very underwhelming game even with 100% done

[Mr Fantastic]

I was really hyped for this game, wonder boy in monster land 3 is one of all my all time favorite games and I thought this was going to be some sort of remake to it.

Sadly it's very far from a wonder boy game, feels like you're playing one of the old castlevanias with WACKY (overall feeling of the game) puzzles and mechanics. Advancing in the game and grabbing all the goodies feels like a chore and leaves a sore taste in your mouth. I got 100% of the stuff by the end but I feel sorry for the time I spend doing it...

The wonder boy I have nostalgia for had exploration, simplish puzzles, advancement was mainly combat based and there were a LOT more of different enemies of all sizes, the bigger ones were hard to kill but dropped big bags of money and big hearts. The story was also much more memorable. The crazy inventory UI and overload of gear in this game make it feel confusing and most of it irrelevant, there's no sense of achievement when you get a new weapon 10min after getting the last one and you don't even need to use most of them at all.

I really hope this is not the last wonder boy, and I hope you can ditch castlevania ideas right out of the window. You want a good source of inspiration for a kickass wonder boy game? Go play wonder boy in monster world for the genesis and mercenary kings for PC, if you could mishmash those two together we would have a really great game in our hands.

[Mr Fantastic]

there's no big hearts?

It's great old games keep getting reboots and this game can be great, BUT it feels like a massive chore to run back to town all the time to get full hp because everything will be doing a ton of damage and there's no way little heart drops can keep up with blows taking away 3-4 hearts.

What happened to the big hearts that refill your whole health that were dropables from the tough monsters in the original wonder boy?

With this current system, maybe it's more challenging for people and maybe some like it, but honestly it detracts a LOT from the game, we are supposed to be having fun exploring and facing unique enemies not running back to town after every single screen because every mob hits you for 1/4 or 1/3 of your life, this is not what fun is about.

[Aletheia]

Originally posted by Cesar:

It's great old games keep getting reboots and this game can be great, BUT it feels like a massive chore to run back to town all the time to get full hp because everything will be doing a ton of damage and there's no way little heart drops can keep up with blows taking away 3-4 hearts.

What happened to the big hearts that refill your whole health that were dropables from the tough monsters in the original wonder boy?

With this current system, maybe it's more challenging for people and maybe some like it, but honestly it detracts a LOT from the game, we are supposed to be having fun exploring and facing unique enemies not running back to town after every single screen because every mob hits you for 1/4 or 1/3 of your life, this is not what fun is about.

You actually can totally heal at some save points. Plus, if you die, you just get back to your previous save point. And always buy a potion, that's ultra cheap for the amount of money you'll get later on.

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by Aletheia:

Originally posted by Cesar:

It's great old games keep getting reboots and this game can be great, BUT it feels like a massive chore to run back to town all the time to get full hp because everything will be doing a ton of damage and there's no way little heart drops can keep up with blows taking away 3-4 hearts.

What happened to the big hearts that refill your whole health that were dropables from the tough monsters in the original wonder boy?

With this current system, maybe it's more challenging for people and maybe some like it, but honestly it detracts a LOT from the game, we are supposed to be having fun exploring and facing unique enemies not running back to town after every single screen because every mob hits you for 1/4 or 1/3 of your life, this is not what fun is about.

You actually can totally heal at some save points. Plus, if you die, you just get back to your previous save point. And always buy a potion, that's ultra cheap for the amount of money you'll get later on.

By later on you mean end game when you have all the gear and can finally afford potions? I had to go through most parts of the game with 3 hearts, we should at least get 50% health at normal save points and monsters should drop hearts more often and have the big ones as well.

[Aletheia]

Originally posted by Cesar:

Originally posted by Aletheia:

You actually can totally heal at some save points. Plus, if you die, you just get back to your previous save point. And always buy a potion, that's ultra cheap for the amount of money you'll get later on.

By later on you mean end game when you have all the gear and can finally afford potions? I had to go through most parts of the game with 3 hearts, we should at least get 50% health at normal save points and monsters should drop hearts more often and have the big ones as well.

Well, there's some hidden chests with money, and the money you get while defeating a boss (but be sure to go fast enough before it disappears with the cutscene). I didn't buy any ring yet but I'm always keeping at least 600G on me. Sometimes I go past 2K and I spend some to get armors and weapons.
Also, you can go to your house, your brother awaits to sell you some healing items at half their prices. Meaning you can buy a potion for 20G, which is fast to get. :)

[SG]

I believe this game is a complete different part of the series. It just borrows so much from other games. Not that good at it but still good enough.

Meaning, there's no need to have all items in others games like big hearts. It's a game on its own.

But I do understand your frustration, yet just only at some points. The game has been easy so far to have so much healing drops. I used elixir just a handful number of times so far in my ~86% map run. Or maybe it's just me being 37 years old and good at such games? Dunno.

