An absolutely charming little game. Love me a single-player co-op experience, and the chapters being these self-contained little vignettes reminds me of the best parts of Dragon Quest and Earthbound. For the most part, the puzzles manage to hit that sweet spot where the solutions don’t feel immediately obvious but also don’t require insane leaps of logic. There is a little bit of friction early on in figuring out how to position the boys for teamwork moves, and some unnecessary padding in the last two chapters, but aside from that I thought this was a real gem

Game Review - originally written by Kitsune Sniper

According to EludeVisibility.org, the game is an RPG similar to Zelda, in which the hero looks a lot like Link. I’d try to elaborate but the game crashed. ZSNES doesn’t run it properly, but SNES9X seems to run it well.
(editor's note: this was written 20 years ago and therefore is no longer a problem, but some emulators and flashcarts out there, mostly ports to weak systems and cheaper flashcarts, still don't support the SA-1 chip this game shares with Kirby Super Star and Super Mario RPG, so confirm support before playing)

Best known for being the first directed work of Eiji Aonuma of modern Zelda fame, Marvelous is a really interesting game about a group of boys in a summer camp who get caught in some kind of pirate conspiracy. A very solid SNES/Super Famicom import. Also has a wonderful fan translation.

The puzzles are to be honest, sometimes annoying, especially near the end of the game.

It is made up for in spades though, by sharp, witty writing (which sometimes feels like it shouldn't be in a kid's game. That, or the fan translation took a few liberties.) A beautiful art-style, that while being made in the Link to the Past engine, is far from a copy of that game. The environments are mostly new and creative.

The game's mostly focused on solving puzzles, but you do have a health bar and there is some combat.

I loved the creative use of each of the main characters abilities. The scenarios the characters find themselves in are really creative, as well.

Most of the game is split up episodically. The areas each have their own theme. I won't spoil beyond that, though.

Recommended.

Things I learned from Marvelous: Another Treasure Island:

-Sometimes you just have to bother the person in front of you by pulling their ears, flicking their nose, etc until they get out of your way or give you what you want.

-There's nothing in the world either too hard to do or not worth doing for your smokin hot teacher

-Not only is it okay to be an ugly fat kid, an annoying short kid, or a tall lanky nerdy kid, it is sometimes absolutely essential to be.

-The real treasure is exploration, seeing as much of this whole wide world that we can when we're given such a short life to do it

-You have to first realize your own limits and then give it your best shot to overcome them and achieve what you never thought you could before.

-If it's directly based on the Link to the Past game engine, you're gonna need a walkthrough!

Incredibly ahead of its time both in that it contains a robust hint system that works really well and in that it sucks in the exact way 3D Zelda games did for years. Eiji Aonuma being the director of both makes me wonder if he had something to do with it.

Game presents you with really interesting scenarios regularly and then proceeds to do nothing with them. You spend an hour playing Rock Paper Scissors with monkeys for no reason. There's a whole scenario that's basically The Thing except boring. The final dungeon is a series of empty hallways with things placed in arbitrary locations that need to be accessed in a specific order. A robot programming puzzle that's just trial and error.

Wretched. The worst game ever published by Nintendo by a significant margin.

A quirky adventure with some hilarious writing and more than enough variety within the puzzles and storytelling to keep the game from ever growing stale. The sci-fi leaning Chapters 2 and 3 in particular were both a lot of fun and caught me by surprise with some interesting time travel segments in the prior and some Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque horror in the latter; these were definitely the highlight of the game for me. There are occasional moments of friction where some dated puzzle designs and tedious backtracking almost cause the game to fall apart but they are usually brief enough to ignore and rarely detract from the overall experience.