[A recurring feature each time I complete a year in the UK, in which I catch up with the games to have been #1 in the archived Japanese sales charts of that year, as reported in Famitsu. Thanks to Game Data Library for running the resource that makes finding these out easy.]
1990 brings some more data, lots of RPGs and eventually the debut of the Super Famicom to take us into the 16-bit era. Still no sign of anything but Nintendo domination in terms of what machines all the games were played on.
魔界塔士 Sa・Ga / Warrior in the Tower of the Spirit World: SaGa (Square, Game Boy)
Square decided to branch out from their big name series Final Fantasy and make a new RPG, taking advantage of the Game Boy’s capabilities (the first thing after starting it that hit me was how incredible the music sounds next to most of the home computer games I’ve been playing). In a neat summary of different approaches to Japanese RPGs elsewhere, for the US it was cautiously renamed as The Final Fantasy Legend, while in the UK it just wasn’t released.
ドラゴンクエストIV 導かれし者たち / Dragon Quest IV: The Guided Ones (Enix, Famicom)
The biggest game series around carries on rolling…
Final Fantasy III (Square, Famicom)
…and is directly replaced at the top of the chart by its big rival in April.
Dr. Mario (Nintendo, Famicom)
Dr. Mario involves dropping and rotating objects, but isn’t quite Tetris. Nonetheless, it’s clearly enough in its slipstream that a surprise to me that it was the Famicom version and not the Game Boy one that was the more successful right away. I guess it’s just that more people had Famicoms.
Famista (Namco, Game Boy)
Regular Famista updates show no sign of slowing down, with the ability to play an existing popular game on the move proving unsurprisingly popular.
ドラゴンボールＺ 強きゅう襲しゅう！ サイヤ人じん / Dragon Ball Z: The Assault! The People of the Saiya (Bandai, Famicom)
Another card-based DBZ game, but with much more impressive animations.
F1 Race (Nintendo, Game Boy)
The lifelikeness is less than that of Family Circuit in 1988, but it’s more straightforwardly fun to be able to see more of the road ahead.
Super Mario World (Nintendo, Super Famicom)
A new era begins, with Nintendo getting the successor console to the Famicom out in Japan before the end of 1990. I remember the hype when it eventually made it here, for hundreds (thousands?) of colours and the dazzling video of this game, although it would be more than a decade before I’d encounter it again.