http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8115
after scouring the english and japanese speaking worlds for about two years looking for information on himshou goran pocket monster, i have come to the conclusion that the entry in klov is a fake-- that the game is nothing more than a hoax.
It's not surprising that it would get the votes needed to be added to the database-- after all, the information is very specific, the descriptions are long, and pokemon is a franchise that is too new for most of klov's audience to pick up on. They know it exists, but few keep truly up to date on pokemon matters, and fewer do so enough to tell when something is fishy about an entry. I admit it, i am a pokemon fan, or at least a fan of the original generation, and i consider myself a bit of an expert... Or at least enough of one to see what's wrong with this picture.
First of all, the description of the game itself is an almost pixel-perfect, so to speak, description of the game-boy games. The two version system, the game corner numbers, and almost everything else. The main difference is that each of the options on the menu are described as a button on the machine, and the functions each thing does are a bit warped from the way the real game works. Surf, for example, allows you to move normally on water, not teleport to other places. That's what fly does, but surf is what you use to get to the unknown dungeon. You don't need 50 ultra balls to catch a legendary bird, and you don't need a master ball to get mewtwo. These 'facts' contradict the explanation at the bottom that they are arcade ports of the game-boy games. The writing gets more and more flawed and unprofessional as it continues: "once you get to certain cities, go to the house with the poke sign to heal your pokemon. You can also turn on the pc to deposit objects. Read the status from professor oak's pc to see how many pokemons you have got. Once it says mart, that means you can buy things. Some places wants to trade your pokemon for theirs such as: Farfetch'd, likitung, mr. Mime, and jynx." it sounds like a ten year old tried to remember what he did in the game-boy games to try to get one over on klov... Or was just stupid.
It also says that the game is two player, with a red version side and a blue version side, and that they play simultaneously and only interact in pokemon centers if they choose to battle. While this works on the independent-screen game-boy games, i can hardly imagine a split-screen cabinet like that when little would be accomplished by it. It also says you can save like you do in the main games, which brings up even more logical fallacies. There is only one save file in pokemon red and blue- why would an arcade machine make room for some thousands of daily players to save their files? What more, why would a game that takes days to beat usually, hours at minimum, be made into an arcade machine!? It's an rpg, there isn't much to keep you from progressing, and i can hardly see it working in an arcade situation to have fifty angry kids in line waiting for one pokemon nerd to stop grinding levels in the grass to get their pidgey to level 100. And it talks about what to do "after you beat the game once"... If you're free to roam the world after beating it with overpowered pokemon that can do anything, couldn't you play forever!? How would that even work in an arcade!? None of it makes any sense.
On a bit more technical level, the cabinet is described as having ash and pikachu on the side art. Why would ash be on the side art for the video game, when he was only on the show!? The cabinet art sounds more like the art on crappy usa-only redemption game pokemon catch. What's more, if this took place in 2001 when ash was out and the show was popular... Wouldn't the machine use gold and silver, which were now the big attraction!? Red and blue were outdated by then, and everyone had it for the game-boy- why the hell would anyone pay to play a game they already beaten two years ago in an arcade!? I could see a game like stadium working in such an environment where one could bring in their carts to battle, but to simulate an ancient home version of the game is simply absurd.
Plus, i can find no proof that this game exists anywhere. Searches only bring up sites reffering to the klov database, and when i search for the title in japanese i get nothing. Even common japanese variants bring up nothing. Doing some intense research on the japanese web by searching for pokemon arcade games in general showed me the print shops, snap stations, and coloring studio games, but nothing even remotely named like "himshou goran pocket monster". My japanese speaking friends even say himshou goran is japanese gibberish-- it sounds and looks japanese, and uses their syllables, but means nothing. I looked through japanese arcade databases, and i even got a magazine from japan documenting pokemon arcade releases- a ton of redemption games, nothing like what is described in the database. Nobody on any pokemon or nintendo forums had any answers, and one man was convinced he had it by finding a "pokemon island" flyer on arcadeflyers- but it featured pokemon that came out around 2003.
And, when nintendo released pokemon battrio a couple years back, a strange pokemon battling game, they described it as the first pokemon arcade game "game". The others were redemption or simple kiddy applications. If himshou goran exists, nintendo must have forgotten about it. Even funnier, the information mirroring the game-boy releases posted at the bottom- "the green version was released in japan only. The red version had charizard, the blue version contained blastoise, and the green version had venusaur." actually, you could get any of the three starters in any version, and... Well, we're talking about a japanese arcade game, right? And we just said there were red and blue versions... When we were talking about the japanese version. So was there originally a version with three monitors, or what!?
It's become obvious to me, and hopefully now to all of you, that this game doesn't exist. If anyone can prove otherwise, please do, because it sounds like a cool concept for a home collection addition and i would love to have it. But as it stands, it's on most "to be dumped" lists of mame roms when it doesn't even exist, and it's leading lots of people to think there was some big arcade port that doesn't exist. I don't know if there's any way to remove from the database, and that may not be neccesary, i'm mainly just posting to see if anyone has anything more to add, and since i know there are some other pokemon/retro gameboy fans on here, i don't want them to get tricked and spend two years chasing a phantom like i did.
