Continuing my adventures through the Lolo games, I found myself next on this, the final Famicom game in the series. After how brutal the previous Lolo Famicom game was, I was prepared for something utterly vicious here, and it delivered in spades (and spikes, swords, and drowning! X3). Even abusing save states and rewinds like nuts, the game still took me close to around 35-ish hours to finish playing all 110 stages on emulated hardware.
The evil Lord Egger is back at it again, but, in a bit of a change from usual, he’s not after Lolo or Lala this time. This time, he’s used his vile magic to turn all the inhabitants of the kingdom to stone! Having been outside of the city at the time, Lolo and Lala are spared this stoney fate, and so they set off at once to go kick Lord Egger’s butt and turn everyone back to normal. It’s still a pretty standard Lolo fare, sure, but I have to commend the efforts they’ve gone through to make this feel like more of an adventure. From the world map to story events and even a twist at the end, this is still certainly just an excuse to weave together our puzzle game, but it’s the best job they’ve done of it so far, and I think that’s worth mentioning (and it’s also something I can see much more distinct echoes of in HAL’s later puzzle series, BoxBoy, for sure).
The gameplay, as I implied previously, is both very much the same with a few new twists. As far as new twists go, most of them are just for show, but they do have some actual utility/gameplay effects here and there. The world map, for example, where you walk around and go to different level hubs to tackle the 5~10 stages inside, gives the game more of an adventure feel, sure, but it also, very importantly, acts as an ability to actually choose which puzzles you’d like to do next for once in these games (somewhat like the old Eggerland games did). Granted, you don’t always have a choice on what you have to do next, but pressing Start while in a level (of which there are 17) brings you back out to the world map, so, if you’re stuck, you can just pop out of that level and choose another one for now until you feel up to tackling that tricky stage again (as you just go right back to the last stage you were at upon reentering a previously exited level).
This brings me to my next very important point: We’re finally rid of the annoying life system from the previous Lolo games! Where in previous Lolo games you had 5 lives per continue (with infinite continues) meaning you were constantly mashing Start at the title screen every 5 deaths to get back into the action, now you no longer need to worry about that awful pain in the butt. The new password acquisition system is, instead, done by just pressing Start on the world map. While the new passwords are a bit longer than the old ones, they’re not too onerously long, and this game is so much longer than previous ones in addition to being far less linear, it makes sense that the password system would have to get a little more accordingly complicated too.
Other small changes include the learning trees. In the first and second hub areas on the world map, there is an optional Level 0 with 5 stages each. These serve as a kind of tutorial for the game, and, even though they lack any kind of text explanations inside, they still do a pretty good job of showing off all of the game’s systems (from reusing egg’d enemies to warp holes) in a way where you have no choice but to get at least a bit used to them. While some of these are pretty damn hard, the game itself is pretty vicious too, so that just makes sense, I suppose XD.
The last little change is the previously mentioned boss battles. The previous Lolo game (both the Famicom Lolo 1 and the English Lolo 2) ended with a little boss battle against Lord Egger, but it was a pretty dead-easy fight that you could win by literally standing still. Lolo II has ten whole boss battles in it, and while they’re also pretty easy, they’re actually something of a challenge, and they make for a neat kind of victory lap once you’ve beaten that level’s fiendish puzzles.
The fiendish puzzles in question are largely the same sokoban-type puzzles they were up through the previous Lolo game (get all the heart framers and then the gem to win, one hit kills you, eight different enemy types, etc.), but there are a few new additions here and there. One of the main new additions is destructible bridges, but not the burning-over-lava kind that the previous game had. Now we have proper destructible bridges that automatically destroy themselves after being crossed over twice, and they make for a much more reliable and interesting mode of puzzling compared to the old time-based burning bridges (of which I wanna say this game has like only one or two instances of, if any).
The other new mechanic (if you can even call it that) is the underwater stages. While this is mostly just an aesthetic choice for the levels in the 3/4ths point of the game, they do have a unique enemy type in the Mobi, who is like a harmless Snakey (which also, amusingly, exist under water as well XD) but sucks you towards itself when it sees you. It’s not a game-changer in and of itself, sure, but the underwater stuff makes for a neat new kind of puzzling after getting thoroughly used to the land-based enemies in the first half of the game.
That puzzling that you’re getting, by the way, is hilariously evil too. I’ve used words like “fiendish” to describe it previously in this review, and that is entirely justified, frankly. Where I was able to beat Lolo 1 on the Famicom while only using save states for just two out of 50 levels (and didn’t need to look up solutions to any), I not only had to look up 4 (out of 110) solutions here, but I also had to abuse save states and rewinds for basically the entire game. There are SO many extremely tight timing puzzles combined with loads of nigh frame-perfect dodges you have to do to avoid instant death, I have no idea how anyone was expected to beat this on original hardware.
