Great Greed (Game Boy) Playthrough
222A playthrough of Namco's 1993 role-playing game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Great Greed.
The Game Boy wasn't known for its traditional JRPGs, but it did have a few good picks if you knew where to look. This hyper-obscure Namco title is one of the better examples.
Rather than attempting to paraphrase the plot myself, I'm going to let the manual's excellently 90s description do the heavy lifting here:
"This is not one of those "Long, long ago once upon a time" fufu role-playing games. This is a tale that begins in a forest somewhere in our world today! You, the hero, are checking the acid rain levels with your buddy, when...BOOM, out of nowhere pops a strange old bag who calls herself Microwave. She's attacked by a psycho mutant dude called the Hunter, and before you know it, you're being sucked into some kind of vortex. And you thought you hated Mondays.
Thus begins your epic tale of heroism, adventure, and monster mashing known as Great Greed. What is Great Greed? Start playing, and figure it out!"
At first glance it looks like a shameless clone of Final Fantasy Legend (https://youtu.be/rM7omzH0LbQ), but overworld graphics aside, Great Greed is anything but.
The bonkers story pits the hero Sam against the aptly named Bio-Haz, a megalomaniacal warlord who is bent on destroying the environment, in a long series of increasingly absurd gameplay scenarios. You'll fight in a tournament to save a town from a crab who rigs an election, infiltrate a music factory filled with giant spinning records to find a copy of a rare album, and get thrown in jail at the behest of a law-enacting roulette machine - all sorts of fun things - and the world is filled with people and places named after food.
So yeah, Great Greed is, in a word, eccentric.
That eccentricity is what gives the game its offbeat sense of humor and makes it so memorable, but the gameplay serves it well. The dungeon designs are creative, grinding is kept to a minimum, and the unique battle system keeps everything moving along at a brisk pace. It's turn-based, but instead of relying on menus, your attacks and spells are mapped to the buttons and will fire instantly with a single tap.
It also has multiple endings based on who you choose to marry at the end. Some are mundane, some are hilarious, and I was pretty surprised and impressed that two guys were included in your list of choices. I wasn't expecting a game like Great Greed to be quite so progressive, and the inclusion meant a lot to me at a time when I was struggling to figure myself out and coming to terms with being gay, especially when words like "fag" were still regularly heard in movies and the media only ever portrayed gays as flaming Nancys and deviants. I don't ever recall seeing gay marriage in a video game that came before this one. Does anyone know if this is the first?
(Even still, I picked the granny in this video for the laughs!)
If you like JRPGs, Great Greed is a great choice. It handily lived up to its claim of not being "one of those 'Long, long ago once upon a time' fufu role-playing games," and I loved it.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!