#54 - Marvelous: Another Treasure Island (SNES)
I never knew of this game's existence until someone posted about the translation patch on HG101 about two weeks ago. I was tied up with Treasure Hunter G at the time, so I had to wait until I finished that to give it a shot. Reading up on it, it looks like it was Eiji Aonuma's big break that got him picked up for addition to the Ocarina of Time crew (which he totally ROCKED and then went on to build some of my favorite entries in the Zelda franchise).
The game has some obvious influences from Link to the Past (I'm not entirely sure if they share the same engine, but there are some sound effects that sure as heck sound the same), but expands the gameplay by incorporating a Lost Vikings mechanic (you have three characters, each with specific abilities that are need to complete different puzzles). Frequently you'll enter a point and click adventure mode, where you can get additional information on objects and interact with them.
For the first half of the game, these modes are pretty well balanced out, the puzzles are well done, and the humorous storyline keeps things moving along. It trips up a bit in the beginning of the third chapter where you have to play games of luck (such as rock paper scissors) to advance to the interesting stuff and the fourth chapter is a neat theme tied up in a pile of messy, awful puzzle design.
At one point in the fourth chapter you're only able to have two of your three characters available at a time. There's no real indication of who to leave back, so you just take whoever seems like they'll be most useful. Exploring the surrounding countryside, you'll realize that you need the missing character's abilities to pass various challenges, so after completing as much as you can with who you have, you need to go back, swap someone out, and then try to tackle those previous puzzles. You may even have to swap out a third time if you missed something (you'll miss something, btw). Not only that, but more than one puzzle requires you to travel all the way back to town to swap something out, head back into the forest, do something, and then head back into town to finish that something so you can continue doing stuff in the forest.
So. Much. Padding. Ruins the sweet theme of the island.
Thankfully, Chapter 5 ties it up with a nice, nonlinear tower that's pretty fun to dissect one puzzle at a time.
My opinion midway into the first chapter and pretty much on through the second was "This is the best god damn Zelda game no one's played", but that kind of got tempered by my experiences in the third and fourth chapters. It's still a damn good game that I would highly recommend checking out now that there's a playable (though not finished) english translation, but I would recommend keeping a walkthrough handy for the fourth chapter simply to reduce as much of that god awful constant backtracking as possible. Try to avoid using a walkthrough for the other chapters, because some of those puzzles can be a bit tricky and are super satisfying to work out.
The translation has some quirks. The title screen and intro aren't translated, there's a few dangling untranslated strings, most graphics aren't translated (though the descriptive flavor text ensures that you'll be able to figure out the puzzles), there's text formatting issues, and you'll run across a couple of bugs, but on the whole it's pretty well done. I don't think any work has been done on it in over six months.
