Space Battleship Yamato for Game Boy: basic instructions
Contributed by Steve Harrison
These instructions are meant to stand in for a guidebook when playing the Game Boy emulator here.
The game has multiple stages, taking their cues from the major steps on the journey to Iscandar. Each stage starts with a briefing that outlines the goals in Japanese. This shouldn’t be too much trouble if you know the story of the first series. The essential strategy is pretty simple; get Yamato to each stage’s goal as fast as conditions permit without losing too many Black Tigers, because you’re going to need them for later battles.
Here are some instructions to get you through the first stage, which is a good way to get used to the interface.
The goal of the first stage is to destroy a Gamilas forward base/observation post on Earth, it’s the square that looks like the door to the secret underground hanger. It’s in your best interest to move Yamato there as fast as you can, using the fighters as a screen. The closer you get, you also come under attack from giant bombs and fighter carriers.
How to play: there is a flashing cursor that you move with your directional keys. You can scroll that over the entire stage to see where you have to go and what’s facing you. Move the cursor over Yamato or a Black Tiger and press ‘A’; this selects the ship and you can move it up to three spaces in any direction, then press ‘A’ again to finish that move. Once you select a ship you can either move it or not, but you can’t select it twice to change your mind for the move.
Once you’ve moved all your ships it’s the Gamilas turn. The CPU moves everything it wants to move and then it’s your turn again. If you want to try and fake out the CPU you can choose not to move anything, press ‘enter’ and it skips your turn.
If Gamilas fighters engage the Yamato icon you go to a ‘first person’ screen, flying the Cosmo Zero. When destroyers or carriers attack, you are flying Yamato itself. The screen at the bottom is your radar, the two different ‘arcs’ being the kill zones for your guns, which you fire with the ‘B’ key.
The gauge on the left is your Wave Energy buildup (fire your cannons too fast and the gauge slows or depletes), the one on the right is your damage. When the Wave Energy Gauge is full you press the ‘B’ key to fire the wave-motion gun. This will wipe out EVERY enemy ship that’s within the most narrow arc of the bottom scope. Naturally you use the directional keys to maximize the attack, trying for the max group within the kill zone.
When you get Yamato to the Gamilas base you engage in a ‘button mashing’ contest that may be risky for some computers, may break the key. You have to hit the ‘A’ button as fast as you can to get the gauge to increase as the timer counts down. Succeed and the base blows up, Dr. Sado comes on to give you a code number (so you can restart from that point) and then….the dangers of the Warp!
Once you reach this point, it goes to a warp synch screen with the bouncing point on the waves, and you must hit the button exactly when the ‘warp point’ is centered. This is harder than it looks. You just have to trust to your hand/eye coordination and hit that ‘A’ key when the dot hits the center of the gauge. If you miss it, Shima will tell you to try again. If you miss it too many times…game over, Dessler wins.
Every stage ends with a ‘button mashing’ battle against whatever is blocking the way, like the artificial sun of Balan being dropped on you. There are also things you can’t avoid, such as the drill missile, that will damage you no matter what.
Also, you have a time limit for the game. every turn is one day, so if you take too long to clear a stage the Earth dies! Good luck!