Mina The Hollower Was Inspired By Pokemon And Final Fantasy Adventure

“If you think about the games that were big at that era, it’s like Pokemon, right?” D’Angelo said. “In the other consoles, they finally were breaking out into huge games. Your Final Fantasys were getting enormous, hundreds of hours of playtime. But on Game Boy, that’s hard to accomplish, but they still were doing it. Pokemon could have been a game with 30 Pokemon in it, but it has more than a hundred Pokemon. It’s crazy. Even getting a hundred unique graphics on a Game Boy is a challenge, so we’re going to pack this big experience into this tiny little package. I think it’s just such an amazing feeling.”

That makes sense, given that one of the things I praised most in my Mina the Hollower review was its density. Every screen is bursting with secrets to find, so the idea of packing a lot of content into a little package certainly tracks.

D’Angelo also said he loves the era for how the rules were not yet set in stone, so lots of developers experimented with strange ideas that may not be considered player-friendly by modern standards.

“Mina starts with a big boss fight, because Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy had a huge boss fight. When you started that game, you’re a slave that is thrown into a gladiator fight [with] a huge monster. And it’s just like, what an insane way to start a game. You just have no sense of what’s going on and you’re immediately thrown into [a fight]. And it just feels like nowadays they’d be like, ‘You can’t do that. You have to teach the player how to play. They have to feel comfortable. They can’t go into a situation where they don’t know how to use the weapon and they don’t know how to do this.’ So they have weird and interesting ideas that are fun for us to pull from and figure out how to make them work a little better.”

By all accounts, Mina the Hollower has figured out how to make a lot of things work. It’s enjoying a glowing critical reception and currently stands as the top-rated game of 2026 on Metacritic. For more on Mina, check out our our Guides Hub for help, and be sure to read the full interview with David D’Angelo for even more insights.