Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap
Developer: Lizardcube
Genre: Action RPG, Platformer
Rating: E
System: Utomik, Steam, PS4, Switch, XB1
Quick Glance:
Yay: Beautiful animation and playful music make this game a living cartoon that is fun to watch. Different puzzles that require different transformations is a lot of fun.
Boo: It’s difficult mowing down endless enemies even on easy. The game’s fighting system and level layout shows its age.
The Hook: Updated art style and beautiful presentation will draw the gamer into the world of Wonder Boy, but be forewarned you are playing something that still has the 90’s difficulty.
The Review
I remember seeing Wonder Boy 3 in my Computer Gaming Magazine and thinking that I would give my left arm for a chance to play such a colorful and exotic game. All I had was the vanilla NES and not the super powered Turbo Grafx 16. These were back in the days when a man had to go to his local arcade to get the latest next gen video games.
Cut to the future when emulation and roms were just getting big, I dabbled in playing a Turbo Grafx 16 emu on my computer. Wonder Boy 3 was the first to be downloaded. I was blown away by the story and the sheer polish. It was like someone took Link’s Adventure and improved on it 300%.
Cut to 2018 and I have repented of my emulation and rom pirating days to actually play the remastered Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. Everything I remember from the 90’s offering has been kept in except the graphics and music have been beefed up 300%. The cartoon animations of your character are straight from a Saturday morning cartoon, the backgrounds are picturesque, and the monsters are a colorful assortment. The music can only be described as a playful mix of Jazz and amusement park jingles. Everything about this game is an instant upgrade into our next gen minds.
You play the adventurer whose primary mission in life is to slay the Mecha Dragon. Upon completing your mission you realize a trickster spirit is out to curse you. You transform into a lizard. Now you have to traverse the Wonder Boy world looking for a way to undo your curse. Along the way you will take many transformations into different animals that can solve different puzzles.
It’s very exciting to slay the Mecha Dragon in the very beginning and let the story unfurl. But after that you get into the meat of the gameplay. I have to say that what passed as gameplay in the 90’s does not translate as well as it could. In this game your level design is long treks of land with traps and tons of baddies. You will be stabbing your way through lots of enemies and navigating the clusterfuss of hacking and slashing just to get to the next part of the stage. The game has several paths in which you need to have different animal powers to get into. Each dungeon boss grants you a new animal transformation, which lets you get into a new unreachable spot. Just like the games of old, they don’t really hold your hand for the next spot you should go. You only get a clue from a fortune teller on how to get to the next dungeon. Meanwhile your journey to get there will be riddled with bad guys and projectiles.
The game still holds up after all these years because the fighting and puzzle solving is sharp and creative. Finding the next area for you to explore is rewarding. The onslaught of enemy bashing across huge traverses is not as rewarding. When you are dodging fireballs that keep knocking you into lava repeatedly it gets annoying fast. Add that to the fact that your respawn is always back at the head village, meaning you have to find your way back over and over again. Luckily you can stock up on blue potions and weapons at a store to live a bit longer. Ironically, the boss battles were much easier than the enemies that guard the dungeons, which actually gave me relief.
Beauty and nostalgia mix to make an action game that is worthy of remastering. You might not find it worth it to get to the end if you are not a committed 90’s retro gamer.
Content
This game is completely for kids. Monsters are cute and the battle damage they take makes them vanish. The jokes told by NPCs are clean. There is one fortune teller pig who tells you where to go next, but that is it.
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