Star Wars was a surprising hit when it came out, so much so that just about every commercial entity with a stake in the entertainment industry wanted to profit from its popularity. They included Nintendo, Capcom and Ubisoft, who started a joint project of sorts to make a GameBoy game using a license of the film.
Unfortunately, the resulting game – developed by NMS Software, a little known developer which is even more obscure now – was far from as impressive as the movie, and was more apt to resort to the more memorable moments of the film to keep the player's interest than actually providing satisfactory gameplay and respectful portrayals of the film's locales and characters.
This GameBoy title is mainly a platformer, though there are other gameplay types; however, these are even less enjoyable than the platforming gameplay, which is far from satisfactory either.
The game starts with an 8-bit intro scene with scrolling text, though perhaps to the embarrassment of NMS Software, the text is not even scrolling in an oblique angle. In any case, the text is still somewhat satisfactory, if very, very brief, at describing the premise of the film and the story of the game. This transitions to an 8-bit rendition of a certain scene that sets up the encounter between the film's iconic droids with the main protagonist.
Conveniently enough, the game skips over the less exciting parts of the beginning of the film to the ones more conducive to a platforming game. The player starts the game with Luke Skywalker, who drives up to a cave in his hovercraft to retrieve a blaster pistol, of all things to be found on Tatooine, to prepare for the rescue of R2D2 from the fickle and often hostile denizens of Tatooine.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't tell the player where to go to (and accessing the party screen yields no clue whatsoever either). The player will have to hunt around for the Sandcrawler, and this just isn't fun.
When on Tatooine, the player takes control of Luke's hovercraft, driving around a limited region of the planet with a bird's eye view of the vehicle's immediate surroundings, which is just too little considering how fast the vehicle can move and bump into things. Moreover, the game does not inform the player that the hovercraft is completely defenseless and that anything else that moves in the map is a hazard that must be avoided, lest the hovercraft be damaged.
There is no map system whatsoever, so the player is forced to roam around looking for clues. At the very least, the developers have included signs such as markings in the sand to denote the trail of a Sandcrawler and the sigils of the Sand People to warn the player that they are entering the territory of the hateful savages, but these would only be recognizable by Star Wars fans. Everybody else simply blunders into a situation that they cannot run away from; entering one of Tatooine's caves means that the player has no choice but to finish the platforming level that ensues.
The platforming gameplay in this game is not good either. Like the hovercraft segment, the screen shows too little of the level to give the player some warning of what lies ahead; any player character simply moves too fast for comfort and can easily run into enemies and get damaged.
Speaking of damage, there is no indication whatsoever that the player character is being injured; there is some knockback inflicted on the player character's sprite, but there is no other visual indicator and no sound effects at all. There is a bar on the left side of the screen that displays the player character's health, but the game doesn't give any indication that this represents the player's health at the start of the game. An inexperienced player can very well keep running into hazards, and then watch his/her player character explode unceremoniously before learning the hard way.
There are also issues with the hit-boxes for sprites in both the platforming sequences and non-platforming ones. The player character, whichever or whatever it is at the time, tends to have a hitbox that is seemingly larger than his/her/its sprite. This means that he/she/it is very easy to be hit either by collision with sprites of enemies and hazards (which also have deceptively large sprites) or fired projectiles. This can pose serious problems in dodging mobile hazards/enemies, as the early-game Tatooine cave levels which are riddled with deadly stalactites and stalagmites would attest to.
Furthermore, much to the questionable wisdom of NMS Software, there is also fall damage in this game. After having fallen a certain distance, the player character's sprite will take on a panicky expression, and damage will be dealt according to the height of the fall. The combination of the screen being so limited in showing the expanse of the current platforming level, the lack of a map and directions to the objective, and frustrating hitboxes for hazards can make the platforming gameplay in this game very, very infuriating.
If the player has the patience to figure out where the game is hiding the player characters (and knowledge of the movie is of little help), he/she can take control of a party of Luke and the other pivotal protagonists of Star Wars. Only one character may be actively controlled at a time, but switching between them is as easy as going into the selection screen (with the "Select" button) and picking the desired character with the D-pad. All player characters happen to have separate health bars, so the player can switch between them as necessary to replenish their health (by picking up shining orbs that more than resemble those in the Mega-Man games) or perform some other action.
All player characters appear to have different weapons, though they do not necessarily start out with all of the weapons available to them: for example, Luke starts with a blaster pistol, but will gain a lightsaber in the course of the game, whereas Han Solo, when recruited, has a heavy blaster pistol, which is more powerful than Luke's but has a lower rate of fire. If a character has two weapons, the same character selection screen can be used to change weapons.
Such designs for the player characters may seem entertaining and fitting to Star Wars fans, though the euphoria may abruptly die down when they realize that the same reverence hasn't been given to the other characters of the film.
