At first glance, Adventures of Lolo 2 looks almost impossibly gentle for a Nintendo Entertainment System game released in 1990. Its hero is a round blue creature with enormous eyes. His enemies include snakes, skulls, stone creatures, and sleepy monsters arranged inside colorful rooms that often resemble elaborate board games more than dangerous dungeons. There are no sprawling overworlds to explore, no inventory of swords and armor to manage, and no need to defeat hundreds of enemies on the road to victory.
Instead, Adventures of Lolo 2 asks the player to stop and think.
Every room is a problem. A movable block may need to be pushed into exactly the right square. An enemy that seems dangerous may actually be the only object capable of carrying Lolo across a stream. A Heart Framer that appears safe to collect may wake an enemy and make the rest of the puzzle impossible. Progress depends less on defeating the creatures around Lolo than on understanding exactly how they behave.
That deceptively simple formula made Adventures of Lolo 2 part of one of HAL Laboratory’s most enduring early puzzle traditions. It also gave the game an unusually complicated history. Its American title does not line up cleanly with the Japanese numbering, its Japanese counterpart contains many different puzzles, and the series itself reaches backward into HAL’s earlier Eggerland games.
Behind Lolo’s cheerful appearance is a piece of HAL Laboratory history from the years before the company became inseparably associated with some of Nintendo’s most famous characters.
Before Lolo There Was Eggerland
The roots of Adventures of Lolo 2 reach back into HAL Laboratory’s Eggerland series.
HAL’s official catalog describes the 1987 Famicom Disk System game Eggerland as a puzzle adventure in which Prince Lolo attempts to rescue Princess Lala from King Egger. The basic ideas that would later define the Adventures of Lolo games were already present. Lolo had to understand enemy behavior, manipulate Emerald Framers, turn certain enemies into eggs, and solve each room by thinking several moves ahead.
HAL continued developing the formula. Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu, released in Japan on August 9, 1988, dramatically expanded the scale of the puzzle design, while Eggerland: Sōzō e no Tabidachi, released that October, even included a construction mode that allowed players to create puzzles of their own.
The importance of the series to early HAL can also be seen in a 1999 interview with Satoru Iwata. Looking back at HAL’s early relationship with Nintendo, Iwata remembered that the company developed titles for Nintendo while also publishing games under its own brand. Among the examples he specifically named was the Eggerland, or Adventures of Lolo, series.
By the time American NES owners encountered Lolo, they were therefore seeing a polished version of a puzzle system HAL had already been developing for years.
The Strange Name of Adventures of Lolo 2
The title Adventures of Lolo 2 sounds straightforward. Unfortunately, the game’s international history is anything but straightforward.
HAL Laboratory’s present-day catalog identifies the Japanese Adventures of Lolo, released for the Famicom on January 6, 1990, together with the overseas title Adventures of Lolo 2. HAL describes it as a continuation of the Eggerland series and notes that it increased the number of stages with stronger action elements.
North American records, meanwhile, place Adventures of Lolo 2 in the United States and Canada in March 1990, published by HAL America.
The important complication is that the Japanese and Western editions should not simply be described as the same game with different titles. They share the same basic engine, presentation, characters, and position in the series, but surviving comparisons of the games show substantial differences in their puzzle rooms. The Japanese release contains many stages that differ from those in the Western Lolo 2, and specialist histories generally regard the Japanese game as the more difficult of the pair.
The confusion becomes even greater with the next installment. HAL’s Japanese Adventures of Lolo II, released December 26, 1990, is identified in HAL’s own catalog alongside the overseas title Adventures of Lolo 3.
In other words, Western players received Adventures of Lolo, Adventures of Lolo 2, and Adventures of Lolo 3, while the Japanese naming sequence did not follow the same numbering. Anyone researching the series solely from the numbers printed on the boxes can easily end up comparing the wrong games.
King Egger Takes Lala Again
The North American instruction manual wastes little time explaining why Lolo must return to danger.
According to the booklet, Lolo and Lala have returned from defeating the Haunted Castle when they are confronted by King Egger himself. The king dismisses their earlier victory as little more than a preliminary challenge and announces that the real battle will take place in his tower and castle. He then kidnaps Lala and carries her away.
Lala is not presented as completely helpless. As King Egger takes her through the tower, she studies the mazes and leaves information behind in the Jewel Boxes so Lolo can use it during his pursuit. The manual therefore frames the adventure almost as a cooperative struggle conducted at a distance. Lolo physically solves the puzzles, but Lala helps guide him toward the castle.
