Trine: Enchanted Edition - 20/52

     Once upon a time, I was probably the easiest to please person in the world.  I would watch pretty much anything from anyone, regardless of quality.  It was about the time I started regularly getting involved in watching online content.  I primarily frequented old Mario and Pokemon Machinima series that used an exorbitant amount of Stairway to Heaven and songs from High School Musical 2, bad Kingdom Hearts AMVs that served mostly to establish one of the main character’s hatred of waffles and High School, and pretty much anyone who talked over playing a video game.  That includes one Cauchemar, a Swiss Let’s Player that I got into in my early days of Let’s Play watching.  Cauchemar was not especially good at this but he had a funny accent and played a vastly different library of games than a lot of the other Let’s Players I was watching at the time, who favored stuff from the NES and SNES because at that time, doing the same games everyone else was doing was an easy way to get views.  But perhaps my favorite part about Cauchemar’s content was his Let’s Play of a little puzzle platformer given to us from Finland, known as Trine.

     Trine casts you into the role of the trio of protagonists, Zoya, Amadeus, and Pontius.  They are, as fantasy entails, a thief, a wizard, and a knight respectively because the world’s saviors must always include someone whose primary profession is stealing things.  These three have the unfortunate luck of living in a world dominated by a growing army of living skeletons threatening to plunge the world into darkness.  More unfortunate still, the trio are seemingly trapped inside of a veritable palace of education with no company other than each other, and as the rules of road trip comedy dictate, they aren’t exactly chums.  In fact, they’re trapped primarily by their own arrogance and foolishness and, as punishment, their souls end up bound together via magical pyramid shaped object and now they must go on a deadly adventure to an evil tower in order to fix their predicament.  So, all in all, pretty bad Tuesday.  But who knows, maybe they’ll do all that good adventurer stuff like grow and change as a person and learn to trust and befriend their comrades.  Maybe they’ll even find their place in this wild and crazy world, hopefully a place that doesn’t involve being in the army of the undead.  Is this just Evil Dead 3: Army of the Dark Crystal?

     The presentation of Trine’s story is stronger than the story itself.  The game is presented as more fairytale than narrative, complete with all-knowing narrator with a soothing voice.  The Dark Crystal comparison is actually more apt in this section than in any other as the narrator in Trine sounds exactly like the one in the Dark Crystal.  There’s even a giant picture book that both serves as a map of sorts to give you an idea of the traveling done between stages as well as serving to establish a sort of Tolkien/Lewis vibe.  The map looks incredibly similar to the map that would be included in later releases of Lord of the Rings or Narnia.  This presentation proves that our Finnish devs know and love their classic fantasy, but also makes it easier to swallow the game’s narrative shortcomings.  We’re told a lot more than we’re shown in this game and if it was presented in any other format, I could see that resulting in some sort of exposition nightmare.  As well, the characters are unfortunately super underdeveloped to the point of being almost non-entities in a story about them, and if it wasn’t for the format I would take huge issue with this.  Considering the game is more about fun puzzle-platforming, though, I can let these shortcomings slide this time.

     I feel like it’s important to at least mention the characters as, while underdeveloped due to a number of factors in the game in terms of personality, their differences are still very important to the game as a whole.  First, there is Amadeus.  We’re told from the start that Amadeus feels inadequate as a wizard because of his inability to do the fireball spell, a basic spell most magically inclined beings are capable of.  We’re also told the reason for his lack of skill is that he’s too much of a ladies man to focus on his studies.  I’d argue Amadeus has a more interesting skillset as a result of his unorthodox spells.  Amadeus is a build of sorts.  He starts off the game only being capable of creating a single box and using his magic to move things telekinetically.  Over time he not only increases his abilities to summon boxes, inevitably able to summon a half dozen at a time depending on your equipment setup, as well as being able to summon planks to use as bridges and even floating platforms.  If it hasn’t been made clear, Amadeus is your primary platforming character.  You can use his abilities to traverse almost any obstacle, even some that were likely intended to be for the other character’s abilities.  Unfortunately, Amadeus has next to no combat ability as, you know.  Can’t throw a fireball.  The best you can do is drop boxes on enemy heads and that’s far too unreliable to recommend.  But overall, a lot of the puzzle and platforming sections belong to Amadeus.

