Okay, we haven’t covered any retro games properly since MARCH! As such, we did some research to discover weird old games and weren’t left disappointed by the glory of Monkey Puncher (さるパンチャー or Saru Panchā) on the Game Boy Colour.

We were expecting this to be a Japan only release, but it also launched at the same time in Europe back in December 2000. North America… you had to sit out on this one, sadly.

Iconic Japanese developer Taito was responsible for this oddball concept. It’s a bit of an odd one, rather obscure these days, and that makes it all the more worthwhile to cover.

Avenge Your Primate Family in Monkey Puncher

The game title may be a giveaway here. Let’s preamble a little bit to build up to the big monkey-based payoff!

Players get to choose between a female or male primate. Then, at the start of the game, your father and sibling are kidnapped. After this, the hybrid genres of the title emerge—boxing simulation game and virtual pet thing.

With the need to find your family, as you’re the child of a celebrated monkey trainer… you must enter the world of championship monkey fighting. Therefore, one must:

• Train monkeys
• Enter the primates into fights
• Watch monkeys beat each other up
• Bask in the glories of victory
• Hunt down your family

Thinking about it, the game has a similar revenge-based plot to the Dreamcast’s Shenmue. Except Sega’s game doesn’t have any monkeys in it (at all), much to its detriment!

But the virtual pet element (think Tamagotchi) sees you offering positive and negative reinforcement for the beast, just with ’80s style training montages of monkeys getting themselves buff.

Based on the various full game walkthroughs we found on YouTube, this game has over 10+ hours of gameplay time.

So, yes, this Game Boy Colour title had a Japanese and EU release.

We can prove it got a European release with this PAL box art. We’d never heard of this game until researching it today, so the thing clearly punched itself into obscurity.

Our beloved N64 Magazine here in the UK actually gave Monkey Puncher 4/5 (we don’t remember them reviewing it at all). Other media publications were harsher. But at least this weird little concept got a little bit of love upon launch.

Okay, better end this retro game summary with some random primate-based comment…

What a cheeky monkey! 🙈