SB Recommends WonderSwan & WonderSwan Color Games

Bandai's budget-priced, failed Game Boy competitor with dual D-pad/button setups and the ability to play in vertical or horizontal alignment. Rather obscure due to never being released outside Japan. Like the Game Boy, it got a color-graphics upgrade. A lot of the WonderSwan's library was ports and anime licenses, with few standout titles aside from Riviera, a Rockman EXE sidescroller and Final Fantasy ports. The best-remembered games for it are two amateur projects that won a homebrew contest, listed below.

• Blue Wing Blitz
  • sharc: One of Squaresoft's most unknown titles; still Wonderswan-exclusive RPG that predictably revolves around a ragtag band of pilots fighting off an evil empire. Battles are turn-based but are notable for the depth of options; in addition to multiple attack maneuvers, you can forego turns to change speed or altitude and improve your accuracy, evasion or attack power on the following turn. Fair warning: lots of kanji in barely-readable font size so bring a walkthrough. JUST SWEEP!

• Dicing Knight Period
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Very playable randomly-generated dungeon crawler with Zelda controls, considerable depth and infectious cuteness.

• Judgement Silversword: Rebirth Edition (also on: PC)
  • Shiren the Launderer: Judgement Silversword was released after winning the 2001 WonderWitch Gran Prix programming contest and now commands a ridiculous price despite several reprints. In an inexplicable Laugh-In reference, the game announces the entrance of level bosses with “Here comes the Judge!” It's often called an homage to Radiant Silvergun, but the similarity only extends to both games' close-range weapons (Silversword's shield to Silvergun's sword). The title is a reference to the Battle Garegga ship Silver-Gun.

• Makaimura for Wonderswan
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Part of the Ghosts 'n Goblins series. Not a remake as the title would imply, but an original game. Unlike most of the series, this one's actually humanly possible to complete, although some enemy hitboxes are annoyingly larger than their sprites. The detailed monochrome graphics coupled with the discordant Wonderswan sound chip lend a strangely unsettling atmosphere to the proceedings. Includes a huge gallery mode with descriptions and statistics (in Japanese) for literally everything in the game.

The WonderWitch was a development kit and cartridge released by Bandai that allowed users to create their own WonderSwan games in conjunction with a PC. Judgment Silversword and Dicing Knight were made using this. Cardinal Sins, M-KAI's sequel to Judgement Silversword, was only released as a WonderWitch file through the creator's website, and there is no emulator that currently supports the WonderWitch cart. This meant that a physical WonderWitch was required to play Cardinal Sins, until a reprogrammed port of the game was included with Eschatos. The WonderWitch mascot also appears as a hidden bonus item in Eschatos.