Let's Play Every Game Boy Color Game, Part 18
Ganbare Goemon: Tengu-tou no Gyakushuu! (TOSE/Konami, 1999)
You play as a kid who loves the Goemon anime, which is grandmother keeps calling a manga. I actually don't know if that's meant to be a joke or if they're somewhat interchangeable terms in Japanese. Regardless, grandma tells you it'd be much more interesting to go check out a big tree in the woods, and that tree sends you back to the Edo Period to hang out with Goemon and friends in a turn based RPG. The game seems solid and has some great music, but I think grandma has a life insurance policy on me...
GB Harobots (Sunrise Interactive, 2000)
It opens with a sing-along title theme, so I can only assume this is based off of some anime. That would also explain why it doesn't bother with much of any world setup. It seems to be about a universe where people battle weird transforming robots in contests, but you don't get to see much of the system in the first fight against a bot 9 levels weaker than you. I didn't play more than that because the music was truly terrible. Easily the worst I've heard on GBC so far.
GB Karan Koron Gakuen Hanafuda Mahjong (J-Wing, 2000)
I don't know how to play Hanafuda Mahjong, so all I can really say about this is that it gets you right into it and it has a surprisingly huge number of characters to choose from.
Gehemnis der Happy Hippo-Insel (Kritzelkratz 3000/JoWood Productions, 2001)
A German game about a hippo who goes around spitting water to put out all the fires the local volcano is starting. There are enemies you have no way of damaging, and since your water supply is very limited it seems like it'd be quite easy to softlock yourself behind a literal firewall. Oh well, You know what the Germans say: Flusspferde sollten keine Feuerwehrleute sein
Gessou! Dangun Racer Onsoku Buster: Dangun Tama (Imagineer, 2001)
This must be based on an anime. It has some weird life sim/adventure bits where you wander around town for seemingly no reason, but at any time you can instead choose "race" to enter a racing simulation. But instead of any of the many ways to do GBC racing we've seen so far, this one just rapidly jump cuts between a bunch of different views of the car above speeding along, and all you can do is occasionally press A to use "dash" and go faster for a bit. It's awful. This is barely a game.
Gensou Maden Saiyuuki: Sabaku no Shikami (J-Wing, 2001)
J-Wing has been decently reliable so far, but the streak ends here. It seems like they went bankrupt within two years of releasing this, so maybe they just ran out of money for it. There's no sound until a good 10 textboxes into the game, and even after that it's barebones. Most of what's happening on screen is accompanied by a blank white background, and even when there is an image it's either a still or just a character portrait pasted on to the blank screen. Then you end up card battling, somehow, but there's no explanation of it and the "cards" in the bottom left are as placholder-y as you'll ever see. It's a shame.
Get Mushi Club: Minna no Konchuu Daizukan (Jaleco, 1999)
Games give me the impression that summer break for Japanese elementary schoolers is just collecting bugs. This time, though, it's because a fairy showed up and demanded you catch 200 species in 30 days. There are a ton of places you can go that each have their own helper character, and then you look at the ground and pick up bugs. There's a surprisingly detailed encyclopedia on the bugs you find, and it seems like it's making a lot of effort to be accurate about the bugs and where they live. An edutainment game that'd be really useful if you actually had to collect Japanese bugs for school.
Gex: Enter the Gecko (David A. Palmer Productions/Crave Entertainment, 1998)
I figured out from the second game that the double jump is meant to be a tail bounce and that's why it only works when you're barely above the ground, but it just looks like a bug in this shoddily-animated game. It's a character platformer with nothing interesting about it except that you can mash B to spin attack everywhere instead of walking normally. I accidentally took a butt shot of Gex while trying to show off that spin.
Gex 3: Deep Pocket Gecko (David A Palmer Productions/Eidos Interactive, 1999)
Eagle-eyed readers might notice that we've jumped to Gex 3 without a 2, but that's because the game above was secretly the second installation all along. Eagle-eyed readers checking the Wikipedia listing might notice that it's called Deep Cover Gecko in Europe, which makes much more sense, and that it came out in the US first even though Eidos is a British company. All of this is more interesting than the game itself, which is just the first one again but with a level select zone that is confusing to navigate and pointless costume changes that don't fit the level. Why is Gex wearing shorts in Antarctica?
Ghosts n' Goblins (Digital Eclipse/Capcom, 2000)
Just a port. GBC doesn't have the resolution to show Sir Arthur's heart underwear, so they're just solid red instead. Oddly, even though it's a Japanese game published by Capcom, this particular port only released in the US and Europe.