WonderSwan Color Review

The WonderSwan came out of Koto, the studio Gunpei Yokoi founded after he left Nintendo, and it carries his engineering habits to the end: cheap parts used well, one AA battery instead of four, and an idea nobody else tried, which is a handheld that works in either orientation. Hold it flat and you have a d-pad and two buttons. Turn it ninety degrees and a second cluster of four buttons becomes the d-pad, which is how Gunpey and the vertical shooters want to be played.

The Color model of December 2000 added 241 colors on screen and a faster clock for 6,800 yen, undercutting a Game Boy Color that had been on sale for two years. Bandai's real weapon was a deal with Square, which had fallen out with Nintendo, so this is where the remakes of Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy IV landed first, alongside Rockman and Bass, Guilty Gear Petit and a Front Mission.

It took a real share of the Japanese market for a while and it never left Japan at all. The problem is the screen. There is no light in it, contrast is poor, and the color panel holds an image worse than the monochrome one it replaced unless you are in direct daylight; Bandai admitted as much with the SwanCrystal two years later. The Game Boy Advance arrived three months after it and ended the argument. Import one for Gunpey and the Square ports, and expect to sit by a window.