Adventure Island
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Hudson Soft
RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12th, 1986 (JP), Sept. 1988 (US), 1992 (EU)
Adventure Island is a devious trickster. When you first start the game, the bright music and colorful graphics deceive you into thinking that you’re playing a game for kids, if not all ages. Master Higgins is a happy-go-lucky sort of guy, particularly while he’s skateboarding. He’s out to rescue his girlfriend, Princess Tina, and he’s in a hurry, but he also seems to be enjoying himself along the way. He eats fruit to keep his strength up. He throws axes at enemies. He runs and jumps and skates and avoids landing on the rocks, so he doesn’t lose a chunk of life and trip into an enemy snail or frog or something. Yes, upon first glance, Adventure Island seems like an innocuous platforming romp, one you could easily complete in a lazy afternoon.
So let’s roll with that assumption for a second. Adventure Island appears to be a light and breezy platformer. As you play through the first world, you might notice its gameplay feels a bit… familiar. You run as fast as you can through each area due to your ever decreasing energy bar. You bounce off precariously placed platforms, avoiding or killing enemies with your single power-up, the axe. You collect fruit so you don’t perish before you reach the end of the stage. What’s this? Adventure Island is a running platformer in the vein of the first Super Mario Bros.
Mario has a time limit. Master Higgins has a dwindling energy bar. Mario has a fire flower. Higgins has an axe. Small Mario and Higgins will both die instantly from hitting an enemy, but if Mario is big/has a flower and Higgins has a skateboard, they can take two hits before death. Both Mario and Higgins’ stages force the player to memorize enemy patterns and platform placements to succeed. True, Mario can hop on certain enemies, whereas Higgins will die if he hops on them (even the snail! – poor weak Higgins). Otherwise, the similarities are stunning. At times, Adventure Island feels more like the true sequel to Super Mario Bros. then Super Mario Bros. 2.
But is Adventure Island just aping SMB or is there more going on here? Yes to both. Adventure Island is a port of the arcade game, Wonder Boy, developed by Escape. However, Adventure Island’s developers Hudson Soft were only given the rights to Wonder Boy’s gameplay, due to a licensing agreement Escape had with Sega. Sega essentially helped Escape start making games, and in return for their help, Sega gained the rights to Escape’s characters and names. Thus, the name “Wonder Boy” and its protagonist Tom-Tom, among other characters, were off-limits for Hudson Soft to use. At the time of Adventure Island’s development, Hudson Soft spokesperson Takahashi Meijin was a Japanese celebrity, so Hudson’s vice-president decided to turn Meijin’s likeness into the game’s main character. Confusing, no? To sum it all up, Master Higgins is Takahashi Meijin. Adventure Island is Wonder Boy, sort of. And Wonder Boy borrowed heavily from Super Mario Bros.
At first, Adventure Island is pretty enjoyable, particularly if you like Super Mario Bros. In addition to the previously mentioned similarities, Adventure Island has that very specific brand of Japanese quirkiness and charm strewn throughout its entirety. Higgins’ facial expressions are hilarious, riding a skateboard is a delight until you inevitably biff on a rock, and one of the enemies is a thong-wearing pig named Pooter. Good times all around.
The two games’ pacing and rhythm are also incredibly similar, at first. Once Higgins gets running in earnest, it’s a joy to leap on platforms, toss axes, and just get to the end of the stage as quick as you can.
Once you reach the third world, however, Adventure Island’s flow collapses. Enemies, rocks, and fires are suddenly placed way too close together, so you have to slow to a crawl to take them all out without dying. Fruits are placed further and further apart, and you have to get them all to keep your energy bar from tanking. In stage 3-1, Higgins must slow down to go over a series of moving platforms that are timed just so funky, the timing makes no sense at all, especially compared to similar sections in the game’s inspiration, Super Mario Bros. And the latter section is long, it takes forever to complete. Yeah, yeah, “get good” and all that, but once you’ve died a dozen times and gone back to the beginning over and over, a sense of “why bother?” emerges. There are so many other less frustrating games we could all be playing.
If you really want to see all that Adventure Island has to offer, you can get infinite continues by finding the Hudson Bee right before the goal at the end of the first stage. Then when you get a game over, you hold ‘Left’ on the D-pad and press ‘Start.’ So there is a way to at least limit your frustration, but again, why bother? Adventure Island pretends it’s your friend, then disrespects you to your face when your guard is down. Why allow it access to your precious time and life?
The tropical air turns sour, the once-beautiful sunset now feels foreboding, and the island life you thought you desired is actually a prison. Master Higgins has no choice. He has to move or die. You don’t have to join him. Not when Super Mario Bros. remains a timeless classic. The Mushroom Kingdom might be a dangerous acid trip, but at least it’s consistent.
C
I’m always thought the Adventure Island games were cool but never really got into them. I wish there was some kind of collection of them for modern platforms.
Adventure Island strikes me as being hard in an unfair way while Super Mario Bros. was hard in a fair way.