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
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