Eggerland (Famicom Disk System) aka Meikyuu Shinwa – Eggerland Mystery 2 (MSX) Review

Eggerland
aka Meikyuu Shinwa (MSX JPN)
aka Eggerland Mystery 2 (MSX EU)
Platforms: Famicom Disk System, MSX
Released in 1986 (MSX) January 29, 1987 (FDS)
Developed by HAL Laboratory, Inc.
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

For this review, I only played the Famicom Disk System version for the smoother animation and more responsive controls. Both games feature identical maps though.

Since I literally just finished Eggerland Mystery for the MSX, I was going to wait a while to do the next review in the Lolo series. Curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see if the sequel improved the skippy, unresponsive controls. Spoiler: they did not, at least on the MSX. Movement is still skippy or jerky and that makes movement feel slow and unresponsive. So I was fine postponing the rest of the reviews.. until I saw that there were two exits in the first level. Hold on, what? That’s when I found out that the sequel is a gigantic 10 x 10, one-hundred room interconnected maze where sometimes it’s not physically possible to solve a level unless you entered from a specific door coming from another direction. Now THAT’S enticing!

And it gets even better! The exact same game, with the same level design across the board, was ported the next year to the Famicom Disk System. This means I could ditch the MSX build and play the game with significant quality of life improvements like smooth animation that allows for responsive controls. So I started playing the game simply titled Eggerland on FDS and realized the levels were significantly tougher than the previous game, so screw it, I decided to continue with the Lolo marathon. I was so excited, but it didn’t take long before some jaw-dropping glitches and stunningly ill-thought design choices turned what should have been a slam-dunk of a YES! verdict into one of the closest decisions I’ve ever made at IGC. I suppose it’s fitting for a game literally starring a blue ball.

The worst example of how sloppy Eggerland is would be the don medusas. See that little devil thing to the left of me in the above picture? That’s one of them, and it’s an Adventures of Lolo mainstay that made its debut in this title. It’s functionally a medusa that either walks up and down or side to side as far as it can go before changing directions, and if you’re lined-up with it and there’s nothing blocking its view of you (trees don’t count), you’re supposed to die instantly. In the next frame, we’ll cross paths and I will, in fact, not die. As long as you keep moving in the opposite direction it’s walking, you will survive every single time. Here’s what it looks like, and in this clip, I needed a couple attempts to clear it because it’s a tight space AND I had to make a turn, but I did do it even with the turn.

There’s two catches: the don medusa must be able to walk, so you can’t pin it with blocks to the point where it’s immobile. However, even a half-space will be enough that you can use the walk-past trick. The other catch is that it only works if you’re moving the opposite direction of it, so trying to walk around it isn’t possible. It will kill you if you, say, try to move over the top of one moving up and down. In the first Lolo game I played, the US version of Adventures of Lolo 1 (up next at IGC), you absolutely CANNOT do this. I even started replaying Lolo 1 right after finishing this to verify that I somehow never discovered this my previous time playing it.

At first, I thought I’d found an insane glitch that made cheesing the levels based around don medusae (I assume that’s the actual plural of don medusa) absurdly easy. Like in that clip I used, that is CLEARLY not the way the level was meant to be beaten. Because I love the puzzle design of Lolo, at first I decided not to use it. I even undid what happened in that clip and beat the stage the proper way (you’ll note that I had an arrow that I didn’t need to use). Except late in the game, there were levels that sure seemed like there was no way to solve them BUT this “exploit.” At least I think so. Maybe I just lacked the imagination to solve them correctly.  (shrug)

If this mechanic wasn’t deliberate, and because of how these same enemies work in future games I assume it wasn’t, it’s one of those things where it’s on the developers to do a better job of programming it so that you can’t just walk past a thing that’s meant to kill you as soon as you share an unobstructed line of sight. The problem with that don medusa trick is that it makes some of the levels downright trivial, and what I’m looking for is tight puzzle design. While there’s some of that in the FDS version of Eggerland, I was also able to outrun the skulls with ease and/or cheese the dragons like before. Thankfully Eggerland is the last game in the franchise where out-running skulls or dragon fire will be easy, so clearly they learned their lesson. Then there’s situations like the mystery objects, like seen in the picture below.

