I'm playing Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy. It's an action-adventure like Zelda with mild JRPG stats.

The game reuses style and elements from Final Fantasy while introducing combat mechanics and new elements remeniscent of Secret of Mana. It's like the two series are mashed together, which is strange and fun. It wasn't obvious at the time in US, but in Japan, this game is the first in the Secret of Mana series. Even after I knew that, I never knew that Secret of Mana is actually a spinoff of Final Fantasy. Sorry, this is all new to me, and it's a little bit of a surprise.

The combat is similar to what's in Secret of Mana, but far less refined. It's downright janky. Hits are not always detected as one would expect, and reactions from getting hit are inconsistent. You may have to behave defensively all the time in order to avoid getting juggled unfairly. Still, the game is pretty fun. There are enemies that jump around the screen erratically, enemies that can only be hurt by magic, enemies that are mostly invisible. All of that sounds like it could be really unfair, but no, they're actually still pretty fun to deal with.

You can save your game almost anywhere, which is really convenient for me playing this thing in short breaks.

However, it looks like my game is over. I'm about halfway through the game, judging by how much of the map I've seen, and I saved my game partway through a long dungeon. There are locked doors both in front of me and behind me, and I have no more keys. There doesn't seem to be any way to get more keys in the area I'm trapped in.

While some games would eagerly put you in this "walking dead" situation as a normal part of their difficulty, this seems like too cruel a trick for a Nintendo game, especially a game meant to be played over many sessions, saving your progress along the way. It must be a bug. The Internet acknowledges this problem but offers no solution.

Revisions of this game were released, and I have the first release, but I haven't been able to find any information on the Internet explaining what might have been corrected in the revisions. So I don't know whether this is a bug that's been fixed in some copies of the game.

I really don't want to start over.