The Game Boy didn't have that many good games in comparison to home consoles of the time. This console was relevant during the times of Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, FF7, Mario Kart, Sonic Adventure, Megaman X, Streets of Rage, Super Metroid, ALTTP etc etc etc.
Tetris and Pokemon isn't gonna fucking cut it sorry. Even the great games on that system like Mario Land 2 and Link's Awakening just have me wondering what could have been had those been made from the ground up for SNES in mind. The hardware limited the games too much
Compared to home consoles maybe lol, but then again as you say it has some titles that stand up to console games (I guess the games either suck, or they're so good they should have been on console. Can't win).
Many of those GB games were good for that exact reason, being tasked to make a GB game after the home console got first servings. But since it was the "other system", needed lots of support and Nintendo was still finding their identity, it had a lot of interesting or quirky takes on Nintendo IP, the most obvious being Mario Land, but the games always felt sufficiently different to be their own thing worth checking out rather than "copied from console except less good".
Like I said in my post if not for Game Boy there wouldn't have been a portable game to play at all. Makes me wonder if you were actually there or just comparing ROM libraries. When you're in a back seat headed to a tourist destination or even just the TV is being used, you prefer the game that exists to the hypothetical one on a home console (which they were still dropping first, ie LA started as a LTTP port but became this mutant side story).
NES resurrected the home console market but GB offshot another one. That's the market that weathered cell phones, buoyed past failed consoles, and existed to merge with consoles come the Switch. Nothing will convince me that's not a big deal lol.
You are counting franchises like what it "delivered" like Pokemon, we are talking about a time where buying Qbert on a cartridge wasn't a joke, that's why we dealt with B&W screen, the gimmick of game boy was a game
existing at all, GB was like the PC of portables...it was the default option to have a handheld game, another didn't exist. Honestly back then I was lucky to score a used Game Gear too but I only played a few games on it and it was always tethered to a wall. "Game Boy" meant for portable game what Kleenex meant for tissues.
GB came out in 1990, before Sonic 1. Try to think about the context of the world it was unleashed to, that is why it was STILL relevant when Mario 64 came out. Instead of comparing it unfavorably to Mario 64, think about what an impactful, juggernaut platform it had to be to still be relevant in 1996.
