For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Jackster's Atlantis no Nazo (J) (NES) maps.
A mysterious island has appeared in the Atlantic Ocean. Adventurers go to investigate, but are never seen again. You play Wynn, an amateur adventurer, whose master disappeared there months earlier. Armed with some dynamite, Wynn sets off to find his master. Will he also discover the mystery of Atlantis, find lots of treasure, and defeat the evil within?
Atlantis no Nazo (J), or "The Mystery Of Atlantis", is a Sunsoft game for the Famicom - had it been released worldwide, it could have been called "Super Pitfall II". This challenging platformer includes 100 Zones, but you don't go through them all sequentially. There are many possible routes to take, and they are not always obvious. You may have to reveal hidden doors, blast yourself down into hidden warps, or fall down certain pits that aren't deadly - even though they don't look any different from the ones that are. Zone 1 has a door in plain sight that leads to Zone 2, but jumping over it, you can instead take a different door to Zone 11. Or, from the starting position, you can drop off the ledge to your left - it looks deadly, but it actually takes you to Zone 33! But even though you can jump to that much-higher-numbered Zone, it might not actually be the quickest route. This was designed to be a difficult game, and would certainly be moreso without any guide!
Jackster took a few weeks to map this all out... Just grabbing the screens was already a lot, as there are 100 Zones - and he did them all twice! Every map here shows a Zone as both unmarked and marked. That's where the real effort was - marking the maps with all the secrets and helpful information, and he had to refer to a number of sources - various online guides, mostly in Japanese, including scans of a Japanese guide book & a code site with addresses to help access different parts of the game, and watching a few speedruns. That's a lot of work, and for a very difficult Japanese game that's rather obscure to the rest of the world, but now we have one more resource in English for anyone that wants to solve the mystery of Atlantis!
So to recognize the effort put into consolidating all of the secrets of this mysterious and challenging game, Jackster's Atlantis no Nazo (J) (NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for June 2022.
