This is a loving remake to one of my favorite games ever, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap on the Sega Master System. I'd played that game to death when I was a kid, and still periodically revisit it.
As a remake, it is very smartly designed. Fully remade with gorgeous hand-drawn animation and backgrounds, the bones of the game are none the less very faithful the original, with a few tweaks. The game has a toggle that can switch between the new, beautifully hand-drawn art and the original SMS pixel art, showing both how faithful the remake is and how clever many of the visual updates are. There's also a toggle for the music and sound, allowing combinations of retro graphics and/or sound, rather than all or the other. (I enjoy the original chiptunes a great deal, so I play with the new graphics and OG sound.)
The overall adventure is still the same, hopping from one animal form to another in order to unwind a curse that is put upon the titular boy (or girl, in this version! progress!) in the intro. The gameplay and world design holds up, with the only major indicator that of its roots as an 8-bit game being the decidedly horizontal level design.
There are some new ideas here, as while the original game had many secrets to find, this remake adds a few more, namely in the way the stones work and are found, leading to some of the few world design updates. These new areas have a very different feel than the OG game, but still integrate into it well.
I do wish saving worked a bit more like how it did in the original, and dying did so as well. And while they did add a password feature to mimic the original after fan requests, it's buried in menus and very counterintuitive to use. The world design is relatively simple compared to later metroidvania games, but as a whole it fits together beautifully.
All in all this is a great version of a great game and I'm really glad it exists. The modern return of Wonder Boy has been a lot of fun to experience, as a longtime fan of the series.
As a remake, it is very smartly designed. Fully remade with gorgeous hand-drawn animation and backgrounds, the bones of the game are none the less very faithful the original, with a few tweaks. The game has a toggle that can switch between the new, beautifully hand-drawn art and the original SMS pixel art, showing both how faithful the remake is and how clever many of the visual updates are. There's also a toggle for the music and sound, allowing combinations of retro graphics and/or sound, rather than all or the other. (I enjoy the original chiptunes a great deal, so I play with the new graphics and OG sound.)
The overall adventure is still the same, hopping from one animal form to another in order to unwind a curse that is put upon the titular boy (or girl, in this version! progress!) in the intro. The gameplay and world design holds up, with the only major indicator that of its roots as an 8-bit game being the decidedly horizontal level design.
There are some new ideas here, as while the original game had many secrets to find, this remake adds a few more, namely in the way the stones work and are found, leading to some of the few world design updates. These new areas have a very different feel than the OG game, but still integrate into it well.
I do wish saving worked a bit more like how it did in the original, and dying did so as well. And while they did add a password feature to mimic the original after fan requests, it's buried in menus and very counterintuitive to use. The world design is relatively simple compared to later metroidvania games, but as a whole it fits together beautifully.
All in all this is a great version of a great game and I'm really glad it exists. The modern return of Wonder Boy has been a lot of fun to experience, as a longtime fan of the series.