The structure is appropriately simple. Lolo must climb through a tower of puzzle rooms, survive the castle above it, rescue Lala, and confront King Egger.
What makes the journey memorable is everything HAL places between the beginning and the rescue.
Every Room Is Its Own Machine
The heart of Adventures of Lolo 2 is its individual puzzle room.
To clear a normal room, Lolo must collect the Heart Framers scattered around the board. Once every required heart has been taken, the Jewel Box opens. Collecting its Jewel reveals the exit and allows Lolo to continue. The instruction manual describes a structure of at least ten floors with five rooms on each floor, giving the main journey fifty regular puzzle rooms.
The objective sounds simple until the enemies are introduced.
Emerald Framers can be pushed around the room and used as walls. Their purpose changes according to the situation. One may shield Lolo from an enemy’s attack, while another may be needed to trap a creature in place or preserve a safe path through the room.
Heart Framers are equally deceptive. Collecting them is necessary, but the order matters. Some activate special powers, and removing the final heart can awaken previously inactive enemies. A player who rushes to collect everything as quickly as possible can discover that the last heart has transformed a safe room into a death trap.
The result is a game built around consequences. The important question is rarely whether Lolo can reach an object. It is whether reaching that object now will leave the rest of the puzzle solvable later.
Enemies That Become Tools
One of Adventures of Lolo 2‘s cleverest ideas is that enemies are not merely obstacles.
Magic Shots can transform certain creatures into eggs. Those eggs can then be moved, used to block attacks, removed temporarily with another shot, or pushed into water. In some rooms, Lolo can climb onto an egg and ride it across a stream that would otherwise be impassable.
The mechanic turns the normal logic of an action game upside down. Destroying an enemy is not necessarily desirable. Sometimes Lolo needs that enemy alive. Sometimes he needs it turned into an egg. Sometimes he needs it standing in one specific square so that another monster cannot attack.
Environmental objects create another layer of planning. Rocks block movement and attacks. Trees interfere with Magic Shots. Flower beds can prevent enemies from entering certain spaces without necessarily protecting Lolo from ranged attacks. Desert tiles slow Lolo while leaving enemies unaffected. Water and lava create barriers that may require special solutions.
The available powers expand those possibilities. Lolo can receive the ability to build a bridge, rotate a One-Way Pass, or destroy a rock with a hammer. Because the powers become available only after particular Heart Framers are collected, the puzzle is not simply about having the right ability. It is about earning that ability at the correct moment.
Every piece of the room becomes part of a small machine. The player succeeds by figuring out how all of those pieces interact.
Learning What the Monsters Will Do
The enemies themselves are predictable, which is exactly what makes them effective puzzle pieces.
Snakey is harmless, but its body can still become useful. Gol remains inactive until the final Heart Framer is collected and then attacks Lolo with flame. Leeper eventually falls asleep and can become an obstacle in either a useful or disastrous location. Rocky can suddenly increase its speed when Lolo comes near. Other enemies attack in straight lines or react according to their own movement rules.
Once the player understands those rules, Lolo 2 becomes less about reflexes and more about arranging future events.
Move an Emerald Framer one square too far and Medusa may gain a clear line of fire. Allow Leeper to fall asleep in the wrong corridor and the exit may become unreachable. Remove an enemy that seemed inconvenient and Lolo may lose the only object capable of blocking Gol later in the room.
HAL’s own modern description of the Japanese game emphasizes that Adventures of Lolo increased the number of stages with a stronger action component compared with earlier Eggerland titles. That balance is important. The game is fundamentally a puzzle game, but some solutions still demand timing and controlled movement once the intellectual part of the puzzle has been understood.
The player has to know what to do and then successfully do it.
HAL America’s Mind-Twisters
Perhaps the most revealing surviving description of the game’s design comes not from a later retrospective but from HAL America itself.
The North American manual reassures players that every room can be solved, then explains that employees at HAL America would sometimes gather around a monitor to work through the programmers’ latest puzzles. According to the booklet, some of those rooms could occupy them for days.
That small comment captures the personality of Adventures of Lolo 2 better than a technical description can.