     Secondly, there’s Pontius.  Pontius is a man with a great sense of honor and duty and nothing going on in that thick head of his.  Pontius dreams of being a royal knight, so much so that he takes it upon himself to guard the Astral Academy(the previously mentioned veritable palace of learning) despite no one telling him to do so.  And as you’d expect, Pontius is the opposite of Amadeus in almost every way.  Pontius is your combat character.  He’s the only one with any defensive capabilities, having a large shield that can be used to block incoming attacks but can also be upgraded to involve a charge attack for smashing into enemies and obstacles, as well as given a magical upgrade to become a “Gravity” shield.  Apparently, Gravity means Magnet in Finnish.  But this is nothing on his offensive capabilities.  Pontius starts off being able to decimate enemies with his blade, unfortunately unnamed in this game, but I hope its name is ‘Pilate’, and just gets better from there on.  His blade can be enchanted to become a flame sword, allowing it to light torches and enemy’s skulls, and he eventually gets a nice Warhammer that can shoot electricity to go along with it.  He’s a regular old Rhydderch Hael, if Rhydderch Hael was also Thor.

     Last but not least, there’s Zoya.  Zoya is shrouded in mystery, as any good thief should be.  We don’t get to know much about her backstory, but we do learn that she’s very good at what she does.  Though that might just be her being exceptionally opportunistic, as she’s apparently the only person in this kingdom who saw the undead apocalypse and decided to make bank off it.  Zoya arguably has the most arc of the three, starting out caring for nothing but herself and at first not even talking to her comrades, but inevitably comes out of her shell and starts fighting more for what’s right than what’s shiny.  Zoya is probably my favorite.  She is the ranged character, first and foremost.  In combat, she wields her bow to snipe skeletons from a safe distance, and this bow can be upgraded to fire multiple arrows at once, and will inevitably be enchanted to fire flame arrows.  Meaning that Amadeus is the only character to not have fire powers because this game is committed to the joke.  But her platforming abilities are where she really shines.  Zoya has a grappling hook which, as you’d expect, is primarily used to swing from objects.  What you aren’t told, is that Zoya can use this grappling hook to recover from almost any bad jump.  If you memorize what the grappling hook can cling on to and what you can get away with when you have proper swing momentum, Zoya can practically break levels.  Not to mention that her swinging mechanic is just generally fun to use, even if the momentum can end up a little on the wonky side sometimes.

      The level design in this game is exquisite.  Not only does it manage to utilize all of the various skills that your trio has at any given time to give you a lot of varied and in-depth puzzles and platforming challenges, but each level is packed with secrets to find and hidden experience to collect.  And the best part of it is that while there is a correct way to do each puzzle that utilizes only the basic puzzle mechanics, if you’ve gone through the trouble of gaining a lot of EXP, you can often just cheese puzzles out and beat levels way quicker than they intended.  Usually, this manifests in the wizard being able to summon a ridiculous amount of boxes that you can just opt to stack upon each other to get where you need to be.  But regardless, it is a nice reward for exploration that incentivizes you to thoroughly explore and replay levels and discover creative solutions to puzzles, especially if you’re having issues with the game’s mechanics.

     I avoided mentioning this when discussing Pontius, as I didn’t want it to seem like what he was designed to do was lesser than Amadeus or Zoya, but the combat in this game is really bad.  Satisfying and fun combat is very difficult to do in a side-scrolling format, of course, so I feel like it’s unfair to judge this in the same way I’d judge, like, Bayonetta’s combat.  But still, Trine’s combat is repetitive, under-designed and just not very fun.  There are a grand total of four and a half normal enemy types in this game, melee skeletons, range skeletons, fire-breathing skeletons, and spiders, with armored variants for each of the skeletons and a shielded and armored shielded variety for the melee.  The issue is that all these enemy types behave in the exact same way regardless of stage, variant or otherwise.  Skeletons will just blindly charge at you with no consideration for what’s in their path, often times leading them to their death and netting you free experience.  As well, the skeletons single-minded AI severely overpowers Zoya, who can just very easily sit up somewhere high and snipe skeletons whose AI is too stupid to tell them to take cover, especially once you gain the wizard’s floating platform skill and are able to take cover literally anywhere.  And not to mention the game’s two boss varieties, the giant skeleton lord and the rock troll, who can very easily fall into the same pit traps and Zoya’s bizarrely overpowered nature.