For most of the levels, the mystery box is empty. But every once in a while, the ? will show an enemy or object, and you have to do something unusual related to that object to trigger the effect. For this room, I had to cover up the snake completely with boxes, like I just did. When that happens, the screen flashes violently (seriously, it’s a huge seizure risk every single time) and then some item or effect appears on the screen. In the case of this level, it’s a shadow Lolo that, once you touch it, allows you to walk freely around the screen, even walking through solid surfaces and walls. You can’t collect the hearts so you need to find a place to stop and press the button, at which point Lolo will teleport there and you can finish the room. Other stages might have separate tricks like turning water into sand or turning every character into an egg for a few seconds.

In theory, it’s a neat idea. In practice, I beat several levels that had the mystery item without ever using the item. I also beat levels where it gave me an arrow, a hammer, or a bridge where I never needed to use them. This even happened near the end of the game, like in the level in the pictures below this. The level has a pen made out of grass that contains three leapers. Grass makes its debut in Eggerland and it’s important to future games because enemies cannot walk on the grass.

The leapers are also important. They’re fast-moving enemies which fall permanently into a coma upon contact and functionally become a wall. Once they’re asleep, they can’t even be shot and turned into an egg. They’re there, forever, and if you block yourself in, you have to reach for the cyanide capsule. If you stop them in the right place, they turn into blocks and help you beat levels. They’re yet another important staple of the Lolo franchise debuting in Eggerland 2. In the room shown below, you get shots that you can use to turn them into eggs and push them out of the pen, then wait for them to run to the area in front of a monster and put them to sleep, acting as a block. I mean that seems to be what the designers had in mind, but I solved the puzzle without cheating not needing any of that sh*t.

So the puzzle design is REALLY loose with many stages that look complicated on the surface being uncomplicated by having multiple outs. That tracks with the difficulty scaling in general, which is HORRIBLE. The majority of the toughest puzzles I thought were in the middle of the game, with maybe one or two right before I reached King Egger’s levels being head scratchers. Despite being one gigantic maze, there’s only a couple paths you can take and you’ll inevitably hit a dead end and reach a room where the path you took doesn’t allow it to be solved, requiring you to go backwards and take an alternative route.Thankfully there is a built-in map, and I also used a really handy map that I found at GameFAQs.

But it means the game is secretly a lot more limiting and linear than it appears on the surface, which should mean that they could still order the levels somewhat by difficulty. Instead, the curve is kind of all over the place. I’m going to guess this was the last Eggerland/Lolo game where they didn’t have any really good playtesters, nor did anyone designing this know the difference between medium and hard puzzles. It’s kind of obvious since the difficulty craters completely once you clear the main maze and enter the Devil’s levels, most of which are literally like level 1 or 2 or even tutorial stages in American Lolo games. Why would they do that? Presumably people would buy games like these for the brain teasers, right? So having them ordered by difficulty as accurately as possible is kind of important. I only really got stuck twice, and that was because of some insanely abstract logic. Here’s one of the times I got stuck:

The mystery “item” is the leaper enemy. In order to trigger its mystery power, you have to put it to sleep, then step back and touch it again, then step back and touch it again, then step back and touch it again, and finally you have to (checks notes) step back and touch it again. At this point the screen will flash with a seizure-inducing strobe and the “walk through everything” item will appear. I figured out every mystery thing on my own, and usually very quickly. Besides this room, only one of them took me more than five minutes to figure out. The problem is, even though the game tells you that the leaper is the clue to the mystery, there’s no way to logic-out that you need to kiss the damn thing four times to trigger the mystery item. It’s not anything you would do through natural gameplay flow or experimentation. How anyone ever figured it out is beyond me. There’s no “DING” noise when you touch it the first time it’s asleep to clue you in that you’re on the right track. I admit, I had to look up the solution to this one, a first for me in the entire Lolo franchise. None of the other mystery items are anywhere near that abstract.

In addition to abstract, arbitrary design, Eggerland has a TON of downtime that combines with brainless trial-and-error design related to a large section of water-based levels. At a few points, you get a raft out of a treasure chest and exit a level through a river instead of a door. The problem is that it’s SO SLOW and you have to wait forever for it to get to the next room. Now, the slowness is partially based on the puzzle solving, as one of the challenges of those rooms is figuring out where to get off the raft. As soon as you step off the raft, it’s gone, so if you step off on the wrong spot, you’re dead. I did this many times and, had I not been using an emulator, I would have to go through that insanely slow process over and over. It can literally take over a minute of just waiting. But it gets worse.

