Thanks to RAWRLab for the review code
Title: Yosei Wars
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $4.99
Release Date: 07/31/2025
Story
In this GBC homebrew game, you take control of the fairy Hanoka as she sets out to defeat an army of evil junk food and rescue the kidnapped tooth fairies! Not much else to the plot, and the game’s cute intro cutscene does a fine job introducing it.
Presentation
This being an emulated release of a modern GBC game, I was curious when starting this up about what kind of wrapper it would use. Either something super barebones like the 8-Bit Legit ports, something pretty solid like the Pixel Games UK ones, or something completely sloppy ala some of the earlier Carbon Engine releases. Yosei Wars kinda falls in the middle of all of that, reminding me more of something you’d find on an older compilation, getting the job done just fine enough.
You have a decent introductory menu, with a few extras to check out. Included are a bestiary explaining all of the in-game enemies and facts about them, some pieces of concept and key art in a gallery, a music player containing the game’s OST, and most intriguing of all, a set of four prototype versions showing the game’s evolution over time, starting from a very mundane, City Connection-esque game where you’re meant to walk over all the tiles to clean them up, to something fairly close to what the final product ended up being. I wish there was a little more context behind the prototypes to explain the differences between them all, but even the most obvious ones I spotted were interesting enough.
As for the game itself, it comes in a decent Arcade-style border, with a few screen sizes you can toggle by pressing the L button. No filters of any kind are on offer, which is a bummer to me as I always enjoy a good LCD filter, but alas. The GBC visuals here are OK at best, clearly being limited from being made as a dual compatibility game, but even the stage by stage action is pretty dull with colors, looking hardly colorized even compared to some GBC launch games. You do have some nice looking color art of the fairy that accompanies the end of each stage, but otherwise the visuals aren’t especially great.
The music is a lot better in comparison. There are only a few tracks, but they’re all pretty catchy and upbeat, and fit the vibe of the game pretty well. Nothing I’d put on my listening routine for later, but good enough I didn’t mind them while playing the game.
Gameplay
I already noted the wrapper’s contents above, but when it comes to saving/save features, Yosei Wars only has a simple suspend save ala the Wii Virtual Console. Back out to save your progress, and jump back in to resume it. No using it as a save state, and no rewind feature. The game has continues and different difficulties, so I didn’t really find these omissions to be a bother.
Yosei Wars tasks Hanoka with collecting every tooth in the stage, which gives her the power to shoot the food enemies and free her fairy friends from their cages so she can rescue them. Before then, Hanoka is completely and utterly powerless, only able to dodge the enemies and collect the teeth before she can finally fight back. While this should lead to level design rewarding clever routing and enemy dodging, Yosei Wars doesn’t really accomplish that, leading to a mess of a game.
See, the stages are all rather tiny. Fine for a GBC screen, but not so good when you can usually plot out a route within the first minute or so of starting a stage. And it gets pretty obnoxious when upon trying to take that route, you’ll quickly realize how obnoxious the hitboxes are. You have to fully wait for an enemy to be way out of your way before it’s safe to go around them, which works fine in the early game, but before long and after a couple of bosses, later stages flood the screen with enemies, including ones like a pepper enemy that’ll shoot clouds of pepper at you that take a bit to dissipate.
Add all that together, and you have stages that can go from 0 to 100 in difficulty between every level, with no consistent difficulty curve. Sure, each new stage gets more complicated and filled with enemies, but if some of them put up more enemies than others in the wrong spots, that’s still a difference between one stage draining a ton of your lives and the next being pretty simple with patience. Being able to fight back does feel satisfying, but if you end up getting that last tooth near the fairy’s cage, you barely get to actually attack anything. And if you are too far away from the cage, you might get struck on the way back, which ends the stage with you not rescuing the fairy, so you gotta be careful on your return trip.
Really the only bit of the game I legitimately had fun with were the bosses. These all amounted to “hit an eyeball until it exploded”, but they at least had different food gimmicks to them and were rather clever. You even get a three hit health bar during these encounters, and have your attack from the onset so you don’t have to go teeth hunting beforehand. They were weirdly less frustrating than even some of the harder stages, since even on the ones that took me a few tries to figure out, I had fun doing so, while going through a stage with too many forks and pepper shakers just led me to going “oh come on, not me barely brushing the edge of that pepper cloud again!” Alas, the rest of the game just isn’t that engaging in the slightest, and it feels like the option to give yourself around 30 lives from the start is more of a bandaid attempt to put over the weird collision detection quirks rather than design the levels a bit better so you don’t have cramming situations or just get bored collecting teeth before you can really do anything.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Yosei Wars is a rather dull homebrew game, which is a big shame since if the game was more focused on scoring and had better gameplay than just hunting teeth, I’d be able to enjoy this a lot more, but as the game currently stands the only thing I can really compliment as a factor I actually liked a lot were the bosses. What saves this game from being a do not recommend kind of deal is just how weirdly detailed this port is with prototype versions.
Despite the lack of context, I almost never see any game include prototype variants with their release, and it was pretty darn fascinating to see how the game went from a nightmarishly bad painter style game to something a bit more fun, but still not as enjoyable compared to other GBC homebrew. Still, those boss battles were fun, and I can only hope the developer takes the ideas of those levels and makes a more engaging action/arcade style game in the future.
I give Yosei Wars a 5 out of 10.