I was so Lolo’d out after Adventures of Lolo 3 on the NES that I really wasn’t sure if I was going to even start this one at all, but my curiosity was just too great, and I had to see it. I’d read (and briefly saw from a little experience testing it earlier) that this game has a *lot* of very meaningful changes from its console counterparts, and it also has the odd honor of being a Japanese-developed game where the foreign version isn’t just more content complete: it’s very significantly more content complete, with the PAL version that I played having almost 3 times the stages (144 vs. just 50) of the Japanese original on top of Super GameBoy support. This will be my last Lolo or sokoban game for a while, but it made for a very interesting send off to the series for both me and the non-PC titles in general (as this was the penultimate Lolo game HAL ever made too). It took me about 12-ish hours to make it through all 139 non-optional levels and make it to the credits for the English version of the game on emulated hardware with moderate save state and speed up usage.
Adventures of Lolo GameBoy has a totally different story in English than it does in Japanese, it seems, but I shall relate the (very strange) tale of the version that I played. We kinda have several stories across the game’s 4 difficulty modes, with the tutorial and “pro” difficulties (respectively at the start and end) having no story to speak of. The intermediate difficulty is “Music and Dance”, where you’re collecting notes for the 5 different songs that Lolo and Lala will play and dance to. The expert difficulty then has them going to Gentry Land, an amusement park that’s been thrown completely out of whack by the evil Lord Egger! Lolo has to get all the keys for all 10 rides to get the amusement park back in working order so his family (including his new son Lulu) can have a nice vacation. It’s a weird story, even for a puzzle game like this, honestly, but it’s a good weird that has some bizarrely funny moments (outside of the uncomfortably racist shot they use for the “Oriental” music section’s intro ^^; ) and it does a more than thorough enough job of setting up the action at hand.
The action at hand is, of course, more Lolo as you’ve always known it, at least in part. You’re still collecting all of the heart framers to then get the chest and escape the level all while avoiding bunches of enemies, but you’ve never seen Lolo quite like this. Rather than the 11x11 stages that all of the console games have, the GameBoy version of Lolo opts for such large sprites that it can only fit 8x8 puzzles instead. As a result, puzzles tend to be far more simple than their console counterparts, or at the very least they have far less moving parts, with each one having only one or two main sections compared to the three or four that many of the harder console Lolo stages boast.
The mechanics at play in those stages is, for the most part, identical to those you’d find in the most recent console Lolo games. You’ve got breakable bridges, you’ve got all the enemy types, you’ve got water and stuff to push into it. The only big thing that’s missing is lava, and I’s say that that’s likely due to an insufficient ability to distinguish it from water on the monochrome GameBoy hardware. We also don’t have any of the underwater level stuff from Lolo 3 either, so there aren’t any Mobis lurking about either. Any other changes exist in what *appear* to be bugs and/or features. One feature that definitely isn’t a bug is that Don Medusas will now block instant death shots from Medusas the same way other enemies will if you just run alongside them with half coverage. It’s a scary thing to get used to, but not a ton of stages use it, so it’s not too bad really. The other main thing which I think *may* be just a bug is how eggs floating on water work. In the console games, an egg floating on water will just be a platform. It won’t block shots for you. The eggs in the GameBoy game, however, WILL block shots for you specifically from the Gol (the dragon fellas), so you can float past them on an egg and be miraculously immune to their fire. You really have no way of knowing this, and I’m honestly totally unsure on if it’s done on purpose or not, but it’s in the game, and it was vital to several puzzle solutions, so I have to assume it’s at least potentially done on purpose?
