Game Boy’s Monster Catchers Beyond Pokémon

For retro fans in England and beyond, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color were not just home to Pokémon, they also became a busy testing ground for creature-collecting RPGs. From official spin-offs to straight-up imitators, these handheld games pushed Nintendo’s 8-bit and 8-bit colour hardware in all sorts of odd and inventive ways.

The original article from CBR Games highlights how this wave of monster catchers grew in the late 1990s and early 2000s. If you want more RetroShell coverage like this, our News tag is a good place to start.

One early example was GeGeGe no Kitarō: Yōkai Sōzōshu Arawaru on the original Game Boy. Released in Japan just months after Pokémon Red and Green in 1998, it drew on Shigeru Mizuki’s long-running GeGeGe no Kitarō manga, which centres on yōkai from Japanese folklore. The game was still a very direct take on Pokémon's formula, with players collecting yōkai and battling in a familiar turn-based style.

Metal Walker, released by Capcom for the Game Boy Color in 1999, took a different route. Set in a futuristic wasteland, it had players collect and evolve robotic creatures called Metal Walkers, made from a mysterious material known as Core. Its battles stood out most, using a billiards-like system where you chose direction and speed instead of picking attacks from a menu. The game also used Land, Marine and Sky types, giving it a simpler type setup than Pokémon.

Dragon Quest Monsters also deserves a place in the story. Released for the Game Boy Color in 1998, and known as Dragon Warrior Monsters in North America, it built on a series that had already inspired Satoshi Tajiri’s original idea for trading creatures. Its breeding system let players combine two monsters to create new offspring, and Dragon Quest Monsters 2 later added version-exclusive keys, rather than version-exclusive monsters, to unlock extra quests across Cobi's Journey and Tara's Adventure.

Then there is Keitai Denjū Telefang, released only in Japan for the Game Boy Color in 2000. It later became the basis for the unofficial Pokémon Diamond and Jade bootleg cartridges, which were infamous for poor English translations and glitchy gameplay. The original Telefang had its own twist on the genre, with players calling Denjū, the game’s monsters, by phone number in a future setting. For anyone interested in the wider history of monster-taming games, the genre has a long and tangled lineage, and this Wikipedia overview is a useful starting point: Monster-taming game.

For the hardware side of things, Nintendo’s own archive is the best primary source on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. You can also check Capcom’s official site for company history and Dragon Quest's official pages for series background, if you want to trace how these games fit into the bigger picture.