Even in all of the absurd timing puzzles I had to clear to beat this, two of those 4 stages I had to look up solutions for were, nonetheless, simply confirmation that some seemingly impossible timing challenge was, indeed, the actual way to do it. Another was one that I just wasn’t clever enough to figure out on my own (I’ll own up to that), and the other was one whose solution used a near-glitch in the game’s engine I had no idea even existed (and frankly I’m dubious on whether or not the Let’s Play I found to use as a guide even got the intended solution for that puzzle). Playing this game, full stop, is incredibly difficult to recommend unless you both love puzzles and have a serious patience for redoing difficult timing puzzles, but playing the game on original hardware without save states/rewinds is completely unrecommendable.
Aesthetically, the game is Lolo as it’s ever been, but just a little bit nicer. Most of the graphics will look very familiar to anyone who’s played the earlier couple Lolo games, but Lala having her own bespoke animations is a very cute extra touch, and the new environments for puzzles and enemies are also very nice looking. The music is a weird one. None of the music is bad, of course, and this is the first of these games whose music I’d describe as having an amusingly Kirby-like vibe to it. However, despite the different overworld sections having different music, there is only one song that plays during puzzles for the entire game, just as the previous Lolo games had. Given how little time you spend in the overworld compared to the dozens of hours you spend within stages, this is a baffling choice to me, but it is what it is. The game suffers a little bit of graphical flickering and slowdown here and there, but it ultimately plays and performs just fine, even when you’ve got a screen loaded with blocks and moving enemies.
Verdict: Not Recommended. This is a profoundly unfair game, and it was unquestionably designed as such. Playing it on original hardware is an utter fool’s errand, and even playing it with save states/rewinds will still likely drive you batty. Far too many of the puzzle solutions are based around extremely tight timing challenges rather than more procedural based stuff, and it just makes for a time that’s too frequently far more frustrating than fun for all the wrong reasons. Very dedicated puzzle game and/or Lolo fans might find this to be a worthwhile challenge to cut their teeth on, but even as someone who’s come to really love these games, I absolutely cannot recommend anyone touch this game. Just enjoy some other of the many Lolo or similar sokoban-like games out there, because it will be time far better spent than in this game (and if you wanna see the story and aesthetics, you can just play the far easier NES Lolo 3 instead anyhow).
The evil Lord Egger is back at it again, but, in a bit of a change from usual, he’s not after Lolo or Lala this time. This time, he’s used his vile magic to turn all the inhabitants of the kingdom to stone! Having been outside of the city at the time, Lolo and Lala are spared this stoney fate, and so they set off at once to go kick Lord Egger’s butt and turn everyone back to normal. It’s still a pretty standard Lolo fare, sure, but I have to commend the efforts they’ve gone through to make this feel like more of an adventure. From the world map to story events and even a twist at the end, this is still certainly just an excuse to weave together our puzzle game, but it’s the best job they’ve done of it so far, and I think that’s worth mentioning (and it’s also something I can see much more distinct echoes of in HAL’s later puzzle series, BoxBoy, for sure).
The gameplay, as I implied previously, is both very much the same with a few new twists. As far as new twists go, most of them are just for show, but they do have some actual utility/gameplay effects here and there. The world map, for example, where you walk around and go to different level hubs to tackle the 5~10 stages inside, gives the game more of an adventure feel, sure, but it also, very importantly, acts as an ability to actually choose which puzzles you’d like to do next for once in these games (somewhat like the old Eggerland games did). Granted, you don’t always have a choice on what you have to do next, but pressing Start while in a level (of which there are 17) brings you back out to the world map, so, if you’re stuck, you can just pop out of that level and choose another one for now until you feel up to tackling that tricky stage again (as you just go right back to the last stage you were at upon reentering a previously exited level).
This brings me to my next very important point: We’re finally rid of the annoying life system from the previous Lolo games! Where in previous Lolo games you had 5 lives per continue (with infinite continues) meaning you were constantly mashing Start at the title screen every 5 deaths to get back into the action, now you no longer need to worry about that awful pain in the butt. The new password acquisition system is, instead, done by just pressing Start on the world map. While the new passwords are a bit longer than the old ones, they’re not too onerously long, and this game is so much longer than previous ones in addition to being far less linear, it makes sense that the password system would have to get a little more accordingly complicated too.