The puzzles were meant to make people stop playing individually and start talking. Someone might suggest moving an Emerald Framer first. Another person might notice that a monster could be converted into an egg and pushed into the water. Someone else might realize that the first move had already doomed the solution.
The manual even acknowledges that rooms may have more than one solution and that players can sometimes finish without using every Magic Shot or available power. This gives the game an experimental quality. The intended solution may be elegant, but the system sometimes allows the player to discover another path.
It is easy to imagine the same conversations occurring in living rooms in 1990 that had apparently occurred around monitors inside HAL America.
Fifty Rooms and the Secret Pro Challenges
The main adventure contains fifty regular rooms spread across ten sections, culminating in the castle and the final confrontation with King Egger. That alone gave puzzle fans a substantial challenge.
HAL also hid additional tests outside the ordinary progression.
Four especially difficult rooms can be reached through the passwords PROA, PROB, PROC, and PROD. These secret Pro rooms do not form part of the normal climb through the tower. They function more like bonus examinations for players who have already learned the game’s systems and want puzzles designed to push those systems harder.
The passwords fit naturally into a game already built around password progression. Rather than battery-backed saving, Lolo 2 gives players passwords that allow them to return to later portions of the game. The manual repeatedly reminds players to record them if they intend to continue later.
For an NES puzzle game, that arrangement made sense. Individual rooms could demand repeated experimentation, but players did not have to complete the entire tower in one sitting.
Lolo 2 Arrives in America
The American version reached the United States and Canada in March 1990 through HAL America, only a few months after the related Japanese release of January 6.
Nintendo owners were already being introduced to the sequel before and around its release.
The January and February 1990 issue of Nintendo Power included Adventures of Lolo 2 among its coming NES coverage. By the May and June issue, the magazine placed it in its “New Games” section, describing Lolo’s effort to rescue Lala from a tower reaching into the sky. The preview emphasized the returning enemies and the need to block attacks, collect hearts, and manipulate the pieces of each puzzle rather than simply charge through them.
That description positioned Lolo 2 differently from many of the NES games surrounding it. The system’s 1990 library was filled with platformers, action games, shooters, licensed properties, and increasingly ambitious role-playing adventures. HAL’s sequel remained committed to compact, single-screen puzzles.
It was a game about thinking in an era when the NES was increasingly capable of delivering spectacle.
Contemporary Reviewers Meet Lolo Again
Adventures of Lolo 2 also received attention from the American gaming press at release.
Electronic Gaming Monthly included it in the Review Crew section of Issue 9 in April 1990. The same issue was covering some of the most prominent games of the period, including Super Mario Bros. 3 and Batman, while Lolo 2 also appeared in the magazine’s larger NES preview coverage.
That context is important. Lolo 2 was not emerging in an empty market. By 1990 the NES had matured into an intensely competitive system with increasingly sophisticated games fighting for attention. HAL’s puzzle sequel had no famous movie license, no enormous scrolling world, and no promise of revolutionary graphics.
Its selling point was the puzzle design itself.
GamePro continued covering the game later in 1990, while Nintendo Power had already presented it to the enormous American Nintendo audience as a new puzzle release. Together, those appearances show that Adventures of Lolo 2 was part of the ordinary commercial NES landscape of 1990 rather than an obscure game discovered only by later collectors.
The Japanese Lolo Is a Different Challenge
The regional differences are one of the most fascinating parts of the game’s history.
A player who finishes the American Adventures of Lolo 2 and then loads the January 1990 Japanese Adventures of Lolo might expect the same tower with Japanese text.
That is not what happens.
The releases share their basic visual identity and mechanics, but many of the rooms are different. Specialist comparisons describe the Japanese edition as containing mostly different puzzles and generally presenting a tougher challenge.
This means that the regional history of Lolo 2 is unusually valuable to puzzle-game enthusiasts. Playing another region’s version is not merely a way to see altered packaging or translated text. It can provide a significantly different collection of problems constructed from the same underlying rules.
The situation also reflects how HAL used the Eggerland library. Earlier games had already produced a large vocabulary of room designs, mechanics, enemies, and puzzle concepts. The Western Adventures of Lolo releases reorganized and reintroduced that design tradition for audiences who had never received much of the Japanese series.
The result was less a simple one-to-one localization process and more an international reshaping of HAL’s existing puzzle heritage.
A Small Game From an Important HAL Era
Adventures of Lolo 2 also belongs to an interesting period in HAL Laboratory’s history.
