by The Game Boy library covered a surprisingly wide breadth of genres for a tiny 8-bit handheld, but what it severely lacked, especially outside of Japan, was rhythm games. Fast forward a few decades, and a game titled Chantey was published by ModRetro for the Game Boy in 2025.
Chantey delivers a unique mix of top-down adventure and note-matching rhythm combat. You can see the inspiration from games like Pokémon and Zelda in the “top-down adventure” aspect of the game. The rhythm portion of the game is similar to Guitar Hero, with notes falling down a highway-like track that players must hit in time with the music using matching button inputs.
Chantey does many things well, especially for a humble Game Boy game. However, Chantey is perhaps too ambitious at times.
Chantey Is a Fantastic Rhythm Game
When you actually get down to the core musical combat, Chantey absolutely shines. This is by far the best part of the game, which is good because it’s the game’s unique value proposition. Chantey cleverly swaps traditional sword fights and ship battles for rhythmic showdowns. It utilizes a four-column note highway corresponding to Left, Right, A, and B. The rhythm combat in Chantey is an incredibly unique and addictive loop that proves rhythm gaming can genuinely work on Game Boy hardware if executed with care.
Story progression triggers most of the rhythm battles, but once you beat the game, you unlock a battle mode directly from the main menu.
When a battle is triggered, you’re greeted by a familiar rhythm game layout featuring a vertical guitar neck “highway” down the center. As notes marked with left, right, A, or B symbols descend down the neck, you must execute precise inputs using your left thumb for the directional D-Pad lanes and your right thumb for the face buttons. Timely hits builds up the Hype Meter at the bottom of the track, where every three successive hits add a bar to the gauge. Conversely, missing notes drops the meter, and stringing together too many consecutive failures, either five on Default or three on Hard difficulty, will penalize you by draining a bar. To win the battle, you must successfully perform the song while keeping the crowd’s enthusiasm above a designated arrow threshold marker on the Hype Meter.
I am far from a rhythm game aficionado. You can call me “casual” all you want because I typically play Guitar Hero games on medium difficulty. However, the default settings for the rhythm combat in Chantey provided me with little difficulty. The rhythm gameplay was all-around fun, fluid, intuitive, and perfectly executed. As a rhythm game, Chantey flawlessly meets expectations.
Amazing Graphics and Sound
From a presentation standpoint, Chantey is a flat-out technical marvel. The game looks like it’s pushing the aged Game Boy hardware to its absolute limits. The game’s incredibly detailed pirate aesthetic completely sucks you into its world.
The high level of detail is most prominent in the game’s buildings, which I assume take inspiration from real late 17th century or early 18th century architecture in the Spanish Main. The small hut-like buildings in games like Pokémon and Zelda pale in comparison to the detailed masterpiece of each individual building in Chantey.
The character portraits for dialogue are equally as detailed; yes, they’re cartoony, but they fit the aesthetic well. Almost every screen on this game is a feast for the eyes.
Thankfully, the soundtrack is every bit as impressive as the visuals. The game features full-blown, heavy-metal-inspired chiptune sea shanties that will easily have you headbanging along to the music. For someone who sometimes enjoys sea shanties completely unironically, these chiptune metal-inspired renditions never get old.
Where Chantey Falls Short
I’ve described how the rhythm gameplay in Chantey is flawless, but Chantey is not just a rhythm game. This game tethers its core mechanics to a full-blown story and an expansive open world. If you want to play the rhythm game, you must play the adventure game.
Being an adventure game is not a fault in and of itself. Adventure games, especially on the Game Boy, can be fantastic games. However, in Chantey’s case, the “adventure” portion of the game is an obstacle that gets in the way of what makes the game truly fun and unique.
The map is pretty big for a Game Boy game. The game features 11 relatively large cities separated by water that the player must traverse. This fact means that you spend far too much time walking around a giant open world, or staring at a screen of blue water, instead of playing the fun rhythm game.
Not only that, there are locations that are completely hidden. You’re supposed to spend your time aimlessly wandering this huge world. And to compound the frustrations, there are many moments when you don’t know where you need to be. A mission might simply say (to paraphrase): “go explore” or “chart a course to a safe haven.”
Navigating the world can also feel distinctly clunky at times. The walking animation suffers from a slight jitteriness that feels generally off, making exploration feel slightly annoying at times. Furthermore, the collision detection is frequently frustrating as well. Unlike classic Pokémon games, which provide clear auditory feedback when you bump into a collision, Chantey offers no feedback at all when your character hits a barrier. All of this makes moving through tight town layouts feel somewhat unpolished.
Overall, these are nitpicks, but they serve to highlight the fact that the “adventure” portion of the game is just not as satisfying as the rhythm portion of the game. This could have been remedied with a better ratio of adventure-to-rhythm gameplay.
The Pokémon TCG Comparison
The best comparison I can think of that would be a model for a “perfect” Chantey would be the 1998 Game Boy game Pokémon Trading Card Game. Like Chantey, Pokémon TCG is a top-down adventure game with a unique twist: trading card battles.
However, the world of Pokémon TCG is much more limited in scope. Really, there is no “exploration” in Pokémon TCG at all because the developers correctly understood that the gameplay should be more centered around the card battles.
To travel in Pokémon TCG, you use the overworld map to visit different TCG clubs. Once at a club, you can run around, talk to NPCs, and battle opponents. Occasionally, you’ll run into your rival while collecting badges. It’s very basic, but that doesn’t matter because the trading card battling portion of the game is fun in and of itself.
I appreciate this aspect of Pokémon TCG because players don’t always have the time to digest a grand story or wander an open world when they are just craving a quick gameplay fix.
However, this is a problem that the developer of Chantey could remedy. Currently, battle mode is only unlocked after you’ve beaten the game. If the battle mode was available from the beginning and allowed you to play only songs you’ve already unlocked in the story, you could get your rhythm game fix without spoiling yourself and needing to set aside time to progress through the story.
This wouldn’t fix problems with the core gameplay loop, but it would go a long way to make the game more fun for a wider audience of players.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, Chantey is a wildly ambitious title that delivers some of the most impressive technical achievements, striking visual art, and infectious music in the modern Game Boy scene. It succeeds flawlessly as a rhythm game, proving that note-matching mechanics can feel incredibly fluid and satisfying on 8-bit hardware. However, the game should have leaned much more heavily into its stellar musical combat and far less on its vague, and often frustrating, adventure elements.
The fact that my biggest criticism boils down to wanting more rhythm battles and fewer navigation barriers shouldn’t be taken as purely negative, it speaks to how phenomenal the core gameplay is when you actually get to play it.
If you have the patience to brave the seas, Chantey is well worth giving a try at its $39.99 price for a physical copy.
