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~.

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~.

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.

This is a game I’ve owned on my Wii Virtual Console for aaaaages. I must’ve bought this 15 years ago at the very least. I have my Wii U hooked up at the moment to play some other games on my old Wii’s VC, and while I wasn’t in the mood for those quite yet, I figured I may as well try and knock out some other unbeaten games on there while I’m at it, and that’s how I found myself playing this old puzzle game once more. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game on real (virtual console) hardware, and I only had to look up one puzzle solution.

The fair princess Lala has been kidnapped by the great demon (known as the evil king Egger in Japanese), and it’s up to Lolo to travel through the evil lord’s insidious tower of puzzles to save her! It’s a very simple premise, and it works fine enough to set up the action at hand. No need for complicated stories when we have puzzle rooms to solve! X3

Adventures of Lolo is the first of HAL Labs’ Eggerland series to make it out of Japan (in a sense). Specifically, this is a combination of levels taken from the previous two Famicom Eggerland games released the year before. Lolo moves on a grid of tiles, and your objective is to collect all of the heart icons scattered around the screen, grab the treasure chest, and then carry on to the next stage (of which there are 50 in total). It’s not nearly as simple as it sounds, however. Lolo has all sorts of baddies out to stop him, and their methods of attack range from just blocking his path so effectively that the puzzle becomes impossible to solve, all the way towards just shooting lasers to outright kill him.

The puzzle design is overall relatively easy (compared to the more difficult of these games, at least), but that’s not to say the game itself isn’t challenging. I had to look up one puzzle’s solution myself, but that one’s solution ultimately just hinged on the fact that I didn’t realize that enemies couldn’t possibly walk on grass (which is something I probably would’ve known had I owned the manual). Getting through the other levels myself was a really fun series of brain teasers, and Lolo provides a great puzzling challenge of difficult puzzles composed of ultimately simple pieces.

The presentation is very cute and charming. While it’s a tad simple for a 1989 NES game in some regards (likely owing to the fact that it’s a mixup of games and assets put together in ’88 and earlier), it’s still by no means of poor quality. Lolo and friends (well, enemies, really) are simple but cute in a way that HAL would very much carry on to their upcoming Kirby series (where Lolo himself would even make an appearance!), and there’s never any issue with parsing what’s going on due to the graphics or otherwise. The music is also relatively simple, with there being quite few tracks (and basically only one main stage theme), but the music that’s there is still very fun and quality for what it is.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you’re a fan of more modern puzzle games like Baba Is You, then Adventures of Lolo is something you should absolutely check out. Granted, Lolo is actually something of an action game, so there will be points where you need to utilize timing or clever tricking of enemies to solve puzzles in a way that something like Baba Is You never has, but it’s still very much cut from the same cloth. While this may be quite an old puzzle game, it’s one that should nonetheless not be forgotten, because it’s still loads of fun (and on the Switch Online NES Service too!) :D