River King 3 & 4

Console: Gameboy Advance
Japan Release: February 2006
JP Wii Virtual Console: May 11, 2016

Introduction: The last GBA River King game is simply a remake of the Gameboy and Gameboy Color versions, River King and River King 2. At the start of the game you can choose which game you want to play. The background graphics were updated but the main graphics (characters, fish, text, and so on) remained the same.

The reason why it's called 3 and 4 is because RK1 and RK2 were never released outside of Japan. River King 1 was an NES game released in 1990 and River King 2 was the Super Nintendo follow-up in 1995. River King 3 came out in 1997, and then was labeled simply "Legend of the River King" when it was released in English in 1999. River King 4 on Gameboy Color was renamed to "Legend of the River King 2" when it was localized in 2001.

Kawa No Nushi Tsuri 5 (aka River King 5) was never localized into English, but if it had it most likely would have been called River King 3. It's so confusing!

Because the Gameboy Advance's screen was much wider than the original Gameboy, a scenery border was added to fill in the empty area around the game screen. The scenery will randomly change every so often as you play through the Gameboy games.

Since you can play Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on a GBA console, it was a little strange that Marvelous chose to publish an updated version of Victor's archaic games. The Nintendo DS system can't play the old style of GB cartridges, so it may have some use if one wanted to play the old games on the newest console.

(Victor Interactive and Marvelous Entertainment joined to be Marvelous Interactive in 2002)