You rented Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters off the Game Boy shelf expecting a shrunken, gray-and-green rerun of the NES game you already knew by heart. What you got instead was the fix nobody had asked Nintendo for. Pit could finally move in any direction without stepping off a ledge to his death. He had wings now, ones that slowed a bad jump into a landing you could actually survive. Someone on the development team had clearly played the original enough times to know exactly which parts made players throw the controller.
Nintendo released the sequel in North America in November 1991, with Europe following the next May. R&D1 built it with help from Tose, and on paper it looks like any other Nintendo-published Game Boy title from that stretch. Here’s the part that doesn’t fit: Japan never got it. Not in 1991, not for another twenty-one years. It sat on shelves everywhere else while staying entirely unreleased at home, one of the rare first-party Nintendo games that skipped its own country, until a Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console release in February 2012 finally brought it to Japanese players — timed, fittingly, to arrive one month ahead of Kid Icarus: Uprising.
The improvements ran deeper than movement. Nintendo threw out the original’s punishing password system entirely, replacing it with battery-backed saves and a three-life, continue-based structure that felt far more forgiving. The bigger, more detailed sprites came courtesy of the same engine Nintendo had just built for Metroid II: Return of Samus, released that same year — a nice bit of behind-the-scenes efficiency that also happened to make Pit’s Game Boy adventure look sharper than his NES debut ever did.
It worked. Nintendo Power later ranked it 18th among the best Game Boy games ever made, and critics at the time praised it as a genuine improvement over the original. But the number that actually defines this game’s place in Nintendo history is twenty-one — the number of years it held the title of the only Kid Icarus game in existence. Nobody touched the series again until Kid Icarus: Uprising arrived on the 3DS in 2012. For over two decades, this quiet Game Boy cartridge was the entire franchise.
That obscurity cuts both ways for collectors today. Of Myths and Monsters never got the marketing push or magazine coverage that the original NES Kid Icarus enjoyed, which means a lot of copies spent their working lives loose in a backpack rather than resting in a box on a shelf. Complete-in-box copies with the manual and inserts intact are genuinely harder to find than the game’s modest sales numbers would suggest, and that’s exactly the kind of gap worth checking for before you assume a cartridge-only pickup is the best you can do. If you’re not sure what separates a solid raw copy from one worth sending in, our grading process breakdown covers what we actually look for.
Twenty-one years is a long wait for a sequel. It’s an even longer wait to just be the only game in a series — and Of Myths and Monsters carried that job quietly, on a system most people weren’t looking to for a Greek-mythology platformer, until Pit finally got his second act.