@yawackhary well, actually, i'm using Gens Kmod in case you wanna know

@playgames169vg Probably using the shadow and highlight feature on the console, shadow makes it darker while highlight makes it brighter.

It might also be your emulator because when I just tried booting up the game via BizHawk (since it uses GenesisPlusGX, one of the more accurate MD emulators along with Exodus and BlastEm), it uses the VRAM palette and even then the values compared to your rips are a bit different.

@yawackhary and why are the palettes in the vram look darker than in-game?

@playgames169vg From what little I know, Gamtec used PCPaint to do the art. So they probably made their own dev kit and used a floppy disk copier connecting it from the PC to the Mega Drive for testing. They had a few sprite artists within the company and considering the state of game development over there at the time would have been fairly skilled/talented, Adventurous Boy in particular was done mainly by Qiongji Zeng however she was only known for doing one other game.

Early Gamtec games were more original unlike their later stuff where they became a contracted developer and started lifting stuff from various things or making unofficial sequels. Going from unlicensed to pretty much bootleg and it was also when their earlier staff left. This game is influenced by Fantasy Zone though.

can anibody around me explain to me why are these graphics so good for a cheap bootleg like this?! They're amazing my friend! I'd better rip some before the rom disappears forever!

I noticed how some bootleg games (mainly Genesis and Plug N' Play ones) have this sorta art style
Best thing I can compare it to is the Super Mario-Kun manga https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/610t-eoMCUL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Never heard of this one, as well.