Don’t let that title fool you! Despite the identical title to the previous year’s NES game, this Famicom game is completely different! It’s a whole new game with all new stages to boot! Still wanting to play more Adventures of Lolo after finishing the first NES game the other day, I continued on to this one. I had actually meant to play the second NES game, truth be told, but upon learning that it wasn’t on the Switch Online NES service, I just opted for this instead. It took me around 9 or so hours to beat all 50 levels via the Switch Online Famicom service, and I did it without looking up any puzzle solutions and only using rewinds/save states on 2 particularly nasty levels.

Given that the Adventures of Lolo series already had a name in Japan, “Eggerland”, and this would’ve been the fifth game in that series (and the fourth one on the Famicom), it is completely beyond me why they chose to drop that old title completely and just reuse the title of the English localization they’d done the previous year. At any rate, it’s more Lolo goodness! The evil lord Egger has stolen Princess Lala once more, and it’s up to Lolo to solve another 50 floors of his tower in order to kick his lousy butt! As with the other Lolo games, we really don’t need much in the way of story to make this a good time. This does actually have some neat story/plot moments near the climax that make for a more memorable ending than the NES counterpart of the same name, but story or no story, the puzzles are fun all the same~.

And what puzzles they are! There are a few new mechanics introduced here, such as having lava stages (that you can’t float enemies across like you can with water) and self-destructing bridges (which burn up after a few seconds in the aforementioned lava), but most of the gameplay is the same old enemies and obstacles that we’ve grown to know over the earlier Lolo games. On the NES, we’d only had the original Adventures of Lolo up to this point, which was made of 50 easier levels from the previous two Famicom Eggerland games. This game on the Famicom, however, was clearly designed and balanced with the knowledge that people had already had over 350 levels of Eggerland on this console, so they needed to up the ante, and boy howdy has it been raised!

Granted, I haven’t played that much in the way of the larger Eggerland series, but at least comparing it to the NES counterpart of the same name, this game is incredibly difficult by comparison (something you probably picked up on given that it took me more than twice as long to beat this game as it took me to beat that one). I’m fairly proud of the fact that I was able to beat the whole thing without looking up any solutions, but the puzzles here aren’t just more difficult on your brain, they’re also just put together less fairly. That’s a word I don’t super like using, but I mostly use it because a very large amount of the puzzles are designed in such a way that the solution to it can’t be reasoned out from just looking at how the boards start out.

For example, many many solutions rely on killing an enemy and then blocking its original spawn point to force it to respawn somewhere else. These respawn points are completely unmarked, so you’ll just need to keep on engaging in trial and error until you’ve managed to figure out where to correctly place the blocks. A similar kind of thing manifests through how, as ever, currents in water aren’t marked, so you’ll just need to trial and error it up by pushing enemies into the water to see what happens. This is hardly the greatest sin in the world for a puzzle game, but going through all the steps in a level just to fail yet another part of trial and error can be very disheartening, and that’s especially true with just how difficult the execution is in so many of these stages. Far more than there ever were in the NES game from the previous year, there are quite a lot of stages where you are given exactly enough time to do something, and you have zero wiggle room to correct if you mess up.

I wanted a good idea of exactly how long the game would take to play if you were trying it legit, so a not small part of that nine hours I spent beating this isn’t just me staring at the screen thinking of what to do next (heck, one level was so hard I took a photo of the starting state and took it to work to look at and ponder during my lunch break XD) or trial and error-ing my way to the correct water current. A not insignificant amount of that time is just trying and retrying the same brutal timing puzzles over and over again. The first stage I cracked on my “no rewinds/save states” rule on was one quite late in the game with an absolutely absurd amount of instant death traps you need to time your way past. My heart goes out to anyone actually needing to do that on original hardware, because I had times where the Don Medusas actually managed to glitch through a half-width gap and kill me where they shouldn’t even have been able to, and that hardly made an already very frustrating stage more tolerable. It’s something I guess I should’ve expected by what can be considered the penultimate Famicom Eggerland game, but it’s still difficult enough that it’s far harder to recommend this outright like the NES counterpart is.

The presentation is still very familiar Adventures of Lolo, and anyone who’s played the NES game will be very familiar with how this game looks. This game, like that one, only has the one song that plays during normal play, but it’s at least a new song this time! (and it happens to be the one they’d go on to use the next year in making Adventures of Lolo 2 on the NES, in fact). The graphics are also largely unchanged, though there are a few little additions here and there. Some special levels use a new design for the rooms’ interiors, pushable blocks now sparkle to help indicate where they are, skulls are now whiter (to clearly indicate they’re skulls, I suppose), and those vile Don Medusas have gotten quite the face lift. It’s honestly so little it's barely worth mentioning (beyond the slowdown these new flashy graphics can cause in a level or two), but it’s still as good as it ever was, as far as I’m concerned.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is still simple puzzle fun like the NES game before it was, but it’s SO much harder, especially in the execution of those timing puzzles, that it’s far harder to recommend. If you’re really into puzzle games like Baba Is You and you want something challenging, Famicom Adventures of Lolo will certainly give it to you, but just be ready to use save states or rewinds to make those timing puzzles more bearable. The quality and care to detail of the earlier Adventures of Lolo is absolutely still here, but the difficulty is SO much higher that far fewer people are going to find it nearly as inviting and enjoyable as its English-language cousin.