     The checkpoints in this game are also far too frequent for their own good.  Death in this game is something that only happens to a single character at a time rather than a whole party thing, so if you end up dying with one character you can still keep on chugging on with the stage.  The issue becomes that each character is restored with half health the next time they reach a checkpoint.  Any checkpoint.  So you can very easily restore your fallen comrades with no actual penalty for your mistakes.  This mechanic alone seems far too generous for the kind of game Trine is, where it’s seemingly all about player creativity.  I could go ahead and try to play around with Pontius’ magic shield, yes.  Or I could just backtrack a couple platforms, get Amadeus back and stack boxes and make stairs to my heart’s content.  A simple matter of making checkpoints limited use could so easily fix this, but as it stands, it’s easy to exploit the game’s system to breeze your way through levels.

     Despite my issues with it, I had a ton of fun with Trine.  I am a sucker for clever design and letting the player think outside the box, so it was right up my alley.  I’m glad I finally got around to playing it after so many years and I’m stoked for the inevitability of playing Trine 2 for next year’s 52.  If you want some of the smartest level design in a puzzle-platformer and won’t be turned off by combat more akin to Zelda 2 than anything, I highly recommend you pick up Trine.  You won’t regret it.  I hope you enjoyed our look at it, and we’ll be back next time with Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream.  I don’t have an NES.  See ya then.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch - 19/52

     One of the most fascinating and arguably important developments in internet culture was the rise of the kitsch indie game.  Usually, the way it goes is an indie game comes out that either is just so unique and bizarre that the internet latches onto it and doesn’t let go until the next big game pops up to replace it.  I like to think it was either the cause or the response of the rise of second-wave Let’s Play, or ‘Scarecam Let’s Play’   Just finding these bizarre little games that will keep the viewers engaged for whatever reason.  Games such as Five Nights at Freddy’s, Undertale and, to some extent, even the omnipresent Minecraft are great examples of this kind of game.  But for every massive success created by this, there’s a lot of meme games that fall by the wayside for one reason or another.  Today’s subject is one such game, a bizarre little novelty game that blew up for a few months and then got replaced and arguably forgotten about.  Not that I can blame them, I don’t see the attraction to such a mundane game as Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

Nothing more touching than a dad spending time with his daughter.

     Octodad: Dadliest Catch puts you in the shoes of an unnamed but incredibly ordinary suburban father.  It’s somewhat off-putting that our main character doesn’t have a name at first, but it’s actually ingenious.  Letting you name your own protagonist is one of the oldest tricks in the book for instant immersion, but that still leaves the player with the chance to name it the default and just get on with everything.  But by leaving this handsome devil of a protagonist unnamed, you have no choice to put yourself in that position.  For the sake of this post, though, I will be henceforth referring to the protagonist by the name in the title, ‘Octodad’, a name that I still don’t quite understand considering that he only has two children, not eight.  But I digress.

WAIT A MINUTE.  HE DIDN'T PAY FOR THOSE SUNGLASSES.

      Octodad must navigate the daily routine, which involves such activities as making coffee, cooking his family lunch, mowing the lawn and going to the grocery store.  It’s roughly as mundane as you’d expect as you hang birdhouses and purchase frozen pizza, but today Octodad’s family has decided to also head off to the aquarium, an activity he’s very vocally against.  We’re never given a lot of explanation for this, but you can easily gather that Octodad is against the aquarium because he hates seeing animals taken from their natural habitat.  What a great guy.  Unfortunately, all is not smooth in the life of Octodad, as we are shown that his marriage is starting to collapse due to a lack of communication.  And, of course, there’s an insane Japanese man chasing him down rambling about ‘the war’, not sure what war but ‘the’ I guess, and claiming that Octodad is an octopus.  Can you believe it?  I mean, look at that stache.  No way can an octopus grow a rocking mustache like that.

