Shanghai Pocket

US release.

Shanghai Pocket is a mahjong solitaire video game developed and published by Sunsoft for the Game Boy on 1998-08-06 and later for the Game Boy Color and WonderSwan. The game is part of the Shanghai brand. It has a story mode and two competitive play formats. The WonderSwan port also includes an additional "challenge" mode.

In the story mode, the animals of the Chinese zodiac once lived in a giant tower of tiles, but it was struck by lightning and their Orbs were trapped under the tile heaps. By solving a layout, you will uncover their missing Orb and allow them to return to their tower.

Personal

After beating Shanghai Mini and seeing how many other Shanghai games there were, I decided I wanted to try some of the other ones as well. I beat the story mode on hard difficulty and both competitive modes of the Game Boy Color port at fast speed on 2022-08-25.

Review

4	4	3	5	6

Best Version: Game Boy Color

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The ability to switch the tile graphics to simpler images that are more visible at low resolution was very helpful. Unfortunately, this only takes effect in the story mode.
• The added competitive modes adds some enjoyable play. At fast speed, the AIs are good enough that you'll have to try several times to beat them, but not so good that it makes the game impossible.

Bad

• The story mode is just 12 different layouts that are generated at random. Each has a guaranteed path to victory, so they're typically pretty easy. When I played through all 12, I needed to retry once on three of them, and only one was so hard I had to retry about a dozen times. All the others I finished on my first attempt. This made the story mode especially short.
• I know the screen space is limited, but, not showing your opponent's layout in the competitive modes makes it much hard to gauge their progress. In either mode, you only ever get a vague idea of what stage they're at.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Box Art

• 

  Game Boy - Japan.

• 

  Game Boy Color - USA.

• 

  Game Boy Color - Europe.

• 

  WonderSwan - Japan.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - USA.

Videos

Long play - Game Boy Color - Story mode.

Game play - WonderSwan.

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no strong women.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There are no named characters.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	There are no human characters.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Credits

Roles	Staff
Producer	Hiroaki Higashiya (GB), Kazuo Nii (GBC)
Director	Kazuo Nii
Main Programmer	Kazuo Takahashi
System Programmer	Yusuke Kamei
Graphic Designer	Satoru Aoyama
Character Designer	Hayato Ishiguro
Music Composer	Satoshi Asano
Sound Effects	Naomasa Nakata
Sound Programmer	Kazuo Nii
Super Game Boy Design	Akira Muramoto
Super Game Boy Programmer	Kazuo Nii
Associate Producer, Shanghai	Eveline M. Cureteau
Senior Producer, Shanghai	Tom Sloper
Special Thanks (GB and GBC)	Masato Kawai, Akito Takeuchi, Seiji Kadowaki, Kenishi Oshika, Shizuya Furukawa, Kazuko Harman, Kazuyo Umemura, Kiyoshi Ohkawa (GBC)
Special Thanks (GBC)	Yoshiaki Iwata, Kenji Yoshioka, Ayako Honma, Hiroaki Higashiya, Atsushi Naono
Executive Producer	Kiharu Yoshida (GB), Mitsuharu Kitajima (GB, GBC)

Links