A Deep Nostalgia for a Never-Lived Dream: Marvelous: Mōhitotsu no Takarajima
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current.”
Source: Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking about getting older. I’m in my mid-thirties and feeling it. Video games are older than I am, but we grew up together. My earliest memories are of watching my father play Metroid while I clutched an unplugged controller and convinced myself that my random button presses were meaningful. I learned to play by imitation. My father passed away in 2020. I am now ten years old than he was when I was born.
When we are young, video games show us worlds we have not yet experienced. As we grow older, they present us fantasies that we will never have the opportunity to fulfill. The journeys we had not yet embarked upon have transformed into the adventures we never had. If we step back, we can acknowledge that what the games are showing us has not changed. What has changed is that we have been swept further down the river of time.
This doesn’t seem tragic anymore although it once did. When I was young, I dreamed of adventure and conquest. Now I am older and my dreams have grown simpler, and my need for exploration has turned inward. Video games are wish fulfillment. My wishes have changed with me.
Marvelous: Mōhitotsu no Takarajim is wish fulfillment, but it would have fulfilled a different wish if I had played it in 1996 instead of 2022. I regret only that I did not have the opportunity play it then, as doing so would have given me a better sense of the distance I have traveled. Still, there is a purity at the game’s core that I believe I appreciate more today than I might have then. In this way, the years between its release and my experiencing it might akin to cellaring a bottle of wine. You only get to experience a game for the first time once, and in this case, twenty-six years might have been the right period for both it and I to reach maturity.
For me, Marvelous fulfills a simple wish. Marvelous granted me the opportunity to enjoy an experience I never had but always yearned for: a summer camp adventure with friends where the stakes, no matter how high, felt low.
I was never a “camp” kid. My family either couldn’t afford to send me away or couldn’t imagine it. Either way, my summers were spent at home. Semi-frequent moves at critical points of my development combined with an introverted, occasionally surly nature left me neither the inclination nor the opportunity to enjoy a bright and colorful outdoor adventure with two companions with whom I had quickly formed unbreakable bonds.
As a twelve year-old, Marvelous may have been a “wouldn’t that be nice” sort of adventure that came and went as quickly as any other game I rented at any number of local mom & pop northern Connecticut video stores. As an adult, it’s a reminder of a summer I never had. The wine has become more challenging with age.
Marvelous hits those notes for me now because design and aesthetics are just familiar enough to seem like I should remember them. It carries with it a deep nostalgia for a never-lived dream that feels as real as any true life’s experience worth of remembrance. Marvelous is a game that I felt like I had played before. It accomplishes what so many modern games attempt when adopting a retro aesthetic. The secret to evoking real feelings of the past is to wait decades before being played.
Marvelous is the story of three twelve year-old boys - Deon, Max, and Jack - attending a summer camp on a remote island. The island is rumored to house a treasure called the “Marvelous”, hidden decades earlier by the legendary Captain Maverick. When King Blue, another pirate, comes looking for the Marvelous, he kidnaps the boys’ beloved teacher, Miss Gina. An excitable monkey and a chatty bird partner with the boys, bestow upon each of them a special key, and kick off an adventure to rescue Miss Gina and find the Marvelous.
At no point does any of this feel like it matters. This is critical to Marvelous’s appeal. The game feels remarkably low stakes. Even as momentum builds, it never feels hurried. The point is not to push towards completion. It is to marinate in the world and to explore it.
Shigeru Miyamoto has often referred to his upbringing in the Japanese countryside a major influence on the exploratory atmosphere of many of his games - specifically, The Legend of Zelda. In a 2015 interview with NPR, he elaborated on the point, stating:
“When I was younger, I grew up in the countryside of Japan. And what that meant was I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hillsides and having fun outdoors. When I got into the upper elementary school ages — that was when I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There's a place near Kobe where there's a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and there's a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top. And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake.”
I have not been able to find any record of Shigeru Miyamoto having any significant involvement in the development of Marvelous.
The game was developed by Nintendo’s R&D2 division under the supervision of Masayuki Uemura and directed by Eiji Aonuma, then only thirty-three years old. Its Japanese release date of October 26, 1996 came nearly four months after the Japanese launch of the Nintendo 64 and nearly one month after that same system’s American launch. Miyamoto was busy. Yet more than any game released that year - except perhaps for the Miyamoto-produced Pokemon - Marvelous embodies that exploratory ethos. This is both intrinsic and extrinsic, especially in 2022.
