115. Minna no Taabou no Nakayoshi Daisakusen (Bits Laboratory, Famicom, 1991)

Minna no Taabou no Nakayoshi Daisakusen is another game in our tour of Sanrio games, this time based on Sanrio's most prominent human character: Minna no Taabou (literally "everyone's altruistic boy"). Every Sanrio game I've played so far has had pretty different gameplay to the others, and this is no exception. Minna no Taabou involves avoiding ghosts while navigating a single screen stage, but you are also flipping over tiles to play a memory match game. I instantly thought of another single screen Famicom game about ghosts and grids that I played earlier this year, #12 Chiisana Obake, which was marginally more interesting than Minna no Taabou, though both seem to have been made with children as their target audience.

The memory match aspect is at least a little strategic, since any matched tiles disappear, allowing you to move freely where they once were, and certain levels lean on this idea where you can effectively trap the ghosts by not matching certain tiles. The cards you are matching normally have animals on them, but occasionally you can match two to generate a powerup, though none of these were particularly interesting (1up, extra time, temporary invulnerability). While the game is not particularly interesting, it is at least fairly easy and painless. I managed to get to level 9 before my reckless playing got me a game over.

The full title of the game translates to something like: "Minna no Taabou's Operation: Buddy" which is strange and maybe a little sad when you consider that the only other characters in the game are ghosts. There is also a tile-sliding game mode included, but it's very simple and not nearly as engaging without any enemies moving around.

2/5, a decent maze/tile-matching hybrid