And so it comes to this, the final day of E3. All things must end, but of course over here on the Alternative to E3 blogging series we didn't even notice. E3? Oh right, that was a loud and annoying thing that may have happened this week, probably. With this final entry of A Marvelous Alternative to E3 comes an equally final reminder and recap: we're playing Nintendo's 1996 first-party puzzle-action-adventure Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima: a Zelda style game with less combat and more point-and-click graphic adventure puzzles developed by a "before they were famous" Eiji Aonuma, of Majora's Mask, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess fame (though he's pretty heavily involved with any 3D Zelda you can name). Playing Marvelous continues to be this amazing mind-screw, where I can see the various seeds for future Zelda game ideas before they had the chance to germinate. It's an incredible game, and it's criminal that Nintendo never bothered to localize it themselves. They should go to a dungeon. Not one of those fun themed Zelda dungeons either, like one with bars and shit.
Last time, we explored the second of four islands - the game's much bigger than I anticipated - and discovered that a Western burg suffering a drought, full of unrest and unease and a dubious past, might yet be saved with the discovery of a time machine room in a dusty abandoned mansion at the edge of town. The dramatis personae this time around include our tireless trio of prepubescent protagonists Max, Deon and Jack, as well as the time-travelling pirate Benson, the perhaps wrongfully-accused bandit leader Indio, Indio's familiar-looking daughter Sisko, and all those classmates we left on the first island who are probably dead by now. Gotta imagine that after their giant stack of tomatoes ran out, they probably turned on each other...
Anyhoo! Welcome to the final part (for now) of Marvelous: Another Treasure Island:
Part 06: Penguins Doing The Nasty in the Past-y
Following behind Benson, who quickly runs off to do time paradox stuff, we enter the time machine room. For no real reason, the room is full of clocks when only one - this purple one here - can actually time-travel. Why design a time machine that wastes time? Seems antithetical.We emerge to find a young (and alive) Indio! And... OK wow. I guess we're just dumping on every tribal civilization this week.While we were able to find the true culprits - the Mammoth Mountain Gang - the sheriff still gets tricked and thinks Indio is responsible. In order to fix this town's past, we need to exonerate him. But how? I suppose finding that crystal ball would be a good start.Oh Jesus, what did I just wander into? This mansion is a nightmare factory, turns out. How did they even fit this thing in here?This guy is, like every mini-game I've encountered so far, a means to earn more luck rocks if you're getting low. By paying two luck rocks in the birdhouse kiosk up there, you get a chance to fight the boss. You have "health", but it doesn't correlate to your actual HP total. It's more like Chrono Trigger's musical training robot Gato.The way to hurt this guy is to either wait for his cuckoo attack, or trigger it yourself by hitting the door in the middle of his chest, and then hitting the target behind. It's not easy, because the door quickly closes after the birds are released, and the birds themselves are tricky to avoid.Hitting the defeated robot one more time stops a slot machine on anywhere between 3-7 luck rocks, increasing your investment. There's also a slim chance of hitting "0", because why wouldn't there be? Lousy designers.Once I'm done wasting time with mechanical horrors, I visit the homes of the past version of the town. Blue, turns out, was a dick (and fancy dancer) even as a kid.Meanwhile, it's revealed that the Patchie pirates grew up close by to Blue. Still no idea why this family is so short.Lil' Sisko's around also, and - in another parallel to Chrono Trigger - we're able to witness the birth of one of our greatest foes.Meanwhile, there's no desert here yet. Rather, it's a pool full of... penguins? They're all blue and pink gender-colored ones too. Did we fall into Parodius when I wasn't looking?Indio, ever the noble soul, is not so much distraught by being framed but because he's not able to fix the town's future drought problem. I gotcha back, buddy.To find more sources of water in the town, we need a penguin. It's mating system, though, so we're required to hook up all the penguins until we're left with one unlucky loser. This mini-game relies on your attention to detail: there are five males and four females, and each pair displays an identical affectation. These include spinning around in a circle, blinking, and squawking. My chief concern is that all the penguins are getting hot and heavy in this reservoir, which also happens to be the only drinking water in town? I better remember to not open my mouth when swimming...Our unlucky in love penguin is a little devastated by this outcome, but he's eager to help us find underground water sources. Apparently, these penguins have an innate knack for it. I'm sure that came up on March of the Penguins.In order to complete the next step, we need some way to dig up the spots that the penguin pointed out. Unfortunately, the local inventor only has blueprints. But wait, the future has all the parts but no blueprint. Hmm.A quick trip to the present, and we're able to buy the parts off the elderly inventor. He'll initially ask for all your luck rocks, but you can eventually haggle him down to 8: watch out though, as haggling any lower still causes him to become irate and demand nothing less than everything you own. Dude, we're saving the town from your lazy ass, what do you need with this pile of crap anyway?While Jack is our designated "tech nerd", I guess because he wears glasses and is therefore the default nerd, he can't actually lift the heavy digging machine. Max, therefore, earns himself a new item.It's no matter to dig the first two holes, but I dunno if leaving these giant potholes everywhere is particularly safe.The third and final hole can't be dug out until you shift a giant cow that sits on top of it. I am so, so sorry for what you're about to do, Polly. Fortunately, she has a lot of skills, cow nose tickling among them. A polymath, you might say.Next step: we need to get a frog. The sheriff is terrified of them, and we'll need to chase him out of the sheriff's office to talk to Indio. He'll get spooked if you go near, but if you use the fishing rod and just let the bait sit a while, he'll eventually pop its head out and try to