The last things that bare talking about are the difficulty curve and general performance. The difficulty curve is sadly much like NES Lolo 3’s. Where most of the game is balanced just fine and made for a good, fun time without any save states or such, some stages in the last leg of the game still managed to make it into my list of most unreasonable Lolo levels I’ve ever experienced (which is really saying something). Just like when I played Lolo 3, this is yet another game where I almost can’t recommend playing it on original hardware since some levels are just that unreasonable. That said, that IS just an “almost”, as this game actually boasts not just a hint function, but even a “do it for me” function. If you take a VERY long time (I think it’s standing still for like 5 straight minutes), then the game will give you an option for Lolo to have a “flash of brilliance”, and if you choose to accept it, then you’ll just see the game auto-play itself through the correct solution much like many modern Nintendo games have. It’s a really nice feature to have for a game that’s both this long and this difficult, and it’s honestly something I would’ve loved to have seen quite a few games ago, as it would’ve made the console Lolo games far more timeless.
However, the performance here really must be discussed. Folks who’ve read a lot of my reviews may’ve noticed that I mentioned I used “save states and speed ups”, in my intro paragraph. I do this to be honest about how I complete games, but it really begs elaboration in this particular instance (and not just because I didn’t use rewinds simply due to the fact that I don’t know how to use them in this emulator XD). On the Japanese Wikipedia page for this game, they mention how it has the “lowest game speed of the series”, and that seemed like quite a strange comment to make to me. Now that I’ve played the game myself, I can see just how sorely needed that clarification is, because this game is heckin’ SLOW. Lolo and the whole game move at an utterly glacial pace, and I’d wager it’s close to half the speed of their console counterparts.
While this *does* make the game somewhat easier to perform tricky timing puzzles in in some respects, it also makes the game *dreadfully* dull a lot of the time. Waiting like 10 or 15 straight sections for an enemy to respawn can get immensely tedious when you’re doing it several times per attempt of a level, and that horrid waiting extends to everything from waiting for an egg to flow down a river to waiting for an enemy to hatch from an egg. This is all extra tedious when you consider that, much like the console games, there is no shortage at all of levels who rely on trial and error via testing warp holes for enemy respawns or where hidden currents happen to be in bodies of water, so you’re gonna be spending a LOT of time just twiddling your GameBoy-holding thumbs as you wait for the next bit of game to be available to you. While the game is hard enough that I’d recommend playing it on emulated hardware anyhow, so this isn’t a massive issue, it’s still something that is so unignorable, even with a speed up feature, that it demands a LOT of complaining XD
This just being a GameBoy game, you might expect it to slouch on the aesthetics, but it honestly puts the console games to shame in many ways. Graphically, the sprites are very big and pretty. I think this was ultimately not entirely worth it, as it ended us up with both the smaller play areas and, I suspect, the very slow game speed, the in-game graphics look nice as do the cutscenes between stages. The music, however, is where this game is truly impressive. Different sections of the game actually have different music for their puzzling sections! Not only that, but there are some *super* cool features even within the same stage for how music plays, as both what direction Lolo faces AND what surface he’s standing on actually affect the music playing as well! I’ve never heard of another game that does this, and it makes for a much more auditorily varied experience than the console Lolo games, and for a game you’ll be playing for likely well more than 10 hours to see it to completion, it’s a very welcome change to the Lolo formula.
Verdict: Recommended. This is honestly a bit of a hard recommendation in some respects, but it excels so highly in others that I feel that it’s simply worth the bump in recommendatory power. Yes, it is absolutely true that some levels are vile & evil and that the game speed is dreadfully slow without an emulation tool to speed it up. However, that said, I don’t think it’s really that bad at the end of the day. Mind you, I don’t say that to excuse these things (especially in regards to the slow game speed), but the “do it for me” spark of brilliance system make the unfair difficulty basically a total non-issue, and the small boards in the first place make the slow game speed far less of an issue than they’d be if this had the larger boards like the console games do. While this is undoubtedly not a game free from issues (as you’ve no doubt gathered from reading the review up to this point XD), it’s a game that’s actually learned from its predecessors enough that it’s still one of the Lolo games most worth playing in my mind. It’s not technically the last game in the series (as the Windows game from the following year would carry that honor), as far as the games on Nintendo hardware go, this is the final Lolo game we ever got, and I think to that point, it’s an excellent sendoff for Lolo and his friends until HAL decided to return to the action puzzle scene years later with their BoxBoy games~.
