Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
316A playthrough of Capcom's 1991 license-based adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the Game Boy showed up awfully late to the party. The NES game's release coincided with the movie's VHS release in the fall of 1989, but by the time Capcom's appeared at the end of 1991, most of the hype had long since faded.
I guess that it was good for fans, then, when it turned out to be an exceptionally strong game. Roger Rabbit was still an appealing license, and the Game Boy still was in need of original, high quality software. Given that Capcom's name on a game box in 1991 was worth its figurative weight in gold and that the game received a multi-page feature spread in Nintendo Power, you'd think that it would be destined to become a best-seller.
I have no idea if it ever was a best-seller, but I remember actively looking for it for months and months after it came out. I never once saw a copy, and my friends knew nothing about it, so I can only assume either (A) it didn't sell well and not many copies were made, or (B) my recess buddies and I were hopelessly out of the loop despite being avid NP and GamePro fans, and I was just super unlucky when it came to finding a copy.
I remember drooling over pictures of this game in Nintendo Power when it first came out - it looked like a Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy Adventure style game but with characters from the movie. It turns out that that assumption wasn't too far off the mark. There's much more emphasis on dialog and puzzles than on combat, but the overarching structure feels fairly similar.
It's a bit on the simple side, but it's fun to guide Roger through ToonTown solving puzzles, collecting items, going for *very* long trolley rides, and using a spring-loaded boxing gloves on attitude-laden weasels. If you like some light-hearted comedy with your top-down pseudo-RPGs, or even just a great soundtrack, you'll enjoy this one quite a bit.
It's also worth noting that this was the second game that Shinji Mikami worked on at Capcom, following a Japanese-only Game Boy trivia game that came out the year before. I doubt anyone foresaw his role in the rise of the survival horror genre when they played Roger Rabbit, but it surely proved that he knew how to put together a good game.
(And there is one scene that quite amusingly reminds me of some of the tenser moments from The Evil Within! I'm sure you'll recognize it the instant you see it.)
You can find my video of the NES game here: https://youtu.be/UbBeQ5RTGrs
*Recorded with Retroarch's DMG shader for that classic old-school look.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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