Mina The Hollower Was Inspired By Pokemon And Final Fantasy Adventure
Like Shovel Knight before it, Yacht Club’s latest game, Mina the Hollower, wears its influences on its sleeve. The game is clearly an homage to the look and feel of classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color Zelda games, while also carrying forward elements of the souls-like genre. But while those were clearly major inspirations for the game, Yacht Club took inspiration from lots of other Game Boy-era games, including Pokemon and Final Fantasy Adventure.
In an interview with GameSpot, Yacht Club's David D'Angelo credited influences as diverse as Pokemon and Final Fantasy Adventure. When asked why Yacht Club pays homage to the classic retro era of games, D'Angelo said that he's particularly drawn to how Game Boy games would pack an incredible amount of content into a tiny package.
"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 makes sense.
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 Guides Hub for help, and be sure to read the full interview with David D'Angelo for even more insights.
