Adventure Island 4

Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima IV, widely known as Adventure Island 4, is an action-exploration platformer developed by Now Production and published by Hudson Soft for the Famicom in 1994. It is the final entry of the Adventure Island series on Famicom and also the last officially released commercial game for the Famicom console in Japan, with no official overseas release. It abandons the linear stage-clearing format of previous games and adopts a Metroidvania-style interconnected open world. The evil Eggplant Demon kidnaps all five dinosaur companions of Master Higgins. Players travel across linked areas including jungles, caves, ice fields and underwater zones to rescue dinosaurs and defeat the demon. The game makes massive system changes: the continuous stamina drain is removed and replaced with heart-based HP, so the player will not die from a single hit. However, if a ridden dinosaur gets hit by enemies, it returns to the nest and needs to be re-summoned. The item roster expands greatly, including bone club, hammer, torch, water gun, boomerang and parasol. Different tools solve environmental puzzles: the water gun revives sprout platforms, torches light dark caves, and hammers break rock barriers. A compass item helps navigation. Players can rest and heal at the cabin, and use password save to record progress. Multiple minigames such as pole climbing, whack-a-mole and shooting challenges reward essential key items upon completion. The five dinosaur mounts with unique abilities return and must be rescued one by one across the world. It features the best pixel graphics in the Famicom Adventure Island series and refined soundtrack. Released very late in the Famicom lifecycle, original cartridges were rare in China; most retro gamers discovered it much later via emulators. It stands out as a unique exploratory action gem of late-era Famicom library.

These are the default keys. Click the gamepad icon 🎮 in the player’s bottom toolbar to rebind them. Gamepads are detected automatically. On phones you get on-screen buttons.

1P

2P

The NES was always two-player — 2P uses the numeric keypad, and NumLock does not matter. No numpad? Rebind 2P to other keys in the 🎮 panel.