Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1~50
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
Continuing my journey through the Adventures of Lolo games, I decided to take a break from just how brutal Lolo 1 on the Famicom was and go for the next English-language game in the series. It ended up being a bit *too* breezy, frankly, as I was SO used to Famicom Lolo’s difficulty that this game felt almost pitifully easy by comparison, but I had a fun time regardless x3. It ended up taking me around 3.5 hours to play through the game on emulated hardware with no save state use save for once or twice to make a couple levels I’d already played in the Famicom game go a little faster (as I’d already completed them once without save states before and felt no need to do it again).
Adventures of Lolo 2 reuses the premise and cutscenes from the Famicom game from the previous year. The evil demon lord is back, and he’s captured Princess Lala again, so it’s up to Lolo to venture up his tower and kick his butt once more! Like in the other Lolo games, the story hardly matters terribly much here, but the little touches of plot add some fun spice to the experience, and it does a perfectly fine job of setting up the premise for our puzzling adventures~.
Those puzzles are a very effective continuation from the first NES Adventures of Lolo game. The mechanics are the same sokoban mechanics we all know and love with Lolo needing to push blocks and maneuver around enemies to collect all the hearts, get the gem, and escape the level. This game, like the first NES Lolo game, has no truly original stages, and the stages for this were mostly taken from the same two Eggerland games that were used to make the first NES Lolo game, and some five or six levels from the Famicom Adventures of Lolo are thrown in here as well. As a result, this game’s construction is a bit weird in places. While this game *does* have lava with burnable bridges like Famicom Lolo 1 does, there are so few levels taken from that game that it’s just this weird mechanic that happens to manifest in just one or two stages, as the game that innovated that mechanic isn’t where most of this game’s levels are taken from.
That unevenness extends to the difficulty curve as well. The game feels very fair, quick, and breezy just like the first NES Lolo game, but those Famicom Lolo 1 levels stick out like a sore thumb with how they’ll just ratchet the difficulty WAY up all of a sudden every now and then. That isn’t to say that the game can’t or shouldn’t be challenging, but it makes the game feel like it just doesn’t have a difficulty curve at all, and nigh every level past level 15 or 20 was just chucked in at random. This was an issue that Famicom Lolo 1 had as well, to a degree, but that game’s overall difficulty was so much higher that it ended up mattering a lot less. What we end up with is a game that doesn’t so much have a “curve” to its difficulty so much as it has a “jaggedy graph” of difficulty (as a friend of mine so elegantly put it). It doesn’t make this game bad by any means, of course, but it does make it harder to recommend than the first NES Lolo was for me, at the very least.
Aesthetically, this game is an upgrade to the first NES Lolo game in the same way that Famicom Lolo 1 was to it. There are some aesthetic upgrades here and there, with Don Medusas getting a new sprite, some special stages having all new tile sets for their environments, and pushable blocks having sparkles on them to help them be more visible, but it’s still very identifiably as Adventures of Lolo as the first NES game was, and the differences likely won’t stick out to you unless you had JUST played the first NES game like was the case with me. We also get a slight music upgrade too, with the singular song that played during all of the normal stages of the first game being swapped out with a new singular song that plays during all of the normal stages (the very same song that Famicom Lolo 1 uses) XD. It’s very much a philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and with a game with as fun and cute a style as Adventures of Lolo, that’s a design philosophy that I find pretty hard to argue with~.
Verdict: Recommended. I really wish I could recommend this game as highly as the first NES game, but I just really can’t. Had they not messed up the difficulty curve in the way they did by including levels from Famicom Lolo 1, I think I’d have a different opinion on it, but as things are, I just have a *few* too many reservations about the game’s difficulty and design to give it that high a recommendation. That said, I still think this is a game that people who love sokoban games or logic puzzle games like Baba Is You will likely really enjoy. It’s not a terribly long game, and it’s got some reflex/timing puzzles in ways that Baba Is You doesn’t, but it’s still a good brain teaser that’s loads of fun to challenge yourself to, so if that sounds like a good time, then this is a game that you’ll probably quite enjoy~.
