Okay, so Nihonshi Target 201 is this weird little Game Boy game that somehow makes Japanese history feel like an arcade challenge. You start off getting quizzed on samurai clans and famous battles—stuff like "Which warlord unified Japan in 1600?"—and if you nail it, you unlock these short, frantic mini-games. One has you dodging arrows in a Sengoku-era battlefield, another makes you match portraits of historical figures against a ticking clock.

It’s way more fun than it sounds, mostly because the mini-games are just chaotic enough to keep you from feeling like you’re stuck in a textbook. The pixel art’s charmingly rough, too—like someone sketched famous daimyos on a napkin and just rolled with it. And yeah, you’ll probably bomb a few questions at first (who remembers every Edo-period poet?), but failing just means you get to retry with a different weird minigame.

Honestly, it’s the kind of game you’d find buried in a ¥100 bin at a used shop, but once you start, it’s weirdly hard to put down. If you’ve ever wanted to learn Japanese history while also, say, frantically tapping buttons to stop a castle from burning down, this is your jam.