Super Adventure Island

This was my entry into the Adventure Island series. My understanding is that it is essentially a re-hash of the first NES game with the difficulty scaled back significantly, and without some of the more ambitious aspects of other titles in the series. I have to say that I still found this game plenty frustrating.

The game has an arcade-style feel to it. It consists of twenty very short levels. There is no battery save or password system: when you get a Game Over, you start from the beginning. The platforming itself is usually easy but many of the enemies must be handled precisely. It is not like a Mario game where you can barrel through the levels once you've mastered the basic mechanics. It is much more like the platforming sections of Actraiser or like Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Of course it is nowhere near as hard as those games, but its challenges are also not as interesting or fun.

Actually, the comparison with Super Ghouls and Ghosts really gets to the heart of my dissatisfaction here. That game is much more difficult, because every moment requires a great deal of precision. When you die, it is almost more funny than frustrating, and at any rate it is expected. In Super Adventure Island the difficulty is not evenly distributed throughout the levels. For the most part, each level feels pretty easy. You are lulled into a certain kind of rhythm and you think you know how to deal with everything it has introduced to you. Then there will be one or two nasty surprises that'll screw you up. So the challenge is memorizing when those tough spots occur and dealing with them precisely. But that makes the majority of the level just feel like dead time. If you get a Game Over halfway through Super Adventure Island, it isn't frustrating because it is challenging or time consuming to get back to where you were. It's frustrating because repeating these levels is boring.

The controls and hit detection are fine, but something about it doesn't sit quite well with me. One thing that makes enemy combat irksome is the contour of your projectiles relative to the contour of some of the enemies. Everything moves on this weird arc and I never could seem to get the hang of it. It feels like swatting flies. The moments in the game where you're dealing with these tiny little bouncing jellies coming at you while trying to ascend these steps constitute my own private hell.

One mechanic I did enjoy was the health bar. It has nothing to do with damage - this is a one-hit-and-you're-dead platformer. It acts more like a timer, in that it diminishes over time, but you can collect fruit throughout the stages to replenish it. This is a nice simple twist on basic platformer mechanics in that it incentivizes you either to rush ahead or to be diligent with item collection. The levels could have done more to exploit this dual approach to the game. As it stands the difficulty curve of this mechanic is handled quite well, with the early stages being generous with fruit distribution and later stages getting more spare so that time becomes more of a factor.

The visuals are quite appealing in a very characteristically Hudson Soft cartoony kind of way. Some of the bosses are especially nice looking. Also, people tend to enjoy the music, most of which is kind of funky, very 1990's sounding dance music. I actually think the music feels a bit out of place aesthetically and makes the game feel a little dated, but I'm clearly in the minority here. The tracks are certainly enjoyable enough on their own.

Overall, this is not a poorly designed game by any stretch of the imagination, and it does have some charm and character to it. But from a gameplay standpoint it is caught between worlds. On the one hand, it's tied to an era where home console gaming was still modeled after the arcades and used difficulty spikes to increase play time. But on the other hand, it follows most SNES games of its generation in curbing that difficulty and trying to make something more inviting and addictive for younger players. Rather than striking just the right balance, it feels a little diluted and uneven, which makes it frustrating. I gave up after getting to Level 4-1 and nothing I saw subsequently in a playthrough made me feel like I was missing anything.