Animaniacs: Animaney! Totally Insaney! Game Boy Gamey!

Because the world of pop culture hasn't really evolved since the mid-90s, Animaniacs is back. The series received a reboot/series revival of sorts in November of 2020 on Hulu, and despite some issues, it feels like a solid revival of one of the biggest cartoons of the 90s. So, what better time while the series is coasting on its old fans and new audience by covering Konami's take on the series for the Game Boy? Let's look at Animaniacs.

Year of Release: 1995
Publisher: Konami

In 1993, Animaniacs premiered on Fox as part of the Fox Kids block. The series was the follow up to the successful Tiny Toon Adventures, but proved to gain even stronger acclaim due to being more free in its comedy, both as parody of 90s popular culture at the time along with a lot of really dirty humor you won't get until you're older (Finger Prince?). 

The show was a series of different animated shorts starring fresh new characters like Slappy Squirrel, the Goodfeathers, Rita and Runt, Chicken Boo among others, but the main two cartoons that really made Animaniacs a success were the Warners and Pinky and the Brain. The Warner brothers (and the Warner sister) consisted of Yakko, Wakko and Dot. Three cartoon characters from the 1930s deemed so insane and out of control that they were locked in the studio water tower until they escaped in the 90s, where they continue to cause chaos. 

The other major cartoon, Pinky and the Brain featured the adventures of two lab mice, the genius Brain and the insane Pinky, as the Brain vies to take over the world, with each of his attempts ultimately failing at the end. Either by Pinky, or his own hubris taking him down. Though even in defeat, he would plan for tomorrow night, where they'll do the same thing they do every night, try to take over the world!

Animaniacs proved another major hit for Warner and Steven Spielberg. And with success comes licensed video games. Fortunately, Konami was still the publisher with the rights to make video games based on the Warner toons, so they made a few. One for Super Nintendo, one for Sega Genesis, and one for Game Boy. Now, given that we're dealing with a Nintendo console in the Game Boy, you'd expect the SNES version to be ported over, but that's not the case. Instead, we get a port of the Genesis game, with famed company Factor 5 developing the port to bring it to the smaller screen. 

The story for the game sees the Warners wanting to run their own souvenir shop, so they head to different movie sets to take each film's famed artifact, all while avoiding Ralph the security guard. Also Pinky and the Brain are around, planning to take over the world. The Game Boy port tries its best to bring the entire Genesis game over to Game Boy, but loses the Star Wars themed level in the process. What's left is a horror level, a jungle level and a wild west level, along with the final level. And those levels feel heavily truncated, losing several areas. This is notable with the jungle and final levels especially.

In Animaniacs you can control all three Warners and can switch between them by pressing start. Yakko can push and pull crates and use his paddle ball to annoy enemies, Wakko uses his mallet to smash boxes and activate switches or bombs. Dot uses her cuteness to get certain enemies and obstacles out of the way. I feel that's a strength this game has over the SNES version. Each Warner feels unique and have abilities that fit their characters from the animated series. It can be cumbersome at times to switch, especially in tense situations, but you can switch faster with a double tap of the select button. 

In terms of challenge, the game isn't super difficult, though a few areas feel a bit obtuse in how to complete them. These issues came to a head mainly with the wild west level where I found some of the box pushing puzzles to be annoying, and due to the GB port easily causing items to disappear if you leave the screen by a couple pixels, you can find yourself taking damage you probably shouldn't have. Another annoying area was the Ralph fight at the end of the wild west level where you have to time your hammer shots to hit him with a piece of coal to knock him off the train, all while sometimes dodging the coal that falls back at you if it didn't get inside the smokestack. Also, a few times I felt hit detection was an annoyance, especially again in the west level when you have to avoid barrels. But those issues aside, the game does feel pretty easy to get the hang of and beat.

The game's graphics look fine, taking an obvious downgrade from the Genesis version, and many of the Animaniacs character cameos disappear. Honeslty, the only notable ones I remember seeing in this version were Squit, Runt, Buttons and Mindy. But given the limitations, it's not a total loss. Audio sounds great on the Game Boy, doing its best to recreate the Genesis soundtrack. Several tracks get lost in the process, but what we get still sounds good. And then there's the addition that actually makes Animaniacs for Game Boy stand out much better than most releases. It has Super Game Boy features. First being a somewhat cleaner color palette, but the most important being that the in-game audio gets replaced with a 16-bit soundtrack. And it sounds just fine. Some of the compositions sound weird, while others just disappear entirely (the Pinky and the Brain theme that is played when a life is lost is replaced with something more generic sounding). I honestly prefer the 8-bit soundtrack, but props to Factor 5 regardless for what is a really neat addition.

For a handheld take, Animaniacs does a solid job. It loses a lot from the Genesis original, but still recreates the game fine. There are some hiccups, often with hit detection and some obtuse sections, but never to the point of pure frustration. For a licensed game, it continues the run of quality that often came with Konami games. I'd say between the two choices, the Genesis one is the better game, but if you're looking for some Warners on the go, then you really can't go wrong with Animaniacs. B.