you need large amounts of money to handle various equipment costs.  Also, the enemy challenge does have a high increase rate, so you need to level a little to handle the upcoming challenges.

A tower in the game.

Is the game fun? I think if you wished Dragon Quest had dungeons like Final Fantasy, it’d be fascinating.  Considering that the game is a Gameboy game, there’s a lot of content in a small package. Still, it could have a lot more charm.  The heavy use of black in the game does give it an interesting feel as you play.