Intrinsically, Marvelous is a game about childhood exploration. The player controls a party of three characters, taking control of each individual as the situation warrants, as they explore a small collection of islands in pursuit of the crystal orbs needed to unlock Captain Maverick’s hideout and rescue Miss Gina. The party progresses by exploring new areas and finding new tools and puzzles with which to interact. The game is built around experimenting and learning by doing. Sometimes this takes the form of baiting mice with cheese. Sometimes it means traveling back in time and reminding a bad architect to design a house with a door so that the same house will be accessible in the future. Sometimes it requires guiding penguins through mating season. This is a game about exploration.
Extrinsically, though, Marvelous evokes the feeling of childhood exploration by bearing a notable resemblance to a significantly more popular and successful game about exploration released five years earlier.
Marvelous is a lost chapter in the evolution of The Legend of Zelda. It is one of a series of games from its era that experimented with the conventions that Zelda established. Crusader of Centy emphasized the genre’s action for a faster, more visceral experience. Landstalker tilted the perspective to an isometric view and leaned heavily into dungeon exploration and treasure hunting. Beyond Oasis changed the series’ aesthetic influences from European to Arabian and amped up combat. Secret of Mana brought forward Zelda’s erstwhile RPG influences. Zelda’s influence was everywhere, and Marvelous was perhaps its last notable child before Nintendo recontextualized the series two years later with Ocarina of TIme.
The connection between Marvelous and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is obvious from the start. The games are built on the same engine and share a similar art style, color palette, and perspective. The game trades Zelda’s combat and action sequences for a more methodical pace and a greater emphasis on puzzles and situational thinking. If A Link to the Past leaned slightly in the direction of action games of its era, Marvelous is what Zelda would be if it abandoned combat almost entirely and focused instead on being an adventure game.
It is not a coincidence that so much of Marvelous’s opening chapter revolves around securing three colored keys. At its core, Marvelous is nothing but locks and keys. Structurally, it is a single puzzle with numerous layers the player moves up and down through. By solving a variety of sub-puzzles, the player moves closer to solving the master puzzle, saving Miss Gina, and uncovering the secret of the Marvelous. Some of these puzzles are more interesting than others. Some verge on tedious. Marvelous is not a polished gem of a game, and there are rough patches that require patience to overcome. But it is admirable for its integrity and its commitment to its conceit.
The conceit begins with the party of three. Deon is small, quick, and able to attack at range. Max is stocky but strong, with a collection of physical attack available. Jack is a tinkerer, weak in a fight but capable of manipulating machinery and accessing hard-to-reach areas. Each character builds their own inventory over the course of the game, which forces the player to consider not only which character is best suited for a particular situation, but also which tool possessed by which character is the key to a particular lock. Layers of locks, layers of keys.
The player controls all three characters, and they are all given equal weight in the narrative. Still I found myself considering Deon as the “primary” character, and the one with which I most identified. More often than not, he occupied the lead position in my trio, despite not being better suited to a greater number of situations than any of the other boys. Maybe it’s just that Deon is the most superficially Link-like in his design, despite wearing red instead of green. Maybe this makes him the easiest figure to latch onto for someone who grew up playing Zelda games.
As with much fiction aimed at children, growing up is a primary theme of Marvelous. Over the course of their journey, the three protagonists generally remain silent, avoid interpersonal relationships, and exhibit bravery only to the degree that it is mechanically important to progress the game. Acts of courage are driven by the player, not by the characters. Yet as the player returns to summer camp late in the game, a non-player character named comments on how they have been changed by their journey. Now, he says, they are men.
This comment had a greater resonance for me as an adult than I imagine it would have as a child, because coming to Marvelous for the first time as a grown man made me intensely conscious of just how long a gap twenty-six years really is. Twenty-six years before Marvelous, Nintendo hadn’t even released Donkey Kong into arcades. Twenty-six years before Marvelous, my parents hadn’t met. If I had played Marvelous in 1996 at age ten, the idea that the boys had become men during their journey might not have landed with me. I would have thought, “Of course they are men now. Look at how many islands they visited!” At thirty-five, the comment hit me harder than I expected.
I’m not sure there is anything a child wants more than to be treated like an adult. When I was young, I was always looking towards the next milestone along the road to adulthood. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be in high school. When I was in high school, I wanted to be in college. I was always looking for that imaginary line, that clear demarcation where I would no longer be “a boy” and would instead be “a man”. I didn’t understand what that would mean. I just assumed it would happen on day, that I’d do something and then someone would pat me on the back and say “Congratulations, you’re now a man. Put this man card in your man wallet.”