Maybe the real Dadliest catch here is the bargain on this pizza.

     These are not the only hindrances to Octodad’s daily activities, however.  Octodad has this bizarre manner of walking where he repeatedly flings his entire body around to move forward.  No explanation on why he does this either, though my theory is that Octodad has been paralyzed for most of his life and due to the wonders of modern medicine, has finally gained the ability to walk but hasn’t been properly taught.  It’s not all bad though, as what Octodad did gain from a lifetime of lower body paralysis was incredible upper body strength.  He has a grip so strong that he can barely control it in most situations, and routinely he lets his guard down and takes the doorknobs off doors without meaning to.  It is both his blessing and his curse to be the strongest man in this nondescript suburban area that is assumingly adjacent to a big city with a nice big aquarium.

I'm rooting for these crazy kids.  These totally normal human crazy kids.

     The unfortunate part about Octodad is tone.  A lot of the game might as well be accompanied by a laugh track and, you know what, that would be fine.  Except, a lot of very serious and unfortunate events happen in this game and it feels like they need to be addressed in a manner that isn’t akin to how Full House would address them.  Like, for instance, Octodad’s marriage is falling apart.  His wife, Scarlet, thinks that he’s keeping too many secrets from her and it’s implied that she thinks he’s cheating on her.  And how do they handle this?  By having Octodad just win a bunch of Chuck E Cheese prizes for her.  We get flashbacks to his past at one point and it involves him stowing away on a commercial fishing vessel, impersonating one of the crew, forcing himself into the position of captain, immediately throwing a man overboard and then disappearing because he finds another stowaway and it’s Scarlet.  Granted, all impressive feats for a man who, until recently, was likely paralyzed for his entire life but also SUPER illegal.  Not to mention the villain of this game is clearly suffering from PTSD and wild hallucinations and wants to murder a man and turn him into sushi because he thinks he’s an octopus.  Which, again.  Killer mustache.

Speaking of length, can you say Rated M for nudity?

     Length is also somewhat of an issue in Octodad.  Granted, I feel like if this game was too long a lot of people wouldn’t mesh with it.  It’s basically just a dad simulator with an odd pun in the title.  But I played the game for a grand total of 1 hour and 45 minutes.  I’ve played actual tech demos longer than that.  It’s a shame too because it’s actually really fun and I would’ve liked to have a little more.  The weirdness of Octodad’s movement aside, there’s a surprising amount of fun to be had in mundane tasks like grilling burgers and weeding the garden and plugging in cables.  Certainly more fun to be had than doing these activities in real life.

OCTODAD.  HOW COULD YOU.  IN FRONT OF YOUR OWN DAUGHTER!!!

     Octodad: Dadliest Catch was a surprisingly fun, incredibly short jaunt.  I still don’t understand where the title comes from, maybe the fact that he used to work on a commercial fishing vessel?  Don’t know where the Octo part fits in, though.  Anyways, if you can find it for super cheap I highly recommend it.  It’s a good game to just wind down and relax with for an hour or two.  Unfortunately not a game that gives you a wealth of things to talk about but, you know, what can you do.  It’s the way the cookie crumbles.  Dad jokes.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Octodad: Dadliest Catch and next time we’ll be moving back into the realm of fantasy with Trine.  See ya guys then.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist

Quest for Glory: So You Want To Be a Hero? - 18/52

    I feel like I spend an exorbitant amount of time talking about eras of gaming that I missed.  It’s the unfortunate combo of getting into gaming in the late 90s as well as being obsessed with nothing but Pokemon until about 2002.  As well, I just like to give some context as to my own history of gaming so these things don’t just read like glorified reviews. The PC point and click adventure game era is no exception to my massive blind spots.  In fact, I was completely unaware of most of this era of gaming until roughly seven years ago when I discovered one PushingUpRoses on YouTube and started getting into her Let’s Plays of all of these old adventure games.  And let me tell you, I was pretty much instantly hooked. These games looked super fun, had a lot of good humor and references in them and, while the puzzles could dip into the insane every once in a while, for the most part, they were really well thought out and took a lot of environmental awareness as well as problem-solving skills.  But, because I’m awful, I never chose to seek out these games until a couple years ago when they popped up in a Humble Bundle and I snatched it up. And because I’m doubly awful, I didn’t get around to playing any of them until just this past week. But boy did the Cookie give me a good place to start. This is, Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero?

