It's new to me: Asmik-kun World 2

The Japanese-exclusive Game Boy game changes up the formula of a trap-em-up series, to great effect.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Normally, you can tell just by looking at the title whether an old-school game released on one of Nintendo’s home consoles, or if it came out on the handheld Game Boy. If it’s “World,” it’s likely an NES or SNES release; if it’s “Land,” then it’s a portable title. Land sounds like it’s referring to something smaller than world, so I get it, but that didn’t stop Asmik from deciding that it was the Game Boy games in their Asmik-kun series that would get the world treatment, and the lone console release that’d be referred to with land.

The first game in the series was Boomer’s Adventure in ASMIK World, released in 1989 in Japan and 1990 in North America. It was both developed and published by Asmik, though you were probably able to discern that yourself if the name at all seemed familiar to you. Boomer’s Adventure is a top down trap-em-up game where you move Boomer the pink dinosaur — well, monochromatic dinosaur, given the platform — around a series of mazes, digging holes for enemies to fall into and to unearth items in. The game boasts 32 levels of tower-climbing maze-solving, and then 32 of the same levels, only in reverse as Boomer descends the tower.

Asmik-kun Land was a Japanese-exclusive release for the Famicom, developed by Graphic Research, a developer with loads of contract work on existing series under their belt. This one was a side-scrolling platformer, where you played as Asmik-kun — that was Boomer’s name in the original Japanese release of ASMIK World, too — searching for six MacGuffins so that the titular Land that this character also shares a name with can become a paradise. It’s a cute little game, one you can play without knowing how to read Japanese, but it’s also the most straightforward release of the trio, even if your power is basically farting on enemies. It’s probably air from a tail swipe, but it also looks like farts because of the way the animation looks, so I say it’s whichever of the two you want it to be. (It’s farts.)

The third game, Asmik-kun World 2, is also different than either of what came before it. The series is back on the Game Boy, with a completely different gameplay setup that might as well have made it a new series in the same way that Asmik-kun Land is a different property than Boomer’s Adventure even if they have the same lead. This time around, in a game developed by Cyclone System, you’re not digging holes or swiping your tail at/farting on enemies, but are instead building roads to lead children from a local village to safety. You get a set number of road pieces in a variety of configurations, all a single tile in length — vertical, horizontal, turning up and to the left, turning up and to the right, turning down and to the left, and turning down and to the right. You have to use these pieces to build a road from the entrance of a level to the exit, and there is either one way to solve each puzzle, or, on occasion, two ways.

It wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out, through trial and error, how to build the paths, but that’s where the second layer of the game comes in: there are enemies attempting to kidnap the kids you’re escorting from their village to safety, and these foes swoop in while you’re off building the road. You have to disengage from building mode to attack these enemies when they are nearing or have successfully grabbed one of the kids, and this sends you to a different screen that plays a whole lot like a basic version of Bomberman, in the sense you are maneuvering around obstacles and dropping bombs in the hopes they’ll blow up while your foes are in the explosion radius.

Each encounter with enemies has a set number of foes you need to defeat: there is no time limit, just your own health meter, which, if emptied, means you lost the encounter. You don’t lose an extra life if you fail, but you are stunned on the road-building map, and for long enough that your victorious foe can likely get away with kidnapping a kid. If that happens, then you do lose a life, which matters because you have just the three of them, and some of these stages are pretty lengthy, too. There is a password system, though, so even if you do end up at a Game Over screen, you can at least restart from the beginning of the stage you were last working on. And if you do win in battle, it’s your opponent who is knocked out for quite a long time, and they also go back to their starting point on the map, too, buying you some time to think and build in peace.

You can see an example of the gameplay in this video below:

That’s a pretty simple level, being the very first in the game, meant for you to figure out just what it is you’re supposed to be doing. Things certainly escalate, though, not just with the difficulty of the stage itself, in terms of what kind of road you need to build and how complicated the piecing together of it is, but also in the sheer size of the stages. That stage in the video, 1-1, can be seen in its entirety on a single screen. Here is what a zoomed out view of world 3-4 looks like, courtesy the FAQ by Daniel Chaviers at GameFaqs:

That is just a little more involved than 1-1, and there’s still an entire world and four more stages to go after 3-4: stage 4-4, the game’s final one, has 18 different road puzzles all on its own. The image above shows a stage with five road puzzles in it. It’s a quick-paced game until it isn’t.

You aren’t locked in to your choices for road tile placement. You press the A button and then pick a direction that you want to build the road in, and the corresponding piece — if one is still available — will appear. If that’s not what you wanted, you can keep pressing directions, and cycle through pieces. If you place one you want to get back because you messed or just want to try something else, you disengage by pressing the B button, and then walk back to the last space you want to keep in place. All of the other tiles that came after that one will go back into your inventory. Of course, while you’re trying and retrying, your enemies are bound to attack the kid out on the road, so you might have to wait to try a new route out until after you’ve temporarily taken care of your kidnapping issue.

Your mileage may vary, but I started to get into a real rhythm with how the puzzles were laid out, and what kinds of decisions I should be making in order to build a road right the first or second time. It wasn’t that the solutions were easy, necessarily, it’s that the challenge the game poses has more to do with the ability to multitask — to plan and build a road while fending off enemies — than it does in making the puzzles themselves purposefully difficult. So, even as the game became more complicated, I felt more in control and capable, which led to some real feelings of satisfaction whenever I’d successfully plot a course from entrance to exit.

Asmik-kun World 2 released 30 years ago and never got an international release, and its publisher doesn’t distribute video games any longer: that particular branch of business ceased operations following the era of the Playstation, Saturn, and N64. So, these games haven’t seen revivals on Virtual Consoles, or plans to remake them, or anything like that. You have to emulate them, or, if you’ve still got the original hardware, you can pick up a copy of one of the Game Boy games, since that entire family of games was region-free. Sure, a complete-in-box-with-manual Asmik-kun World 2 will cost you $30, but if you just want a region-free cartridge for a game that does not require at any point that you understand Japanese in order to play it, you can spend more like $7-8 on Ebay and get yourself a copy, if you don’t want to go the emulation route.

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