The story of Adventure Island is a very interesting one. This title was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System as a port of Sega’s arcade hit Wonder Boy. Obviously some things had to be changed in order to avoid copyright infringement, and that’s why we have a re-release (with an entirely different name) that doesn’t at first resemble its source material. From here Adventure Island actually became its own franchise, and Wonder Boy moved away from its original concept and integrated itself as more of an action RPG. Today I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at simpler times with the Hudson Soft release of Adventure Island for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Unfortunately the game itself suffers from sub-par level design, and wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the Super Mario Bros. series. Adventure Island has little historical relevance, and has been long forgotten by even its fans.
Adventure Island stars the franchise mascot Master Higgins. It’s interesting to note that he was modeled after Hudson Soft’s spokesman Takahashi Meijin, and that’s what the character’s name is in the Japanese version. Either way, our portly protagonist hears of a princess being kidnapped by an evil witch doctor on a tropical island, and he ventures there to rescue her. Gameplay is very basic even by two dimensional platformer standards. You move Higgins from the left side of each level to the right where a goal awaits him. Any contact he makes with an enemy results in instant death, and he cannot even jump on the heads of his foes. Instead your basic method by which to assimilate the forces of evil is his stone axe which he acquires as a power-up. This moves at an arched trajectory, and can destroy most enemies with a single hit. You also have a skateboard which allows you to travel faster but while riding it you cannot come to a complete stop. What’s nice about this is the fact that it allows you to take an extra hit before dying, and it’s worth it for this alone. You can also find a fairy that will fly alongside Higgins and grant him temporary invincibility but this is an obvious copycat of the super star of Super Mario Bros. fame.
What sets Adventure Island apart from the pack is that Master Higgins, despite being chubby, needs to constantly eat food. Fruits can be found hanging in trees or levitating freely mid-air. You have a meter that depletes at a constant rate (think of it as a countdown timer) and when it runs out you lose a life, and it can only be refilled by eating the fruits strewn about everywhere. At first this feature has little bearing on gameplay, but as you progress it’s significance increases tenfold as fruit becomes more scarce and stones (which when tripped over make Higgins hungry faster). It’s a somewhat novel idea, but the concept alone isn’t enough to make up for the standard level designs. The stages are very boring and straightforward with only the most basic obstacles that repeat themselves over and over again. The most complicated hurdle are the moving platforms, but those have been a genre staple ever since the beginning of the genre. There’s just not enough variety to keep things interesting. To make matters worse the boss encounters are recycled. There’s simply a new head placed atop the goliath’s body, and he moves forwards and back while shooting fireballs your direction. If this isn’t the epitome of lazy design than I don’t know what is.
Adventure Island is certainly not going to win any beauty contests. It has the simple pastel graphics of most early titles on the original Nintendo, but as a late release there’s really no excuse for it. The whole game looks rough, and is frequently devoid of texture. The sky is one simple color as are many of the trees. It appears to be just barely a step above the original Super Mario Bros. which I find very disappointing. Even the tropical theme is skimped out on with simple totems and palm trees thrown in to give the illusion that this is an island in the pacific. Even the more complicated enemy designs have only two different frames of animation, and though most are based off of animals it can sometimes be difficult to see what the artists were going for. As per usual this title suffers from the usual slowdown and flickering sprites that most games of this era do. These two problems combine to make this release seem like a budget title even for its’ time, and we all know that this was probably a full priced game. The soundtrack is, in a word, boring. The music repeats itself far too often and the compositions are extremely simple in nature. There are only a few different notes per song that simply loop over and over again. It’s just plain bad in my opinion.
I can’t imagine a time when this release could have actually been considered good. Adventure Island is such a standard and by the books platformer that it’s hardly worth playing. If you’ve experienced any other genre offering from the eighties then you should know what to expect here. It’s one innovation really isn’t anything to write home about, and honestly the game would almost be better without it. The original Wonder Boy wasn’t exactly a great game to begin with, and this port feels very unnecessary.