That day never came. I didn’t feel more a man when I graduated college, when I got my first job, when I got married. I kept feeling like that moment was ahead of me for so long, until I finally realized that there wasn’t anything I was going to encounter in life that would make me “a man”. The process of becoming “a man” is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It’s accepting that you are who you are and that you can take the world as it comes. It’s accepting responsibility for your actions and owning the consequences. The dramatic journey of a fictional hero towards manhood externalizes this process, but in most of us, it happens quietly. The line isn’t clear. There is no man card.
I actually think that Marvelous recognizes this. The characters go on a journey to save Miss Gina because no one else will. They endure hardships, but the game is so relaxed and its narrative so pleasantly paced and structured that it never feels like they’re really overcoming challenges that reflection any inner struggles. The characters have no inner lives. At age ten, the player might not recognize this, because most games in 1996 still thought of player characters mostly as simple avatars rather than participants in a dramatic journey. As age thirty-five, though, it’s impossible to see Deon, Max, and Jack as anything other than different hats that the player can wear at any point in time. They aren’t characters. They’re tools. They are keys. How can they grow?
Yet we’ve done so much, the NPC tells us. We’ve come so far. The praise is hollow because it can’t be anything but hollow when what you’re praising is not a person but a key. And to praise the player because they’ve successfully navigated a few hours of a video game by telling them that they’ve now “become men” is as laughable as it is condescending.
But I think that’s the point. Playing this game won’t help you grow up. But going out and exploring…
Exploration is the heart of this game. It’s baked into its DNA, going back its Zelda roots. But by stripping away the high adventure of Zelda, Marvelous did a better job of encouraging players to search for and find new things than any Zelda game since the original, and would hold that crown right up until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented the series under the direction of Eiji Aonuma.
Marvelous is Eiji Aonuma’s game. It was his first directorial effort, and to this day remains the only non-Zelda game he has ever directed. It was here that he first deployed his puzzle-box style game structure, which would become a staple of his Zelda games. But while the Zelda series married this structure with robust combat, expansive worlds, and high adventure in a fantasy setting, Marvelous manages to stay focused almost solely on the puzzles.
It’s that focus that challenges the player by turning Marvelous almost entirely into a game about thinking your way through situations rather than fighting your way out of them. The limited number of boss fights in the game are so mechanically rudimentary - and the tools you use to fight them so commonly used in non-combat situations - that they reinforce rather than detract from this point.
Marvelous is just a game about solving puzzles. Find the right key and use it to unlock the lock. This structure means that the player is constantly exploring. The player is either searching the world for new keys or searching for which key is best used in the current situation. The lack of viscerally motivated combat or dangerous situations means that this search is seldom cut short by an obvious and immediate need for a solution. The player has time to explore solutions. The player is always exploring new things, even when they’re new things inside the player. Exploration is in the mind.
Marvelous is about exploration.
When the player finally finds the eponymous “Marvelous”, Captain Maverick’s greatest treasure is reveled not as a stash of gold or a miraculous artifact. The “Marvelous” is a hot air balloon. A note left by Captain Maverick, the great pirate, explains that his greatest dream as a child was to fly, and his greatest achievement was not the intricate series of puzzle boxes through which the player has journeyed nor the wondrous ships and tools the characters have used, but rather a simple balloon that carried him closer to his dreams. It’s a real “Rosebud” of a moment, but in the context of a game about exploration, and about searching extrinsically for treasure, this turn inward constitutes a remarkable twist - one the characters and the young player may miss for lack of life experience.
The older I get, the more I feel like I’ve missed something along the way to getting here. I get the impression that there was a passion I found somewhere along the way but then moved on from because I didn’t understand that there was genuine value in just being happy doing something that I liked. I’ve lived my life mostly pursuing things that I care about only extrinsically, because they’re the things I have thought I’m supposed to care about. And I know enough about myself to know that I’m not going to stop pursuing those things immediately, because if you tell yourself that you care about something enough times a day for enough days, eventually you do start to care about it enough to not want to let it go.
I think I play games like Marvelous because I’m trying to work my way back along that path in some way. I’d like to find that thing that I cared about, that made me happy when I was young but that I discounted because happiness wasn’t enough. And I think by playing games like Marvelous, I come a little closer to understanding what that was. And if I never find it… well, I may find something else along the way.
In Marvelous, as in life, there is always value in exploring.