[JiiPee]

Personally I really like this style of not having big heart drops and scarce gold drops.
Yes, it's annoying when you're low on health and you have no more potions nor money, but that only adds that slight curve to the difficulty challenge that so few games have these days.

! Spoiler alert !
Later on in the game you'll get an weapon that allows you to fast travel from anywhere back to towns to heal yourself, restock potions and it even allows you farm gold between zones. But personally I try to avoid using that, because it's not my style to play like that.

[Warrior of Right]

Big hearts how about Any Hearts at all...
During the Volcano a few heart drops would have been nice when you are pushing blocks around lava and being attacked by monsters that take like 3 + hearts at a time and when you die you come back with 3 only (sometimes you come back with 6 it's weird)
At least in the Volcano they should have filled it with the healing Savepoints...

[Warrior of Right]

They should keep the Metroidvania but maybe go a bit more on the exploration and less on the tedious puzzles, was not having much fun with them and they reached a "Boiling" point in the Volcano... (See what i did there?!)

[FDG Entertainment]

Did you notice ceramic pots with magic symbols on them? They exchange magic bullets to hearts and are spread only in the volcano to replenish health from time to time. They might help if you’re in trouble.

[Warrior of Right]

Originally posted by FDG Entertainment:

Did you notice ceramic pots with magic symbols on them? They exchange magic bullets to hearts and are spread only in the volcano to replenish health from time to time. They might help if you’re in trouble. Also ice armor is a must.

No i did not that would explain why i was having a harder time then with other Dungeons and of course i was using the ice armor, (right when you open the tower you get access to the shop with the actual armor instead of the tunics and i wasn't going to move on without at least one set of them, plus the ice armor is my favorite so far....
(like how you guys have a different model for the newer armors was worried they were all going to be recolored tunics)

Would mainly go back to the first save point that heals you since it was in a centralized location, just thought it was a difficulty spike even with the armor.
Oh well i already finished the Volcano and moved on....

Edit:also forgot to add i only found out about the returning to the point you warped out towards the end of the Volcano when it was too late.

[Rutabaga]

Most frustrating garbage for me so far is blind stuff. Dashing with the lion, oops needed to do a double jump there, had like 20 frames to react and process that before bashing in to the wall and falling in to the poison. Oh you didn't realize a crab cut the string of a float mine off screen and it one-shot you? Try again sucker! Oh you have an option between two streams pushing you in the water? better pick the right one, the other one is just gonna loop you back to the start! LULULULUL. Constantly with garbage like that, that is hard to avoid, does a TON of damage and is just frustrating beyond belief. Like it's usually not even a challenge, you just have to know that it's there, or you get totally rekt. Once you know, it's super easy every time.

Runner up for frustrating garbage is also swapping forms every 2 seconds, because god forbid that you don't stop the game dead in it's tracks every 3 steps because of frog rings, snake crawling or wall bashing.

I can't believe this game is getting amazing reviews. They nailed the game design in 89 10 times harder with Dragon's Trap.

Also OP, please don't drag Castlevania trhough the mud by comparing it to this. Castlevania 1 is a brilliant game.

[Warrior of Right]

Ya i should have specified one of the annoying things about the puzzles is the blind stuff
(or not knowing what the goal of the puzzle is) and when you learn what you have to do you have no health left to pull it off..

[Virtua Sanus]

I love the game but I noticed a few hours in that it felt more like a Metroid game with a Wonder Boy paint job. Not a bad thing at all, but I think they took the subgenre title too literally.

Still I think it is a very worthy successor to the franchise. Monster World IV is still probably my favorite and that ultimately feels like a bigger departure than this one does.

[gamertyp95]

Originally posted by Rutabaga:

Dashing with the lion, oops needed to do a double jump there, had like 20 frames to react and process that before bashing in to the wall and falling in to the poison.

Haha, yeah. And if you have anti-poison gear to not loose health you can walk back the whole way...slowly. At another lion stage they placed the endurance bubble so far away that you can only reach it, if you start from the last pixel. But ofc you only know once you failed and walked all the way back.

There are sadly a lot of those situations. Another one are these shooting clouds, which invert the controls. This makes it harder to dodge them, so you get even more hits. That results in a negative feedback loop.

And well...if you manage do dodge them with inverted controls. You simply don't know when the effect stops. So as soon as it stops you walk in the opposite direction, into the flames and here we go again...

I don't get why where isn't a simple indicator telling you that the effect will end in 2 secs or something like that. Generally the game feels like if devs never thought about what if people actually play the game.

[pythonfp]

The original games also had really tense moments.
The volcano part was for my part the hardest but it was not much more infuriating than Wonder Boy in Monster World which was frankly not the best in the series (even laughable compared to Monster World 4).