HAL had been working with Nintendo since the early Famicom years. Iwata later remembered the company developing games such as Pinball, Golf, F-1 Race, and Balloon Fight, while HAL simultaneously built products under its own name. He specifically placed Eggerland and Adventures of Lolo among those HAL-branded projects.
That makes Lolo part of the company’s identity before its later characters became far more famous.
HAL’s official corporate history dates the company to February 21, 1980. By the end of that decade it had already accumulated years of experience with home computers, the Famicom, Nintendo hardware, and its own puzzle franchises.
Seen from that perspective, Adventures of Lolo 2 is not simply an early curiosity from the creators of later hits. It represents a design tradition HAL had already spent years refining.
The game’s emphasis on simple rules that create complicated possibilities is especially characteristic of that tradition. Lolo himself has very few abilities. Most of the complexity comes from understanding the environment, enemies, and consequences of each move.
The hardware did not need to overwhelm the player because the puzzle was doing the work.
Lolo Lives Beyond the Cartridge
The original NES cartridge was not the end of the game’s life.
The January 1990 Japanese release later appeared through Nintendo’s Virtual Console services. MobyGames records the Japanese version on Wii in 2007, while the North American Adventures of Lolo 2 followed on the Wii Virtual Console in January 2008. Japanese Virtual Console releases later appeared for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U as well.
Nintendo and HAL have also continued preserving the history of the Japanese Adventures of Lolo through their official online catalogs, keeping Lolo, Lala, King Egger, the Heart Framers, and the puzzle mechanics visible decades after the original Famicom release.
For a game built around single-screen rooms and a handful of rules, it has aged unusually well conceptually. The graphics immediately reveal its 8-bit origins, but the central puzzles do not depend on technological novelty. A good room remains a good room because the player still has to understand it.
That gives Adventures of Lolo 2 something many technically more ambitious NES games cannot claim. Its central challenge survives almost untouched by changes in hardware.
Why Adventures of Lolo 2 Matters
Adventures of Lolo 2 occupies a small but revealing place in video game history.
It connects the NES era in North America with HAL Laboratory’s earlier Japanese Eggerland tradition. It preserves a style of puzzle design in which almost every object has multiple possible purposes. It shows HAL publishing under its own identity during the company’s early relationship with Nintendo. Its regional releases also demonstrate how complicated localization history can become when titles, stage selections, and numbering systems change between markets.
Most importantly, it is a game built around respect for the player’s ability to learn.
The monsters follow rules. The objects follow rules. The rooms can be solved. Failure usually means that the player has not yet understood how those rules fit together.
HAL America’s manual made that philosophy explicit when it assured frustrated players that every room had a solution, even if the company’s own staff occasionally spent days finding it.
That may be the best way to understand Adventures of Lolo 2 more than three decades later.
King Egger provides the villain. Lala provides the reason to climb the tower. The colorful enemies provide personality. But the real conflict is between the player and a carefully arranged room.
Move the wrong block and everything falls apart.
Understand the room, and a tiny blue hero takes one more step toward the castle.
Sources & Further Reading
HAL Laboratory. “アドベンチャーズ オブ ロロ／ADVENTURES OF LOLO 2.” HAL Laboratory Works. 1990. Official developer and publisher archive. https://www.hallab.co.jp/works/detail/000763/
HAL America, Inc. Adventures of Lolo 2 Instruction Booklet. NES-A4-USA. Beaverton, OR: HAL America, 1990. https://www.world-of-nintendo.com/manuals/nes/adventures_of_lolo_2.shtml
HAL America, Inc. Adventures of Lolo 2. Original North American box, cartridge, and packaging, NES-A4-USA. 1990. GameFAQs preservation archive. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587074-adventures-of-lolo-2/boxes
HAL Laboratory. Adventures of Lolo. Original Japanese Famicom packaging, HAL-A4. 1990. GameFAQs preservation archive. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587074-adventures-of-lolo-2/boxes/3321
HAL Laboratory. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Magazine advertisement, May 1990. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/gallery/image/2156-adventures-of-lolo-2-may-1990/
Nintendo of America. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Nintendo Power, no. 10 (January/February 1990): 94. Contemporary prerelease coverage. Nintendo Power Issue 10 archive
Nintendo of America. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Nintendo Power, no. 12 (May/June 1990). “New Games Now Available.” Nintendo Power Issue 12 archive