Characters like Greedo and Boba Fett are relegated to the role of goons, and it can be especially jarring to watch more than one Boba Fett on-screen. Furthermore, most of them have the usual and typical AI designs: they patrol stretches of platforms, going from one end and turning around to go to the other, ad nauseam. This was a common enemy design during this game's time of course, but it certainly didn't do the source material any justice, even when used on inconsequential characters like the Stormtroopers.
Most of them can be defeated simply by exploiting their patrol paths and repetitive behaviors, though some do have surprises, such as the Boba Fett sprite's ability to fire homing projectiles that just cannot be avoided in any way.
As vaunted as the lightsaber is in the film and the franchise, it is not very effective at defeating enemies in this game. Of course, it often one-hits any enemy, but its canonical ability to deflect shots isn't implemented in the game. Considering the wonky hit-boxes that sprites in this game have, using the lightsaber isn't practical. That is not to say that the lightsaber is useless, but even the sequences that require its use would not be impressive; one particular enemy encounter can be finished with just a single slash, whereas shooting it out would have made for a far more difficult fight. Such simplistic designs for the lightsaber may greatly disappoint Star Wars fans.
There are other sequences in the game that do not involve platforming, such as a sequence where the player must fly the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field early on in the game. The Millennium Falcon sequence involves dodging a lot of asteroids that are spawned on-screen and is heading towards the Falcon. While this sounds exciting, this sequence can be terribly infuriating if the player plays it as it is intended to be played, or can be rather underwhelming once the player figures out a programming oversight that NMS Software has made.
Gauging the distance between the Falcon and the asteroids from the cockpit of the ship is next to impossible, as the asteroids have varying sizes and their hitboxes appear to be just as varied. There is no indication whether the player has successfully avoided asteroids; only the shaking of the screen and some crashing noises would tell the player that he/she has failed to avoid a collision. Furthermore, the game does not inform the player that he/she should be collecting icons of the Falcon while in the Mos Eisley levels to fill the ship with the shields that it needs to withstand impacts from asteroids – not that this would help, as getting through this section is impossible if the player plays it as the developers intended.
The player is given control of a targeting cursor in this sequence, but is not told that this controls the direction of the ship. Tilting the cursor in any direction makes the ship turn, and in theory, this can be used to dodge asteroids. However, due to a programming oversight that has sprites for asteroids being spawned in the middle and upper half of the screen, the player can practically breeze through this sequence by simply aiming the cursors at the bottom edge.
This exploit would have been entertainingly silly, if not for the fact that this sequence is impossible to get through without resorting to it.
There are other space-ship sequences, but these tend to be just as disappointing. In these, the player has to shoot down TIE fighters that do little but swivel around while shooting the occasional projectile, which can also be shot down. This gives an impression of playing a stripped-down version of Space Invaders.
That is not to say that the non-platforming levels are all bad. One of them is quite decent, though a seasoned player at the time would notice that it is little more than a very simplified top-down shoot-'em-up.
While some platforming levels have so many difficult jumps to make, a few levels betray the developers' lack of enthusiasm at level design. Some levels, such as those on the Death Star, are little more than mazes that has the player taking identical-looking elevators to get through a level that ultimately has linear designs. Some others have many inexplicable hazards such as rows and rows of spikes that just do not match the canonical description of the places that the levels are supposed to be modeled after. All these level designs give the impression that the game designers had designed these levels to pad out the game and inject some artificial challenges to the platforming gameplay.
While the environments and sprites in the game are quite well-rendered for an 8-bit GameBoy game at the time, animations are very, very sparse in this game. The player characters have little more than a few frames of animations, and enemies have even less; the worst of these are perhaps the lightsaber slashes, which look clumsy and comical. Death animations are also very minimal: characters, either that of the player's or enemies, just seem to explode when they die, and even then this explosion is so puny.
The environments are very much static, and even if things move, these are little more than sliding sprites: illustrative examples of these include conveyor belts that do not appear to be moving at all, and pairs of alternately attracting and repelling electromagnets that serve as little more than annoying hindrances to jumping attempts. Worst of all, the developers appear to have recycled some environments; a player with a good memory will notice that the aesthetics of a level that took place in a Jawa Sandcrawler is repeated in a level that took place on the Death Star.
The sound effects are the usual teensy beeps and blips that can be expected from GameBoy games at the time, and they are provided for only a few occurrences, such as the firing of the player character's gun. While one can say that they would suit the corny and campy sound effects heard in the film, they only make things in the film sound even weaker and sillier in this game. An example is Luke's blaster, which makes meek gurgles when it fires.
Perhaps the only aspect of the game that can be considered convincingly good is its soundtracks. These are mostly 8-bit renditions of the soundtracks used in the movie, and they are quite good facsimiles.
Star Wars for the GameBoy suffers from a lack of effort on the part of the developers, such that the overall experience just leaves an impression of time (and money) having been wasted on a shameless cash-in.