Once you finish one of the water levels, you then have to select the right space to reenter the water to drift to the next room, and there are NO hints which space is the correct space and no way to logic it out. If you pick the wrong one, you have to collect the raft again. Except, sometimes it doesn’t instantly fail, but instead circles around the level before just stopping and letting you drown, costing you a life. It’s blind, no logic trial and error that is so slow, so tedious, and so pointless that it would have made giving Eggerland a NO! a no-brainer if I hadn’t been able to fast forward and use save states. How the hell did the same people who created so many clever puzzles not realize how f*cking boring this could get? Hell, it was boring and felt like busy work based around blindly poking every spot next to water AND I WAS USING FAST FORWARD! What were they thinking? This is bad, bad game design.

Besides just solving rooms, the main object of Eggerland is to locate five keys that will allow you to enter the levels belonging to the Devil (aka King Egger) along with four special helper gods that will give you superpowers required to beat the devil’s rooms. Ten of the one hundred rooms have a hidden tunnel within them, like seen above. Well, not all are HIDDEN-hidden. Some appear immediately when you solve the puzzle in the correct room. Others remain hidden until you solve the puzzle AND THEN shove an arbitrary block. Again, there’s no clues to this or any way to logic-out which rooms are the correct rooms. If there were items that could be found, like compasses or maps or things that mark the map you have with an X, that would be one thing. Apparently Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu does have such items, which makes me think they realized how bad Eggerland was for not having them. The sequel also apparently ditches these:

Four of the tunnels contain “the gods” while five of the tunnels contain keys, and then there’s one tunnel that’s the portal to the final sequence of puzzles (either I’m very lucky or the game successfully queues you in a way where the 100th room you enter will be the one with the final tunnel). In order to collect the keys and gods, you have to complete a challenge that requires you to reach a treasure chest in the allotted time while having to run through sand, which slows you down. These “sand traps” (seen in the above gallery) have multiple different potential pathways, but only one will allow you to barely reach the treasure chest before time runs out. If it does, you’ll have to wait for a loading screen (this is the Famicom Disk System, remember) and then reenter the tunnel, which goes to another loading screen, then try again. “Nuts to that! I’ll just use save states” I said, a decision that would bite me in the ass here:

The path in this level was obvious: go through the UP arrow and to the left and the second UP arrow, then walk around the left side and down to the treasure chest. Except, I kept failing just short of the chest. Actually, I was literally on top of the chest and usually taking my final step before being completely on the treasure space when time would run out. I’d reload the save state and try again. And again, and again. I’d keep coming up short. So I switched to my keyboard and used the directional keys and had one of the kids with their youthful reaction time help me create a frame-perfect run, cussing a blue streak about how prickish the design of this level was the whole time. And then, to my absolute horror, I discovered that even a frame-perfect run would fail every single time:

“Oh sh*t, something has gone wrong.” At this point, the don medusa trick felt like a red flag that nobody properly tested Eggerland. I was worried that they somehow let a level that was impossible to beat slip by detection. Except, I found a complete play-through video on YouTube and, when the person did the same room, they got it on their first try. “What the hell is going on?” I thought, and then my father noticed the timer in the video changed from 9 seconds to 8 seconds a lot later than ours did while in the game we were playing, the 9 changed to 8 almost immediately. We figured it might be connected to our emulator and tinkered with a variety of latency settings, but it didn’t matter. The best possible run kept ending where you see in the above picture: a single frame short of the goal. I really thought it was game over. Finally, Dad said “instead of reloading the save state, leave the room and come back.” Except, I’d already done that and nothing changed. But, when I did it on my third time entering the room, I won on my first try. Then I rewound it and won on my next try, and then I rewound so I could record a clip and did it a third time in one attempt.

So what the hell happened? My father’s theory is that the game has an invisible one-second timer that is always going, and when I entered the tunnel for the first and second attempts, I had done so while that invisible timer was just short of being empty instead of having just reloaded. Since I was reloading the same save state.. for literally a couple hours.. it kept going back to the impossible-to-finish “9 seconds” that was closer to 8. So, my bad for using save states for the convenience, but the fact that it’s even possible to do this is maddening and it means, in theory, a person who played this in 1988 could have chosen the correct path and made all the correct moves and still have lost without ever knowing why based on having the bad luck to enter the tunnels at the wrong moment. That’s inexcusable in any situation, but for a puzzle game it would be especially infuriating because it could send a player on a wild goose chase for an alternative solution when they had the right one all along. I was already annoyed because these levels don’t really fit with Lolo at all, but this straight-up pissed me off, and the game never recovered.