    The Quest for Glory series is a fascinating bit of gaming that deserves far more in the way of recognition than it gets.  It’s an incredibly ambitious series of games, a multi-part fantasy epic taking you through a series of vastly different worlds based on various different folklore and mythology and allowing you to keep the same player-created character throughout the series.  It’s not the first of its kind by any means, that honor appears to belong to the first three entries in the Wizardry series from what my research has gathered. But it’s still noteworthy with not only the scope of the series but also the time period these came out in.  Nowadays it’s fairly common in role-playing games, especially role-playing games developed by American developers, for you to import your own character across several games, but in the early 90s, I have to imagine this was a potentially problematic feature to implement. I mentioned in my previous entry on Shantae: Risky’s Revenge that I intend on starting at the beginning of a series and working my way through as many of them at either later dates or subsequent 52s.  Quest for Glory may have been the reason for that decision. Annually going back to my created character and taking him on a new adventure. So without further ado, let us start on the adventures of August the spellcaster in his first adventure.

    The original Quest for Glory puts you through what may be the most basic fantasy setting ever.  You enter the town of Spielberg, a small little chunk of civilization in the middle of a vast forest, as a novice adventurer seeking fame and fortune.  Spielberg has had a wealth of bad luck as of late, with the local Baron who lives in the castle to the north having lost both of his children, bands of brigands and goblins having taken up residence in the southern forests and the eastern forest having recently been chosen as the current home of the traveling witch Baba Yaga.  So of course, since no fantasy story would be complete without everyone placing literally every problem on the shoulders of a complete and total stranger, it is up to our young spellslinger August to solve everyone’s problems. At least he gets wealth, power and a title out of it. And knowing the time period, maybe the Baron will even throw in his daughter as an added bonus.  It’s not like you’re going to immediately leave for the desert with a pair of Romani cat people and an Aladdin wannabe or anything.

    As mentioned before, the Quest for Glory series tends to be based around various folklore and mythology from around the world.  The first game is really the least clear about this but a little mining and paying attention to detail can tell you that this game is based on Grimm fairy tales.  This creates a very generic fantasy setting overall which I initially held a distaste for but as I played more I saw it as more of a necessity. It’s easy to say the setting is boring nowadays when this kind of Grimm fairytale setting is burned into our minds forever, but I can see the logic of introducing something familiar at the beginning of a new series to entice players in before going with the more unique stuff like Arabic folklore, Slavic mythology or African fairy tales.  As well, it gives a certain early Dungeons and Dragons campaign vibe, seeing as you’re immediately thrown into this small town after character creation and immediately see mainstays in role-playing games like the magic shop, the guild, the inn and, of course, the Tavern. So many adventurers meet in Taverns in fantasy that there might as well be an epic fantasy adventure about overcoming alcoholism.

From left to right, warrior, mage, thief.

   Quest for Glory is a surprisingly deep game despite its relatively small size.  There are, as with most video game RPGs, three classes to choose from and not only are your default stats vastly different depending on which class you choose, but the solution to many of the game’s puzzles are changed considerably as well.  As I chose a magic user, for instance, a lot of my solutions to puzzles were based on spell adeptness. I had to individually level my skills throughout to complete certain objectives, such as using my retrieval spell ‘Fetch’ to grab a magic seed from mid-air or using my unlocking spell ‘Open’ to get into the brigands' hideout.  But if I were playing a thief, for instance, all of my solutions would be vastly different, relying on timing and cunning rather than adeptness and mana. The amount of depth and meaning to the character creation aspect is refreshing as I know certain modern games with perfect review scores whose names rhyme with ‘Sly Kim’ that basically use their class system as just a different combat skin that has no deeper meaning to your gameplay otherwise.