Nintendo of America. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Nintendo Power, no. 14 (July/August 1990). “Classified Information.” Nintendo Power Issue 14 archive
“Adventures of Lolo 2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 9 (April 1990). “Electronic Gaming Review Crew.” Sendai Publishing. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/electronic-gaming-monthly/electronic-gaming-monthly-issue-9/
“Adventures of Lolo 2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 12 (July 1990). Sendai Publishing. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/electronic-gaming-monthly/electronic-gaming-monthly-issue-12/
“Adventures of Lolo 2.” GamePro, no. 14 (September 1990). “S.W.A.T.” IDG Communications. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/gamepro/gamepro-issue-14/
HAL Laboratory. “Adventures of Lolo.” Advertisement. Bi-Weekly Famitsu, no. 87, November 10, 1989. Preserved in MobyGames promotional-material archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/promo/
HAL Laboratory. “Adventures of Lolo.” Advertisement. Bi-Weekly Famitsu, no. 89, December 8, 1989. Preserved in MobyGames promotional-material archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/promo/
HAL Laboratory. “Adventures of Lolo.” Advertisement. Bi-Weekly Famitsu, nos. 91–92, January 5–19, 1990. Preserved in MobyGames promotional-material archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/promo/
HAL America. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Advertisement. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, no. 24 (January 1991). Preserved in MobyGames promotional-material archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/promo/
Nintendo. Top Secret Passwords. Nintendo Player’s Guide. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1992. Includes Adventures of Lolo 2 among its NES reference material. https://snes-projects.de/forum/wcf/index.php?file-download%2F146%2F=
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “アドベンチャーズ オブ ロロ.” Nintendo Classics. Official Nintendo retrospective. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/games/feature/nintendo-classics/clv-p-hacwj/index.html
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “アドベンチャーズ オブ ロロ.” Wii Virtual Console. Official Japanese Virtual Console archive. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/vc/vc_aol/vc_aol_01.html
Iwata, Satoru. Interview concerning HAL Laboratory’s early history and relationship with Nintendo. 1999. English translation by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/iwata/
Schwartz, Steven A. The Big Book of Nintendo Games. Greensboro, NC: Compute Books, 1991, 19–20. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2769841W/The_Big_Book_of_Nintendo_Games
Lampton, Christopher. Nintendo Action Games. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1991. Includes a chapter devoted to The Adventures of Lolo 2. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL12114204M/Nintendo_Action_Games
Famitsu. “アドベンチャーズ オブ ロロ.” Famitsu.com. Historical Famicom release database. https://www.famitsu.com/game/title/2043/page/1
MobyGames. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Game database and release archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/
MobyGames. “Adventures of Lolo 2: Releases.” Documents Japanese, North American, and later digital releases. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7505/adventures-of-lolo-2/releases/
Hardcore Gaming 101. “Adventures of Lolo / Eggerland.” Hardcore Gaming 101. Series history, regional differences, puzzle lineage, and hidden stages. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/eggerland/eggerland.htm
GameFAQs. “Adventures of Lolo 2: Release Data.” GameSpot/GameFAQs. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587074-adventures-of-lolo-2/data
Data Crystal. “Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES).” Data Crystal. Technical and ROM preservation documentation. https://datacrystal.tcrf.net/wiki/Adventures_of_Lolo_2_%28NES%29
StrategyWiki. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” StrategyWiki. Detailed documentation of rooms, game structure, mechanics, and hidden Pro stages. https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Lolo_2
StrategyWiki. “Adventures of Lolo 2/Original Rooms.” StrategyWiki. Comparative documentation tracing puzzles to earlier Eggerland releases. https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Lolo_2/Original_rooms
NESCartDB. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” NESCartDB. Cartridge, PCB, product-code, and hardware documentation. https://nescartdb.com/search/browse/a
RF Generation. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” RF Generation. Physical-release and regional-variant database. https://www.rfgeneration.com/cgi-bin/getinfo.pl?ID=E-027-S-02630-A
Gaming Alexandria. “Adventures of Lolo 2.” Gaming Alexandria, November 2018. High-resolution preservation scans of original game materials. https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2018/11/adventures-of-lolo-2/
van Duyn, Marcel. “Review: Adventures of Lolo 2.” Nintendo Life, January 22, 2008. https://www.nintendolife.com/games/nes/adventures_of_lolo_2