Avenging Spirit

The Good
Avenging Spirit is an action side-scroller made by Japanese studio C.P.Brain and published by Jaleco. It's a port of their own moderate success Arcade Machine from 1991.

You play as a dead guy... a spirit looking for revenge from his murderers (and rescuing his girlfriend "Gennifer" - gotta love that name! technically his ex-) As a spirit you can possess people and other spirits from the world. And each one of them have different skills, some of them can shoot or kick, some can jump higher, throw grenades, etc. throughout the levels you'll find more than twenty of all sort of crazy characters to posses like gang members, dragons and robots. As you can see is sort of a creative premise.

Avoiding infinite respawning enemies and their projectiles is difficult - you'll get hit no matter what - but you have two energy bars, one for your spirit and one for the possessed, as long as you have ghost energy you can keep on possessing (you can lose all your life bar or simply leave your current body with select button). This and the unlimited continues makes the game on the easy side. The challenge come from the bosses where sometimes you need to have the right kind of possessed to make the fight easier. But the real fun is in trying out every character to possess and deciding which one is the best for the current level.

The graphics are amazing. Detailed backgrounds and sprites, and even cutscenes that narrates a somewhat compelling story (with the help of the manual) The music has a very "Japanesey" quality to it.

The Bad
Once you beat it there isn't much left to do in the game, though there's a secret ending, and a secret difficulty mode so... Also the USA cover art sucks real bad. Why would you not use the adorable cutesy designs of the protagonist like in the Japanese cover? I think they were trying to cash in on the early 90s Dick Tracy hype?

The Bottom Line
Avenging Spirit for the Game Boy is a perfect conversion from the Arcade Machine, every level is here and every boss (and even new characters to possess). I'd even say is an improvement. They basically took a boring, unplayable game - designed to eat your quarters - tone down the difficulty and made a cute, crazy fun action side-scroller that's worth your time and is all together a much better experience.