eat it.The door to the sheriff's office is locked, but the window's open. Have it, froggy. (If you talk to the frog again after the sheriff leaves screaming, he'll talk about how much of a wuss the sheriff is. The animals in this world are savage, and not in the way you'd expect.)Anyway, Indio refuses to move until he's freed from guilt. He recommends we find Benson: he's the best bet we have against the true culprits. Benson's hiding out in the present, but we find him eventually in an abandoned house.Back in the past, Benson does the responsible adult thing of giving children dynamite to play with. (He'll take it back after we're done trying to blast an entrance to the mountain bandits' lair. Still, though.)There's a number of mountain bandits up here, and each wears a mask: by hitting a bandit with the baseball, they drop the mask and run straight for it. That's your cue to bean them again for a KO.To get up, we need to kick these levers with the soccer cleats. It wasn't the first thing I tried: we have a few ways of pushing rusty switches now, between the baseball, the hammer and Deon's Dash Shoes. There are a few moments where the necessary item seems to be chosen arbitrarily.This is a neat system. Each lever moves these four panels that fold out into a staircase. If I had a cool mountain base, this is how I'd get up there.The next area is one of those identical crossroad mazes, where each screen looks the same and you're trying to figure out which of the four directions is the right one (you know, like the forest maze in Ocarina of Time? Weird coincidence, huh?). Each crossroad has its own telescope though, for whatever reason, and we can see the smoke signals Benson left for us to determine the right direction. It kind of feels like that signal is several miles away though...?Benson got himself captured, because of course he did, but we only have to hit these three buttons to free him. I'm sure there won't be any surprises here.I was right. There wasn't a surprise. We got ambushed by the Mammoth Mountain Bandit trio just like I expected I would. These guys have an invincible spinning attack and always aim for the team leader. However, you can use this to your advantage: switching leaders is instantaneous, but it takes the bandits a couple of seconds to realize the leader has changed. Like the rest of the bandits, you can knock off their masks and then take them out during this brief window of opportunity.We rescued Benson and recovered the crystal ball for this island! Or, at least we will eventually. Benson needs the orb to exonerate his friend Indio and ensure the town's prosperous future. After that, well, we can find him in the present and take it then.After coming back through time, the town is very different. For one, the time machine room no longer exists: the mansion belongs to the mother and son we helped out in the beginning. Alas, both Benson and Indio have died of natural causes, but his widow tells us about Benson's grave at the end of town. Rather than pariah ditches, both have been buried with honor as the town's heroes due to their efforts of restoring the town's water supplies.One of the houses has yet another one of these gambling games. It involves Max's cleats and kicking a soccerball past some cut-outs. I didn't bother: I'm getting close to 100 of the things now.Benson left us a cryptic message on his own tombstone, which is an impressive feat. Must be a pirate thing. If we want the crystal ball, we've got one last puzzle to solve.Not that it's a particularly tough puzzle. The black stones are these four around the grave. He couldn't have buried it somewhere other than a gravestone? What if I hit a corpse with my digging machine? These kids are traumatized enough.Finally! We are outta here!But before we leave, we check in on Sisko one last time. Without the shadow of her father's perceived misgivings, she was able to become a teacher like she always wanted. It serves to remind us of our obligations to rescue our own teacher. It's kind of a strange relationship to build a "rescue your kidnapped [blank]" narrative around, but it sorta works. Reminds me of Roald Dahl's Matilda, actually.
And with that, the boys set sail for the next crystal ball and another adventure, but as far as this series is concerned we're going to draw it to a close. How did everyone enjoy this year's Alternative to E3? Still too captivated by the glitz and glamor of "Awesome Gamer" shirts and Knack 2 reveals, is my guess. All the same, I'm happy to provide this service each year for anyone who wants it, and I'll ask you all to keep your eyes peeled for some actual E3 content from yours truly in the near future.
For now, I'll just end this series with a few observations about Marvelous. I think it's a really cool game, absolutely unlike anything else on the system, and I'm eager to keep playing it to see the rest of its puzzle design. That we just had a whole chapter essentially based on an idea Oracle of Ages would follow up on in greater detail is just one example of how frequently you can see prototypical shadows of Aonuma's big ideas before they inevitably made their way into one of the major Zelda games as a core mechanic. While Marvelous is unrelated to Zelda in all respects besides a superficial resemblance to A Link to the Past, it seems like an important missing link for Nintendo's second biggest franchise: it's evidently the creative breeding ground for many concepts and conceits that would make their way over to that series through the years via Aonuma's mental notebook. I also really appreciate the game's production values: it's no big surprise that an in-house Nintendo game made towards the tail-end of a console's lifespan would look and sound amazing, with some of the best sprite animations and detailed pixel-art close-ups I've seen in a SNES game, but it's shocking that there's so much quality on display for a game deemed unnecessary for international localization. This might well be one of the best (or at least most imaginative) first-party SNES games, and we never saw hide nor hair about it besides a few speculative screenshots of a localized version in the printed games media of the day. I'm inclined to blame the N64 and its peers: it seems so wild now that we were all so fixated on early, rudimentary 3D polygons that we let so many wonderful pixel-based 2D games from the late 90s slip us by.
Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope to this all again next year. Maybe E3 will be a week-long by then, and maybe I'll have something other than an obscure Super Famicom game lined up for it. I wouldn't count out either being true.
