DuckTales ダックテイルズ - Game Boy Longplay - No Deaths (Nomiss), Difficult Mode, Real Hardware

A no miss clear run of DuckTales (ダックテイルズ) for the Game Boy. Captured straight from a SNES via a Super Game Boy 2, no cheats. Please enjoy the idle animation for this particular border! I have also uploaded a video of the NES game with a more extensive review - for a complete review, check there, and then check back here for commentary on some of the differences and how it stacks up - [ • DuckTales ダックテイルズ - NE... ]
Featuring some substantially different level design, this conversion of the first DuckTales is probably the most substantially different game from its NES version when stacked up with the other two duck game converstions for the Game Boy (Darkwing Duck and DuckTales 2). Stage layouts carry familiar enemies and elements, but end up playing out almost entirely differently and often in a an even more compacted way.
Bosses also now only take 4 hits, instead of 5, and the difficulty changes will actually allow you to take more hits on lower difficulties and no longer get rid of full health refilling cakes on the highest difficulty. While one might assume a lowered difficulty because of this - and I think that is what the developers were going for - I tend to find it a bit harder and more frustrating than the NES game because of its much, much poorer controls.
Something is just significantly off about the way that Scrooge controls, and this is hardly the only off element about the game. His jump ascends in a weirdly slow way, descends in a sharper way, and the hitboxing on the pogo feels warped just a little bit to add to this. The NES game has an almost perfect responsiveness, and going straight from one to the other is outright jarring in terms of how they function. Out of all the duck game recordings I did recently (there are 6 others), this is easily the worst and features my most sloppy play in match with that.
Even the music is off, with some of the instrumentation sounding weird and pitch being poorly managed for most songs. None of this makes the game as bizarre a mess as Rockman World II (e.g. Mega Man II GB), but it doesn't really do the original game justice. The remixed elements add something of their own charm and there is a novelty to this being a handheld version, though! I don't meant to be so harsh on it as to totally dismiss it, it's just semi-decent, at best, and feels like a deformed cousin more than DuckTales properly reformatted for pocket-sized play.