     There’s a lot of great atmosphere in this game as well.  A lot of the game is wandering through the forest trying to find your way between a number of locations hidden amongst the various nooks and crannies.  And the game replicates the feeling of wandering aimless and lost through a forest pretty perfectly. The ambiance in this game is top-notch, with most of your time being spent accompanied by the sounds of birds chirping and water running.  This also makes the game’s soundtrack pop more, as you spend most of the game in relative silence. None of the songs in the game are especially great or memorable on their own, but with the context, they all come across as little gifts whenever they do pop up. This constant contrast between silence and music really helps immersion a lot, I was surprisingly sucked into to the goings on in Spielberg and the surrounding forest.

Do you mean the African or European answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

     Do you like references?  Because this game is full of references.  Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of references, especially considering at the time of writing this, it’s only been a month since Ready Player One and I was constantly reminded for a month and a half leading up to it about the nightmare of a reference ball that thing was.  But for the most part, Quest for Glory is sparing with them. A majority of the references involved in the game are really just in one section, the Wizard’s Tower area. That area starts with a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference that splinters off into a bunch of other references to various British comedies, like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Black Adder, then once you get into the tower you’re immediately greeted by a room full of various different fantasy references, most egregious a rodent in a wizard’s hat.  This area isn’t required by any means so you can easily avoid the bulk of the references, but if you want to get all the spells as the wizard it’s a detour you have to make. Otherwise, the game just peppers in references every once and a while and usually they manage a smile.

    So the combat in this game is terrible.  I originally didn’t understand what was going on at first with the combat of this game and that was admittedly my bad.  There are two menus in the combat for this game, the spell menu and the attack menu, at least for my class. And for some reason the game doesn’t start you on the menu you can actually attack on, so it’s easy early on to lose a lot of battles before you have any spells.  But even once you figure out what’s going on, it’s still not fun combat. It’s a lot of imprecise telegraphing and mashing the attack button because the game will either not read your attack or it’ll just completely miss the enemy. It’s the least fun part of the game and it’s, unfortunately, a requirement if you want to better your character at any point in this game.  But hey. At least you get a lot of coin out of it.

    Quest for Glory is another old-school fantasy video game that is systematically unhelpful.  At this point, you can just call me a dirty lazy millennial gamer and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you there.  And to the game’s credit, it does include a hint system if you manage to scrape up the coin for it. The issue is that there’s a variety of different places hidden throughout the forest in this game and other than a single overturned log to use as a landmark to let you know you’re close to the town entrance, almost every part of the forest looks the same.  It’s surprisingly easy to get lost in there and have trouble finding your way out and then it turning to night and you get murdered by a troll, losing any progress made since your last save and just generally feeling discouraged.

    The last major point I wish to bring up likely has nothing to do with the game but I feel is an important issue to talk about nonetheless.  I had fairly frequent issues running this game. I played off the Steam release which is basically just loading up your choice of the original EGA release, which plays more akin to a text-based adventure, or the VGA release, which is a point-and-click, in the DOSBox emulator.  For some reason, I couldn’t really play this game for more than 40-70 minutes at a time before the game would start being swallowed by an overwhelming white light, causing all the graphics in the game to go screwy and basically forcing me to quit and reload the game several times before completion.  My playthrough in total couldn’t have taken me more than 7 hours, but the recording I captured so I could pull screenshots is in 13 parts. If you are opting to play this game, I’d keep this in mind. It’s more a minor inconvenience than anything, though.

