Why I Love Game & Watch Gallery 2

 As a fan of underrated and overlooked video game series, I have a lot of fondness for the ghost developer Tose, who have assisted with countless games almost entirely uncredited. They've worked on several Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests, some of the recent WarioWare games, Splatoon 2, Metal Gear Solid for GBC, and countless more. Of course, since Tose doesn't make themselves known, whenever they do make their own games, it often goes under the radar. And that's a real shame because they're usually really good, some of which even making it on my Top 100 games. They made Kirby's Block Ball, Super Princess Peach, the Rocket Slime games, the Starfy series, and most notably, the criminally underrated Game & Watch Gallery series.

Game & Watch Gallery is a series of four handheld games that set out to compile and remake some of Nintendo's old Game & Watch games, with each entry containing accurate ports of the original games and modernized remakes featuring the Mario cast. Many Game & Watch games are pretty slice of life-y, usually focusing on normal people doing relatively normal jobs, so the decision to use Mario characters is really endearing because it shows these familiar faces in a uniquely mundane light. You have Mario and Luigi making cakes, Peach cooking in her massive kitchen, Toad delivering packages, Yoshi protecting his eggs, and so on. But what's always been the most impressive thing about the Game & Watch Gallery series is that while the modern remakes usually add one or two new mechanics to each game to keep things fresh, the core of each Game & Watch game is pretty much intact and Tose/Nintendo never try to reinvent the wheel. They are still fundamentally the same games they were in the 70s and it's with the fresh coat of paint that you realize, the Game & Watch holds up surprisingly well. They aren't these super dated games that aren't worth playing anymore, they're genuinely fun and chaotic high score chasers that are still a blast to play and still stress me out like no other game out there.

So why is Game & Watch Gallery 2 my favorite of the four? Well, it's simply that I just think it has the best lineup of games. There's really not a bad one in the bunch. Parachute is the perfect first game, where you have to quickly catch parachuting people/Toads in a boat. It's simple but gets pretty frantic as it goes on, a great introduction to the Game & Watch formula. Helmet and Donkey Kong are more platforming heavy as you have to make your way through obstacle courses while dodging either falling tools or barrels, and their modern versions both contain multiple levels to keep things varied. Vermin is easily the hardest one in the game, a fast-paced and intense game of Whack A Mole with some pretty drastic differences between the classic and modern variants. And saving the best for last, Chef takes what was probably the weakest of the classic games and completely remakes it into hands down my favorite modern game in the series, with a ton of depth and risk-and-reward around making sure you don't cook the food too much while also dealing with the Yoshi you're trying to feed.

The Game & Watch games are also noteworthy for having a ton of content and G&WG2 is no exception. As I said, each game has both a Modern and Classic versions, but both versions also have two difficulties basically leading to four versions of each game (and on top of that, you can unlock a super hard difficulty for the modern games by getting 1000 points). By getting 200 points in a version, you'll get a Star, with each G&WG containing 20 stars total. You can use stars to unlock a ton of neat extras such as a museum that shows off even more Game & Watch games, a music room, and coolest of all, a sixth Game & Watch game in the form of the iconic Ball. I love Ball in this game because it really feels like a bonus, especially the modern version. It shakes up the formula by giving you 10 points for catching a ball but only giving you one life unlike the other games' three lives, and by getting more stars, you'll unlock more characters to play as in Ball (this is the only game in the series with multiple playable characters). Between the star collecting, all the versions of each game, the museum, and especially Ball, G&WG2 is absolutely crammed with stuff to do.

But while most G&WG games have a ton of content, I think 2 is the only one where getting 100% feels genuinely rewarding and worth it. As you'd expect, getting 1000 points in a game in one sitting can be brutal not just because of how hard these games can get, but because of how long they can take. All the other entries the series have at least one game that feels like an absolute slog to get all the stars in, like Octopus in 1 or Donkey Kong 3 in 4. Game & Watch Gallery 2 does not have this issue. All of its games are quick, snappy, and reasonably generous with the point distribution. Donkey Kong gives you a point bonus for reaching the top the fastest, Chef has a ton of wild point calculations, and as I said earlier, Ball only requires 20 juggles to get one star at the cost of removing any margin of error. And even the games that have a more simple point distribution like Vermin and Parachute move at a fast enough pace that getting to 1000 points doesn't feel like a drag. Out of all four games, G&WG2 took the shortest amount of time for me to fully complete, even compared to its four-game predecessor. So not only does G&WG2 have a ton of unlockables and content, I think it's the best balanced towards making all that content worth experiencing.

If you're a fan of the Game Boy Color look, Game & Watch Gallery 2 is a super pretty game in my opinion. The Mario sprites are very charming and expressive, and the color choices are super bold and well-picked, with the abundance of blues looking especially visually-pleasing. One of my favorite things about G&WG2 in particular is the fact that being a Game Boy Color launch title, it also released on the original Game Boy in Japan, and the backgrounds in both versions look almost entirely different. It's one of the few games that proves that there was actually a gap in power between these two consoles. And as you'd probably expect by now, the soundtrack is great. The Game & Watch Gallery in general has a ton of really catchy and pretty chiptune melodies that I feel go criminally overlooked, and G&WG2 is no exception, with Parachute, Ball, and Chef being the easy highlights for me.

Game & Watch Gallery 2 may seem like a bit of a weird pick for one of my favorite games of all time, but it's just one of those games that's so brilliantly crafted and easy to come back to, that I have nothing but the highest praise possible for what it's accomplished. It's a fun minigame collection with consistently stellar games and a ton of content, it's a unique look into the Mario world that no other game can really offer, it's a stellar remake of some Game & Watch classics that expands on what they did right while showing how well their core gameplay has aged, it boasts a perfectly-paced and rewarding 100% completion campaign, and it has an incredibly charming and lovely presentation that shows what the Game Boy Color is capable of. That's quite a lot for a little GBC cartridge.