Don’t let that title fool you! Despite the identical title to the previous year’s NES game, this Famicom game is completely different! It’s a whole new game with all new stages to boot! Still wanting to play more Adventures of Lolo after finishing the first NES game the other day, I continued on to this one. I had actually meant to play the second NES game, truth be told, but upon learning that it wasn’t on the Switch Online NES service, I just opted for this instead. It took me around 9 or so hours to beat all 50 levels via the Switch Online Famicom service, and I did it without looking up any puzzle solutions and only using rewinds/save states on 2 particularly nasty levels.

Given that the Adventures of Lolo series already had a name in Japan, “Eggerland”, and this would’ve been the fifth game in that series (and the fourth one on the Famicom), it is completely beyond me why they chose to drop that old title completely and just reuse the title of the English localization they’d done the previous year. At any rate, it’s more Lolo goodness! The evil lord Egger has stolen Princess Lala once more, and it’s up to Lolo to solve another 50 floors of his tower in order to kick his lousy butt! As with the other Lolo games, we really don’t need much in the way of story to make this a good time. This does actually have some neat story/plot moments near the climax that make for a more memorable ending than the NES counterpart of the same name, but story or no story, the puzzles are fun all the same~.

And what puzzles they are! There are a few new mechanics introduced here, such as having lava stages (that you can’t float enemies across like you can with water) and self-destructing bridges (which burn up after a few seconds in the aforementioned lava), but most of the gameplay is the same old enemies and obstacles that we’ve grown to know over the earlier Lolo games. On the NES, we’d only had the original Adventures of Lolo up to this point, which was made of 50 easier levels from the previous two Famicom Eggerland games. This game on the Famicom, however, was clearly designed and balanced with the knowledge that people had already had over 350 levels of Eggerland on this console, so they needed to up the ante, and boy howdy has it been raised!

Granted, I haven’t played that much in the way of the larger Eggerland series, but at least comparing it to the NES counterpart of the same name, this game is incredibly difficult by comparison (something you probably picked up on given that it took me more than twice as long to beat this game as it took me to beat that one). I’m fairly proud of the fact that I was able to beat the whole thing without looking up any solutions, but the puzzles here aren’t just more difficult on your brain, they’re also just put together less fairly. That’s a word I don’t super like using, but I mostly use it because a very large amount of the puzzles are designed in such a way that the solution to it can’t be reasoned out from just looking at how the boards start out.

For example, many many solutions rely on killing an enemy and then blocking its original spawn point to force it to respawn somewhere else. These respawn points are completely unmarked, so you’ll just need to keep on engaging in trial and error until you’ve managed to figure out where to correctly place the blocks. A similar kind of thing manifests through how, as ever, currents in water aren’t marked, so you’ll just need to trial and error it up by pushing enemies into the water to see what happens. This is hardly the greatest sin in the world for a puzzle game, but going through all the steps in a level just to fail yet another part of trial and error can be very disheartening, and that’s especially true with just how difficult the execution is in so many of these stages. Far more than there ever were in the NES game from the previous year, there are quite a lot of stages where you are given exactly enough time to do something, and you have zero wiggle room to correct if you mess up.

I wanted a good idea of exactly how long the game would take to play if you were trying it legit, so a not small part of that nine hours I spent beating this isn’t just me staring at the screen thinking of what to do next (heck, one level was so hard I took a photo of the starting state and took it to work to look at and ponder during my lunch break XD) or trial and error-ing my way to the correct water current. A not insignificant amount of that time is just trying and retrying the same brutal timing puzzles over and over again. The first stage I cracked on my “no rewinds/save states” rule on was one quite late in the game with an absolutely absurd amount of instant death traps you need to time your way past. My heart goes out to anyone actually needing to do that on original hardware, because I had times where the Don Medusas actually managed to glitch through a half-width gap and kill me where they shouldn’t even have been able to, and that hardly made an already very frustrating stage more tolerable. It’s something I guess I should’ve expected by what can be considered the penultimate Famicom Eggerland game, but it’s still difficult enough that it’s far harder to recommend this outright like the NES counterpart is.

The presentation is still very familiar Adventures of Lolo, and anyone who’s played the NES game will be very familiar with how this game looks. This game, like that one, only has the one song that plays during normal play, but it’s at least a new song this time! (and it happens to be the one they’d go on to use the next year in making Adventures of Lolo 2 on the NES, in fact). The graphics are also largely unchanged, though there are a few little additions here and there. Some special levels use a new design for the rooms’ interiors, pushable blocks now sparkle to help indicate where they are, skulls are now whiter (to clearly indicate they’re skulls, I suppose), and those vile Don Medusas have gotten quite the face lift. It’s honestly so little it's barely worth mentioning (beyond the slowdown these new flashy graphics can cause in a level or two), but it’s still as good as it ever was, as far as I’m concerned.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is still simple puzzle fun like the NES game before it was, but it’s SO much harder, especially in the execution of those timing puzzles, that it’s far harder to recommend. If you’re really into puzzle games like Baba Is You and you want something challenging, Famicom Adventures of Lolo will certainly give it to you, but just be ready to use save states or rewinds to make those timing puzzles more bearable. The quality and care to detail of the earlier Adventures of Lolo is absolutely still here, but the difficulty is SO much higher that far fewer people are going to find it nearly as inviting and enjoyable as its English-language cousin.