    Despite all my issues with Quest for Glory, I really enjoyed my time with it.  It was a very engaging and immersive RPG that validated all my hopes from watching the aforementioned PushingUpRoses LP that I would really enjoy this.  For the sake of what I want to do with the 52, i.e. make it an annual series, I’m going to hold off my desire to immediately rejoin August the novice mage until next year.  But for all of you, I highly recommend playing through the series if you haven’t already. Next time we’ll be finally moving away from the world of retro fantasy games and taking a look into the wonderful world of memes, as we take a look at Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap -17/52

     I have previously mentioned I got into gaming relatively late.  My first home console was a Nintendo 64 and I didn’t get seriously into gaming until several years after that.  So I unfortunately missed out on Sega’s days as a major console maker.   Most of my knowledge of Sega is limited to a couple marketing slogans, the internet’s proclamations of the underappreciated genius of the Dreamcast, the later era Sonic games and some vague memories of being a really young kid and playing Ecco the Dolphin at a cousin’s house before I even got my own Gameboy in 98.  And before you ask, no, I couldn’t even begin to tell you what was going on in Ecco the Dolphin.  So, similar to my want to get caught up on a lot of classic PlayStation franchises I missed out on by being a Nintendo kid in the PS1 era, I have always wanted to check out a lot of the classic Sega franchises.  Luckily, developer Lizardcube and publisher DotEmu have been so gracious to hand us a remake of the third entry in Sega’s classic adventure series, Wonder Boy.  So join me now as we take a look at Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap.

     Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap puts you in the shoes of the eponymous Wonder Boy(or Wonder Girl, if you’d prefer), who is heading off on an adventure to slay the dragon and rescue the village.  We’re not really given a lot of context for this in Dragon’s Trap, but the gist of it is that the beginning of this game is a direct continuation of the ending of the previous game in Wonder Boy canon.  However, it’s not super necessary to know the context as the game is almost made stronger just by having this quick, action-packed opening that throws you immediately into the gameplay, allowing you to get used to the combat with an overpowered character before having everything stripped away from you.  Speaking of which, our at this point overpowered hero is currently heading off to combat the Mecha Dragon, a gargantuan robotic dragon who, upon defeat, curses the hero into the form of a large, bulky and incredibly weak fire-breathing Lizard-Man hybrid.  The mission from here becomes pretty clear after a bit of exploring, you need to travel the world, slay the five other dragon villains and collect their souls before you’ll be able to turn back into human form.   I genuinely can’t believe that we’re doing another game involving animal transformation this soon.

     I think it’s time to return to using my favorite word when describing video game plots, simple.  I’ve been avoiding using it because it seems redundant at this point, the way I write these things makes every plot seem fairly simple.  But in this particular case, the simplicity seems almost intentional.  Wonder Boy reminds me a lot of the original Legend of Zelda in terms of how it handles it’s narrative, namely how it gives you virtually nothing to go on and you must piece together the plot on your own.  And, much like Zelda, it surprisingly works in spite of its status as an adventure game.  It can be almost a detractor to Dragon’s Trap how little the game gives you to go off of, and we’ll certainly get into that more when the negatives start rearing their ugly head.  But for this game’s narrative, simplicity is perfection.

     Unfortunately, there’s a downside to Dragon’s Trap’s lack of context.  From a gameplay standpoint, the game just comes off as chronically unhelpful.  There’s a lot of guesswork that the game expects you to do and, while a lot of it is the self-explanatory ‘Piranha-Man can swim so now go do the water section’, there’s a lot of room to just miss necessary items and have to go through an insane amount of backtracking to go find them.  In particular, the Magic Saber, which is needed to access the final area of the game, is somewhat hidden away in a specific alcove and I could totally see someone missing it for a while and having to do a lot of unfortunate backtracking.  The worst part of all of this is that the game kind of tricks you into thinking that it might have a hint system only for said hints to be vague and mostly unhelpful.  I just see some players, especially younger players, being turned off by it is all, though it’s really worth sticking to.

