Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code

Title: Griffin
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 07/11/2025

Story

In this Game Gear obscurity, you take control of the Griffin Tank as you go through four stages in order to rescue its creator!

There’s not much of a plot here besides that bit in the manual, which is untranslated and still in Japanese via the wrapper’s (very) poor scans. In fact, you don’t even get an ending outside of a simple congratulations screen, making the whole experience feel as if it was rushed out the door at hyper speed.

Presentation

The new Ratalaika wrapper returns, just as clunky as ever and not as good as the previous one. Still no button remapping and a barebones looking menu, and you do have a few bonuses like in recent games of this lineup, including a soundtest, in-game achievements and very, very, very bad manual and box art scans. I seriously cannot begin to describe just how weirdly amateur these scans are, with the manual looking like it was taken with an ordinary camera in someone’s bedroom, and the box having completely off lighting, with poor airbrushing to remove the SEGA logo.

These have to be either pulled from a random spot on the internet, or the game is so rare/tough to source that somehow Edia didn’t just give Shinyuden proper scans to make use of. Oh, and all of the scanned material is 100% in Japanese, making the manual pretty pointless to read if you don’t know the language.

Still, the LCD filter is decent enough I used it for my playthrough and found it to get the job done well enough, even if I do miss the wide variety of display options from the old Ratalaika wrapper. Going into the game itself, Griffin immediately starts off with a loading screen, which was incredibly strange to see considering this was a Sega Game Gear game of all things, until I realized upon getting the ending of the game and seeing it loop to the title screen that this “loading” screen is just a black screen meant to obscure the SEGA copyright bootup. It would also explain why you can’t rewind or fast forward until you get into the actual game.

Regardless, Griffin looks decent, with solid colorful pixel art as you’d expect from the Game Gear, although the game has massive shimmering, to the point I was wondering if it was bad emulation. No, the game just naturally does that on real hardware, and I assume on a ghosting Game Gear the shimmer wouldn’t be as noticeable as is blown up to the size of whatever console you choose to play the port on. Whenever you beat a stage for the first time/the final stage on the second loop, you get a pixel art portrait of the nameless heroine before progressing to the next stage.

Not much else to add for the visuals, since there aren’t any crazy effects taking advantage of the Game Gear. The audio is even more simplistic, since outside of an incredible title screen theme, the idea of a “soundtrack” barely exists in Griffin. Incredibly short loops play throughout each stage, each song just as forgettable as the one beforehand. Sound effects are simple Game Gear fare, and I could easily write off the entire audio aspect of this game if it wasn’t for how seriously good that title song is.

Gameplay

Griffin is a top-down vertical tank shooter, where you must guide your tank through four stages, three of them twice, as you use three different weapons and your bombs to defeat a wide range of enemies. One button fires, and the other drops those bombs, with the pause menu being the means in which you switch between your main, sub, and special weapons. Your main weapon can be aimed at in all eight directions, but the other two can only be fired directly upwards, launching in an arc and thus requiring a bit of distance in order for your attack to actually hit the enemy, unlike your main shot.

Navigation is fairly simple, and the controls are decent enough. The hitboxes are a little annoying when dealing with projectiles or hazards like flames coming out of the side of a wall, but otherwise you’ll get the hang of the game rather quickly and likely clear a couple of stages. Then Stage 3 shifts the genre a little bit into a typical vertical shooter, where only your standard shot is available to use. Decent fun, and then you’re already at the end of the game with Stage 4! A pretty decent challenge with that final boss, which then forces you to loop Stages 1, 2, and 4 again before giving you a super barebones congratulation screen.

I just described the entirety of Griffin. Just as it starts getting fun, the game ends and you have to loop most, not even all of the game, just to see a boring end screen. And that first loop took me around 10 minutes to see, with no high score display or any incentive to replay the game outside of getting that unsatisfying end screen, and if you pull that off then you really don’t have much of a reason to come back to this one again outside of letting the great music on the title screen loop over and over again.

Of course, Ratalaika added their usual QOL features to make this short game even shorter if you so wish, from their usual rewind and fast forward features, and a few cheats to toggle on if you are on a console with achievements and just want to get them for free. The paper thin nature of this game honestly would have me calling it achievement fodder if achievements existed in the early 90s, since there truly isn’t that much here to speak of. Per usual, these newer reissues’ fast forward feature do not work that well on the original Switch, but interestingly on Switch 2 fast forward will work properly and rather well at that, so if you happen to own a Switch 2, you get the system exclusive feature of making a 10 minute game even shorter.

Conclusion

Griffin might just be one of my biggest disappointments from playing a retro rarity in quite some time. Telenet games were often known for jank, sure, and some were outright terrible, but Griffin is neither; rather it ends up being a game with decent gameplay that barely has time to develop before you’re forced to loop the game again, which barely lasts enough time before the whole thing abruptly ends.

Considering how rare the IRL cart is, I’m honestly gobsmacked as to how that could be the case, since Griffin offers nothing memorable besides a great title screen song. By the time I was having fun with the gameplay loop, the game was over, and you don’t even have as much as a high score display to try and beat your prior scores. Not even forgoing rewind makes the game all that tough once you know the patterns and which of the three weapons are good for your situation, and for a ten minute game on the first loop, Griffin is so paper thin I remain baffled. This may be the first non SEGA Game Gear reissue, but unfortunately Griffin is really not worth your time.

I give Griffin a 3 out of 10.