Other small changes include the learning trees. In the first and second hub areas on the world map, there is an optional Level 0 with 5 stages each. These serve as a kind of tutorial for the game, and, even though they lack any kind of text explanations inside, they still do a pretty good job of showing off all of the game’s systems (from reusing egg’d enemies to warp holes) in a way where you have no choice but to get at least a bit used to them. While some of these are pretty damn hard, the game itself is pretty vicious too, so that just makes sense, I suppose XD.
The last little change is the previously mentioned boss battles. The previous Lolo game (both the Famicom Lolo 1 and the English Lolo 2) ended with a little boss battle against Lord Egger, but it was a pretty dead-easy fight that you could win by literally standing still. Lolo II has ten whole boss battles in it, and while they’re also pretty easy, they’re actually something of a challenge, and they make for a neat kind of victory lap once you’ve beaten that level’s fiendish puzzles.
The fiendish puzzles in question are largely the same sokoban-type puzzles they were up through the previous Lolo game (get all the heart framers and then the gem to win, one hit kills you, eight different enemy types, etc.), but there are a few new additions here and there. One of the main new additions is destructible bridges, but not the burning-over-lava kind that the previous game had. Now we have proper destructible bridges that automatically destroy themselves after being crossed over twice, and they make for a much more reliable and interesting mode of puzzling compared to the old time-based burning bridges (of which I wanna say this game has like only one or two instances of, if any).
The other new mechanic (if you can even call it that) is the underwater stages. While this is mostly just an aesthetic choice for the levels in the 3/4ths point of the game, they do have a unique enemy type in the Mobi, who is like a harmless Snakey (which also, amusingly, exist under water as well XD) but sucks you towards itself when it sees you. It’s not a game-changer in and of itself, sure, but the underwater stuff makes for a neat new kind of puzzling after getting thoroughly used to the land-based enemies in the first half of the game.
That puzzling that you’re getting, by the way, is hilariously evil too. I’ve used words like “fiendish” to describe it previously in this review, and that is entirely justified, frankly. Where I was able to beat Lolo 1 on the Famicom while only using save states for just two out of 50 levels (and didn’t need to look up solutions to any), I not only had to look up 4 (out of 110) solutions here, but I also had to abuse save states and rewinds for basically the entire game. There are SO many extremely tight timing puzzles combined with loads of nigh frame-perfect dodges you have to do to avoid instant death, I have no idea how anyone was expected to beat this on original hardware.
Even in all of the absurd timing puzzles I had to clear to beat this, two of those 4 stages I had to look up solutions for were, nonetheless, simply confirmation that some seemingly impossible timing challenge was, indeed, the actual way to do it. Another was one that I just wasn’t clever enough to figure out on my own (I’ll own up to that), and the other was one whose solution used a near-glitch in the game’s engine I had no idea even existed (and frankly I’m dubious on whether or not the Let’s Play I found to use as a guide even got the intended solution for that puzzle). Playing this game, full stop, is incredibly difficult to recommend unless you both love puzzles and have a serious patience for redoing difficult timing puzzles, but playing the game on original hardware without save states/rewinds is completely unrecommendable.
Aesthetically, the game is Lolo as it’s ever been, but just a little bit nicer. Most of the graphics will look very familiar to anyone who’s played the earlier couple Lolo games, but Lala having her own bespoke animations is a very cute extra touch, and the new environments for puzzles and enemies are also very nice looking. The music is a weird one. None of the music is bad, of course, and this is the first of these games whose music I’d describe as having an amusingly Kirby-like vibe to it. However, despite the different overworld sections having different music, there is only one song that plays during puzzles for the entire game, just as the previous Lolo games had. Given how little time you spend in the overworld compared to the dozens of hours you spend within stages, this is a baffling choice to me, but it is what it is. The game suffers a little bit of graphical flickering and slowdown here and there, but it ultimately plays and performs just fine, even when you’ve got a screen loaded with blocks and moving enemies.
Verdict: Not Recommended. This is a profoundly unfair game, and it was unquestionably designed as such. Playing it on original hardware is an utter fool’s errand, and even playing it with save states/rewinds will still likely drive you batty. Far too many of the puzzle solutions are based around extremely tight timing challenges rather than more procedural based stuff, and it just makes for a time that’s too frequently far more frustrating than fun for all the wrong reasons. Very dedicated puzzle game and/or Lolo fans might find this to be a worthwhile challenge to cut their teeth on, but even as someone who’s come to really love these games, I absolutely cannot recommend anyone touch this game. Just enjoy some other of the many Lolo or similar sokoban-like games out there, because it will be time far better spent than in this game (and if you wanna see the story and aesthetics, you can just play the far easier NES Lolo 3 instead anyhow).