It's new to me: Chalvo 55
A developer not known for their gems had at least one in this late-life Game Boy puzzle platformer
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Chalvo 55 only released in Japan, and only for the Game Boy, even though it was 1997 — so close to the release of its successor, the Game Boy Color. It had no Super Game Boy-specific functions, and has never seen any kind of re-release, which shouldn’t be entirely surprising given that its developer and publisher produced their final pre-bankruptcy console game just one year later.
Japan System Supply, the developer of Chalvo 55, was a small studio that usually worked with large publishers like Sega, Capcom, and, until the project was canceled, Nintendo. Chalvo 55, though, was self-published, which explains why it didn’t end up with a worldwide release. The idea behind Chalvo 55 originated out of that canceled project with Nintendo, however: that was a Virtual Boy game known as Bound High!, which, when the Virtual Boy was deemed a failure and support for it was withdrawn, was shelved.
Chalvo 55 isn’t the exact same game with a new name, but instead features the same lead, transforming robot character. It’s basically a follow-up from a different perspective — the Virtual Boy, with its stereoscopic 3D, was the ideal system for Bound High!’s top-down bouncing around, while the more standard Game Boy made sense for a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with a similar bouncing mechanic, utilized in a different way. There were enough similarities between the two that the designer behind Bound High!, Hideyuki Nakanishi, had no interest in working on Chalvo 55 because he “felt nothing new” in it. Given Bound High! was canceled, though, and not even given an unofficial release until its ROM image was put out into the world in 2010, Chalvo 55 managed to feel new to anyone who didn’t design the concepts behind it.
Japan System Supply wasn’t exactly known for creating high-quality games in the time before Chalvo 55. House of Tarot was a tarot card reading game for the Game Gear, published by Sega, and Japan System Supply was also handed the development reins to a spinoff of Phantasy Star, titled Phantasy Star Gaiden, which, given this review of it from Hardcore Gaming 101, is probably the weakest entry in the whole franchise and not worth seeking out unless you’re a very serious completionist. Bound High!, though, seemed pretty promising and like it was going to be a game that made the Virtual Boy more interesting than it had been to that point — Nintendo, now as then, gravitated toward third-party projects they had confidence in to turn them into first-party ones — but the platform died off before the game could release.
This was no small thing, given what Bound High! was supposed to be. Nakanishi, in an interview with Planet Virtual Boy, said that, “The company I worked for was very small and had nobody creative enough to develop an original concept." Nakanishi came up with both Bound High! and the Sunsoft-published Chameleon Twist, the latter of which is for some reason wildly inferior in its seemingly unfinished international release state compared to its original Japanese one. (Maybe a little ironically, some critics said Chameleon Twist was fine for kids, even though it lacked “originality.” One wonders how they would have felt in general if, language aside, the international and Japanese versions had been the same game.) So, salvaging something from the canceled Bound High! became a priority, and thus, Chalvo 55 was born for Nintendo’s still-breathing portable system.
What was salvaged is a good time, and enough so that, despite it being a relatively unknown Game Boy title, ended up with a fan translation all the way back in 2004 (though, it wasn’t uploaded as a patch until 2013 — no one knows who originally translated it, as it was discovered “floating around the internet” in a working, already patched ROM). Chalvo 55 is a “super action puzzle” game per its own tagline, and that’s a good way to describe it, really. You play as a robot with two forms: in one, the robot can walk around, and in the other, the robot is a bouncing ball. You must navigate the interior of a spaceship across eight stages (and a bonus ninth stage), transforming back and forth between walking around and bouncing around, in order to open up the way to the exit of each stage, and advance to the next one.
You can’t jump in the robot form, just walk around, but sometimes, that’s all you need. Obstacles like spikes are setup around the game’s stages so that you would very easily bounce into them if you were in ball form: you’re going to want to carefully walk by those — or, in robot form, push blocks around to cover the spikes — because Chalvo can only take the one hit before losing a life. Foes, though, you’re going to want to bounce on in order to stun and defeat them. There are also breakable blocks all over the place, which bouncing into them in ball form can smash through, ledges you can’t reach unless you bounce, vertical platforming puzzles that require you to get the jump right the first time because the platform is going to break under the power of your bounce, switches to flip to open pathways — none of what you do is necessarily new or innovative, but how you do it, by switching between two modes where all you can do is walk or all you can do is jump, makes it all into a different way to experience the kind of puzzle platforming you might already be familiar with to a degree. The what of it might be familiar, but the how of it is not, if that makes sense.
Here’s the intro video, which sees Chalvo infiltrating the ship the game takes place on, and some gameplay of the first two stages, from the fan translated version:
Those diamonds are scattered throughout and need to be collected to open up the exit, and you will have noticed that the signs labeled “Go” open up additional pathways for you to traverse. The whole game is just exploring your surroundings, by walk or bounce, while trying to avoid dying against foes or obstacles. And it works! It’s not incredibly easy, but it’s not super hard, either, once you get a sense of what you need to do. And the boss fights are designed as an extension of the kind of platforming you’re doing in the stages themselves: avoid obstacles, hit your targets, proceed.
You receive a password after completing each stage, as there is no battery backup to save your progress. The passwords are pretty short, since the game isn’t saving much besides which stage you want to start playing at, and since it’s not a game about high scores, you don’t lose anything by putting it down and entering a password later to continue, anyway. It’s all just about making it to the end.
It might be relatively unknown, but that’s not a statement on its quality: Polygon listed it as one of the 30 best titles on the Game Boy back in 2019, when they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the handheld, and while longtime readers will know it takes me a whole lot of investigating and weighing of pros and cons before I can simply make a declaration like that myself, I can vouch for Chalvo 55 being a lot of fun. It’s easy to pick up and play, short enough that it’s not a hassle to just restart if you feel like taking in the entirety of the game, and also simple enough to understand to dive in halfway through with a password if that’s where you left off.
It’s a shame, as understandable as it is, that the game never received a re-release: it would have been a perfect addition to the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console, for instance, which already featured quite a few of the games that Polygon listed in their top 30. Instead, though, it’s been relegated to mostly forgotten status, along with far too many other Japan-only Game Boy titles that should see the light of day again, and internationally this time, like Asmik-kun World 2, or Trip World, or Cave Noire.
Figuring out which company actually owns the rights to Chalvo 55 these days is more of a puzzle than the game itself. Japan System Supply’s assets were purchased by SETA Corporation and Square Enix sometime after they declared bankruptcy in 2000; SETA dissolved in 2009, and parent company Aruze absorbed its assets. Nippon Ichi Software purchased JSS, but as of 2009 they rebooted under their old name, and in 2015 were merged directly into Toei Animation. Does Square own Chalvo 55? Did SETA, so now Aruze does? It’s pretty unclear, from the info that’s out there, but what we do know is that no one has bothered to release Chalvo 55 a second time.
Luckily, you don’t need an official release to be able to play it. Game Boy emulation is possible on basically every device you could look it up for, given its age and relatively simplicity, so all you have to do is find a ROM out there, and patch it with the English translation if you care to do so. It’s that, or spend $35-50 on an actual cartridge (with no box, of course) on Ebay, since Game Boy family systems are region-free. I’d suggest the emulation, though: there are only so many of those cartridges to go around, you know, and you’re certainly not taking any money away from any developer or publisher at this point, either.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.