     You know what was absolutely bizarre?  Playing a second side-scrolling platformer adventure game that heavily involved animal transformations this close to Shantae.  They’re practically back to back.  But this game, unlike Shantae, has a couple very distinctive differences.  The first is the inventory.  Wonder Boy has a surprisingly large armory available to you, if you have the coin of course.  There are a total of thirty pieces of equipment in this game, separated into three categories, swords, shields, and suits of armor.  For the most part, the equipment is very progression based and a lot of the really early pieces just end up forgotten and outclassed.  But the game doesn’t fully abandon equipment once it’s seemingly run its course either.  A lot of the most effective equipment sets change between transformations.  In particular, the shields seem to favor specific creatures over others.  As well, a few pieces of equipment hold special abilities, which usually cost you a lot in the way of offensive or defensive stats, but the special buffs you gain tend to be worth it.  Though by the end of the game the only one of these that remains useful is the blade that allows you to freely switch between your transformations, but that’s more a symptom of level design than anything.

     The other major thing that separates Wonder Boy from Shantae is that, while Shantae’s transformation mechanic was based on voluntary inputs, Wonder Boy’s is a series of forced, incredibly drastic changes in gameplay style that you have basically no control over until roughly the halfway point in the game.  New transformations are given to you each time you defeat a boss and the way they bestow them upon you, that being forcibly transforming you almost immediately after the boss disappears, tends to interrupt gameplay as you get to play a rousing game of ‘what does this character do’.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to get used to each character though and some things are just incredibly obvious, like the Piranha-Man swims or the Hawk-Man flys.  But just in case you find yourself confused, the Lizard-Man is weak but defaults to a projectile attack, the Mouse-Man can climb on walls and easily avoid attacks due to his height, the Piranha-Man can swim and has increased defenses, the Lion-Man has increased strength and a vertical slash for an attack instead of a stab and the Hawk-Man can fly at the cost of a large chunk of his offensive and defensive stats.  There’s really a lot of balancing issues here and by the time you gain the ability to switch between the transformations, you’ll basically always be working with the Lion-Man for anything that doesn’t involve any of the others’ platforming skills.

     Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is an exceptionally beautiful game.  All the environments and character animations are just so lively and so enthralling.  You can almost get lost in this game, it’s just so incredibly beautiful.  I feel like there’s an aesthetic that’s been created in HD installments in old, long forgotten platformer franchises, as the third and fourth Shantae games also share this kind of visual style.  That’s not a complaint, really, just an observation.  But for that apparent aesthetic, Wonder Boy hits it right out of the park.  I’m particularly a fan of how a lot of the transformations look.  That’s obviously the part you’d expect them to get right before anything else since they’re what you’re going to be looking at for the entire game, but they just all have these adorable, giant googly eyes combined with calm, stoic expressions that just make them seem so cute and yet so cool.  Not to mention how beautiful the environmental work is.  It’s tough picking a favorite out of the environments of this game, but if I had to choose it would likely be the Daimyo Temple, though the desert, underwater and Sky Palace areas are up there.

     Wonder Boy does something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a remake.  It’s not uncommon for other remakes of classic video games to include some version of the original present in the remake, but I think this is the first one I’ve ever seen that allows you to swap between the two versions on the fly.  With nothing more than a couple simple button presses, you’ll switch from the gorgeous HD remaster to the original 8-bit game, complete with retro soundtrack.  It doesn’t actually change much about the game other than visuals and music, the remake is incredibly faithful to its original product, but it’s one of the coolest additions I’ve ever seen to a remake and I hope more remakes take note of this in the future.  As well, the game even keeps the password system from the original game, though now you can only enter passwords upon startup as the game default autosaves, but that also means any of the old cheat codes you have from the original still work.  Though, even as someone who loves old video games despite not being especially good at them and classic pixel art, the game just honestly looks and feels better with the remake’s art style and you’ll more than likely be playing with that most of the time.  Unless of course, you’re nostalgic for this game, in which case more power to you.

     Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is just a lot of old-school video game fun.  I’m really surprised this series isn’t still around as Sega’s competitor to Zelda, though the way Sega used to treat its franchises, especially the ones on the Master System, might’ve had something to do with this series’ ultimate fate.  I would definitely recommend this to anyone wanting a nice side scroller fix, though maybe not almost immediately after you do Shantae like I did.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Wonder Boy and next time around we’ll be taking a look at the original Quest for Glory.  I know, three retro fantasy games in a row, can you even believe it.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist