Wonderswan Retrospective

The tale of how the wonderswan came about is widely known, so read other's articles about that. This will start at the release of the original Wonderswan.

I think every model of Wonderswan came out in some sort of blue color. I can't blame them, it looks nice.

The Bandai Wonderswan was released in march 4 1999, after the release of the Game Boy Color and also even after the release of SNK's Neo Geo Pocket. The NGP was an immense failure almost instantly and was soon replaced with a color model, so it didn't really impact the Wonderswan's launch. The real competition was from the Game Boy Color, obviously having the color feature whilst the wonderswan was monochrome. There was a reason for this seemingly backwards design, and that was price. The Wonderswan costed 4,900 yen or about 50 dollars in the 1999 valuation. The Game boy Color retailed for 70 dollars. So, for 20 dollars less you technically got the more powerful system, as the wonderswan had a 16 bit CPU but the GBC had a 8 bit CPU. The wonderswan had decent support from developers, quickly accruing over 50 titles. However, the market had spoken: color was important.



Before we move on, I'm going to run over some hardware specifications. The wonderswan had a screen similar in tint to the game boy pocket, a tan yellow. The screen is much easier to see in dim lighting than the wonderswan color, but I'll get into that later. There is a power toggle switch at the bottom of the system. There is a very cheap looking link port on the left side (It looks like should've had a cover. Maybe it did at one point?). The speaker is mono and quite small and tinny sounding. More notable are the buttons themselves. The wonderswan was unique in that you could play either horizontally or vertically using the two sets of d-pads ( or well, four buttons in a cross shape. The Wonderswan d-pad is actually quite terrible.). Oddly, you could have four action buttons for vertical mode but only two for horizontal play. This seems like a missed opportunity. Games that really needed the four buttons HAD to display vertically. There are also the occasional games that use EVERY button and have hold the system diagonally... Which is an abhorrence to all of humanity, but isn't that uncomfortable in reality. The wonderswan uses one AA battery which is inserted into a detachable batter pack at the back of the system. This pack reminds of the batter packs used with minidisc players around this time. The downside to this is that the weight in vertical mode is all of and you've got A GIANT LUMP where your left hand should be holding the system. Honestly, Bandai was good at making gimmicks and toys, not well thought out video game hardware. There are finally some terrible start and sound buttons that are difficult to press, but game boy color had them too, so who cares. Since this is using a screen like the game boy pocket's there is a contrast wheel as well... AND THIS KEPT TO THE COLOR MODEL????? Seriously if my thoughts on this system seems harsh, the Wonderswan Color is SO MUCH WORSE. Interestingly the less successful Neo Geo Pocket is something of a polar opposite of the Wonderswan. It was (allegedly) priced higher at 70$ and was actually weaker performance wise but had an excellent build quality that perhaps even exceeded Nintendo's. Unfortunately,history makes Bandai's price cutting measures moot and the system looks much worse in comparison nearly 20 years later. If history was a perfect thing and consumers had tons of cash to burn I think the Neo Geo system would've been the one to do respectably, but that's just how these things go, and neither of them had a even a long shot at usurping Nintendo's monopoly. SNK was bleeding money and Bandai didn't really have the drive to play the long game in the handheld arena.
- and before you critique me for mocking the late Gunpei Yokoi's designs... I'm pretty sure corporate had a big part in cheapifying the Wonderswan. With a higher price the Wonderswan could've been made much better, with things like the link port and speaker being easy fixes. The d-pad's terribleness was likely due to Nintendo's copyright as well, everyone at that time felt the need to make some weird alternative, and the main d-pad had to pade of individual buttons as that's how it would be used in vertical mode. That's certainly not something that would be a breeze to fix. There is some (darkly) funny irony in that the inventor of the d-pad couldn't use his invention when designing his last system. In a lot of ways the Game Boy Pocket 2's uh, Wonderswan's design is pretty creative. But yeah, the screen is just a landscape ( or even taller vertically) version of the Game Boy Pocket's.

Next article I'll talk about some interesting oddities in the Wonderswan's library and after that, THE SUCCESSOR.