191. Adventures of Lolo II (HAL Laboratory, Famicom, 1990)

Adventures of Lolo II is the sequel to the previous game, released later the same year (and a year later in the west as Adventures of Lolo 3). While Adventures of Lolo II has the same mechanics as its predecessor, this time there is an actual set of tutorial stages that allow you to grasp concepts I had to either look up or learn through trial and error in the previous Lolo. There is also a lovely little overworld map that you can wander around to select each level. On the overlord map you can also switch characters between the blue ball Lolo and the pink ball Lala, though this does not effect gameplay at all.

Holy heck this game is so much easier (and therefore more immediately enjoyable) than its predecessor. While I would often have to restart (the first few) levels in Adventures of Lolo 10-20 times before I cleared them, Adventures of Lolo II starts you off on levels that can generally be beaten in a couple tries, and just the sense of progress feels so good after struggling with Lolo 1.

Not only is the difficulty of each level less punishing, the structure of the game is gentler as well. You are no longer relegated to a set of 5 lives, now you have infinite restarts. Pressing select just restarts the room with a nice little jingle, so I feel like the game even encourages restarting. You can even leave a set of levels and return to the same floor you left off on, so Adventures of Lolo II also respects your progress.

There is also more variety in the enemy types, and several of the old sprites have been given a nice face lift, even though this game come out less than a year after the previous entry in the franchise. Including the pre-Lolo Eggerland games, this is the 6th game in the series, but the first that really polished and paced the experience to a point where I want to get invested and actually learn the mechanics. Once I made it to the third area where the levels start to become challenging, I was more willing to put up with that challenge because of the nice pacing up to that point (and the promise of more overworld to explore).

4/5, a huge upgrade over the previous Eggerland/Lolo games