Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima

I played "Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima".

It's a SNES game released in 1996 by Nintendo.

Marvelous was only released in Japan. Presumably this is because Nintendo outside of Japan had fully shifted their focus to the Nintendo 64 at this time, so they had no incentive to localise and publish any more SNES games.

I played a fan-translated version on emulator.


The game is not really an RPG, it's actually a point-and-click / adventure style game! That's not a style of game you see very often from Nintendo, or even on non-PC platforms in general - especially during the 90s. How unusual. :o

In this game, you control three boys:
Dion, the short and speedy kid,
Max, the tubby and strong kid,
and Jack, the tall and nerdy kid.

The three boys are on a school camping trip, on what is supposedly a legendary treasure island.

At first, the gameplay involves gathering firewood and helping the other classmates with their camping tasks. But after their teacher Miss Gina gets kidnapped by pirates, the three boys have to travel across different islands to gather the crystal orbs in order to open the fortress she is being held at. You know, just normal camping things.

You can either take control of one boy individually, or all three of them together. You press the R button to swap individual control between the three of them, and you can press Y to blow your whistle, which will cause the other two to start following your lead so you can walk together.
At any time, you can press the A button to make a cursor pointer appear. You can then point at anything on screen to examine it. You can point at NPCs to talk to them from a distance, and you can examine environmental objects to get a closer look at them.
Whenever you get a closer look at something, the screen will switch to a zoomed-in first-person view of whatever you're looking at, and you can use the cursor to click on parts of the screen to interact with them. For example, if you examine a keypad on the wall next to a locked door, the zoomed-in view of the keypad will allow you to press the numbers to try and solve the combination.


The general gameplay is typical adventure game stuff - walking around, talking to characters, gaining hints, and solving puzzles. Along the way, you also gain new abilities that are used to help solve some specific puzzles, as well as some used for general traversal.

for example...
Dion gains running shoes and a baseball glove, so he can dash quickly and throw a baseball as a projectile.
Max gains football shoes and a snorkel, so he can kick things and dive underwater.
Jack gains jumping shoes and a fishing rod, so he can jump over gaps and fetch items from a distance.
... and there are more than just these items of course. Dion gets a hammer, Max gets a boxing glove, Jack gets an RC controller - some of these items are definitely more situational than others.

Often you will also come across an obstacle that requires all three of the boys to work together - lifting up a large rock, or pushing a piece of furniture across the room, for example. In these cases, you need to position them around the object correctly, and then select the "Teamwork" option from the menu.


The progression through the game is linear. There are five chapters to play through, and once you complete a chapter, you don't return to the previous areas.

The different chapters have different feelings to them:
Chapter 1 is the introduction in the island campsite setting,
Chapter 2 is an old west town with a touch of time-travelling shenanigans,
Chapter 3 is a jungle settlement with a slight horror-themed flavour to it,
Chapter 4 is a forest kingdom with a scavenger hunt to complete,
and Chapter 5 is the final fortress, a large maze to solve.

I found the puzzle design in this game to be pretty good overall. Very often you are only given partial hints to the puzzles, so you have to come up with the rest of the solution yourself, which feels satisfying.
It never gets too difficult or too obtuse, so the game stays easygoing to play. If you ever do get stuck, you can always buy a hint from a friendly bird, so you'll never be stumped for too long.

I will say that it can be a rather slow-paced game. Max and Jack are pretty slow walkers, so whenever Dion isn't around, it can feel a bit annoying to be moving so slowly. And the menus and interface can get rather fiddly, especially in regards to swapping characters and selecting items. Thankfully I had emulator speedup functions available for when I was getting impatient with the slow movement. I think I would have gotten a little bit more frustrated with this game if I had played it on proper hardware...

I occasionally had a few issues where I tried using an item that seemed like it logically should have done *something*, but the developers never created an interaction, so it didn't work... For example, one of the inventory items you can find is a pocket-sized tiny girl named Polly, who is used to investigate inside keyholes and other small places. In one area, you find a mouse hole - and I wanted to send Polly in there to investigate, but the game didn't accept that as as valid interaction... (the real solution, of course, is to use a cheese to lure out a mouse).
I mean, this kind of issue is extremely common when it comes to old point-and-click games, so it's not all that surprising, but I do wish they could have put in some more bespoke interactions, just in case players tried using the wrong items like this.

Graphically the game looks great, and there are some really nice detailed sprite animations for the characters. Everyone is extremely expressive and animated well, especially for a SNES game. The game has a nice, lighthearted sense of humour, perfect for its fun treasure island adventure aesthetic.


In regards to this particular fan translation, I had some issues with it. It does its job well enough for the most part, but there are definitely some problems. There was a puzzle involving number-related wordplay that they just didn't bother translating properly - they had a character just say "This would be a useful if you knew the Japanese word". ...yeah, not very helpful! And in one case I saw an NPC that had "FIX THIS" written in their dialogue - presumably a leftover note from the translation team. ... it felt rather unprofessional.
They did a good job replacing all the graphical text, however the maps you find during the final chapter seemed to have bugged-out graphics or something, so I had to navigate my way through the maze without them... Despite its problems, the fan translation does allow me to play the game in the first place, and for that I am thankful to the fans, as always. :)


Overall, I had a good time. It was a short and easygoing adventure, and it was interesting to see a Nintendo-developed point-and-click style game like this. Normally Nintendo makes more action-focused games, so it was nice to see something different from them.

Looking up information about this game, apparently Nintendo was considering using Marvelous for the basis of a new multiplayer game, sometime around 2003... and in fact, some unused Marvelous-related graphics can be found hidden away in the ROM files for The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. How unusual! Aside from this, Marvelous hasn't had any attention at all. It was rereleased on the Wii U eShop in Japan only (which has since become defunct), and also the artwork of Dion, Max, and Jack appears in Super Smash Bros Ultimate as one of the many many collectible "Spirits". .... So I guess Nintendo still keeps this game in the back of their mind, but I doubt it will ever see the light of day again.
Still, it was a fun time. :)