And then there’s the finale.

That is the first room of the final tunnel, and if you haven’t collected all five keys, the tunnel to the right of the giant “5” (which I suppose is the REAL final tunnel) won’t be there, so you have to leave and go find them. If I hadn’t used the map from GameFAQs and seen the tunnels in each level, I wouldn’t have known about some of their existences and never would have thought that I had to arbitrarily shove a block to reveal them. That would have meant backtracking through one-hundred goddamned levels in search of them. When I entered the KEY 5 room, I originally thought the tunnel to the right of the giant 5 was the exit back to the room I was just in, so I beat the first stage, which was this one:

And all that did was warp me to a different spot on the map. Calling the four puzzles attached to the KEY 5 room “puzzles” is a stretch since there’s no effort to make them difficult. The above room feels like a bonus level where you can let off steam by gunning down the snakes with dozens of shots. It was an ominous sign that the designers had long since run out of f*cks to give. Since it’s literally impossible to have reached the room with the KEY 5 puzzle until the very, very end of the game, you’ll have solved some damn challenging puzzles by this point. Thankfully, I already had all five keys and Gods, which meant I could go through the devil’s rooms. There’s eight of them, and they took me, oh, about five minutes to solve. They introduce new gameplay ideas, like in this room:

That’s not an emulator trick. You just suddenly move super fast for this one and only room. You don’t even do anything to activate it. It just happens. Other rooms do require you to actually press a button to do things you haven’t been able to do before, like remove a tree instead of a rock, like in this room:

It seems neat, except these levels are too damn easy. This is the final sequence of a game that has some damn tough puzzle design at times. Ending THIS GAME on levels that require almost no brain power (which seven of the eight don’t, and the one exception is like a level 3 or 4 puzzle in another Lolo game) was a huge letdown. The only way it could possibly get worse is that the final boss is a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors where you have to watch Lolo and King Egger dance back and forth for twenty agonizing seconds before shooting AND it’s best of seven AND it’s f*cking rigged, regardless of what you select, to have Lolo score, then King Egger, then two to Lolo, then two to King Egger, then the final one is won by Lolo, but despite being rigged, you can still have ties that last quite a while. Well, guess what?

My criteria for a YES! is that I spent at least 50.1% of my time with a game having fun. If I hadn’t been using an emulator, this would have been one of the easiest NO! verdicts just by the sheer amount of downtime that’s multiplied by blind luck trial and error. Those areas were a frustrating slog even with fast forward. The “did I have more fun than not?” question is a little harder with emulation trickery and the map I had from GameFAQs. As angry as I am by the haphazard design that offers no logic or means to suss out pathways or hidden elements without blind luck (or a guide), I have to admit that some of the levels were very good. But, the more that I thought about it, the more I realized the truly good levels were outnumbered by ones that weren’t very creative or challenging.

Once I factor in the downtime, the sand traps (and I’m not even counting being stuck on that level for a few hours because of an issue with the timer), the don medusa thing, and the horrible final sequence ending on a fake version of RPS, I realized I spent more time mad, frustrated, or just plain bored than I did enjoying the type of Lolo gameplay that I signed up for. So no, I can’t recommend Eggerland for Famicom Disk System and Eggerland Mystery 2 for MSX. It’s a very, very close NO! In fact, it’s so close that it’s one of those “fans of the American series should probably check it out anyway” decisions. Though I think such fans will probably be as annoyed as I was and, more often than not, get bored. Eggerland has it’s moments, but it’s an overall boring game.

Eggerland is a better concept than it is an actual game, but final execution just isn’t good enough. Apparently the direct sequel, Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu for the Famicom, addresses some of my complaints with items that alert you that you’re in a room with a tunnel, and the sand traps are gone. So, like the first Eggerland Mystery, this Eggerland was still a glorified proof of concept for better things to come. And hey, if the sequel sucks, at least I know I have plenty of linear Lolo games coming that do a better job. HOPEFULLY this was the only game in the franchise that’s a rotten egg.
Verdict: NO!