1.03g

Wonder Boy: the dragon’s trap is a semi-remake of the Monster world II dragon no wana. I say “semi-” because it looks to me like it was made the same way as Windows for DOS — a beautiful coat of paint on an old turd. You can swap between the original and the new graphics any second, the kinaesthetics, the hitboxes, the stun-locks — all feel exactly as bad as in the original. If they made such pretty game, i sure believe they could’ve made it as tight and satisfying as modern platformers too.

This is an action-adventure game, so, the usual — platforming, combat, cash, shops. There’s an additional gimmick of you changing forms, and corresponding non-linear loot progression. The game never explains how you lost all your HP between the intro and entering the village.

This remake adds an easy mode, increasing your HP immensely, which feels unsatisfactory at the beginning, but then you start to run out of HP in seconds, and then you encounter the first (second) boss and you realize that this is a good call. To mitigate the damage spam, unreachable enemies, early low HP, you had to edge-farm enemies for hearts. For bosses you had to save (memorize the password), then reach them, then farm hearts until full, then try to learn their stupid patterns with trial and error. Repeating the whole long way until full satisfaction. Easy mode saves you from that, and also offers conventional saves at the password shops.

You can choose to play as wonder girl, so of course i did that. It doesn’t really matter sine you play as the same enemies for the most of the game, but i was rewarded with a meta joke for my choice.

The original games doesn’t show items in shops, which you are unworthy of, for some reason. This version shows them, and you can even farm a ton of cash yo buy them asap.

The dragon levels are not too easy or too satisfactory, but you have your ranged attack, so it’s fine. The stupid danger cloud put right in the beginning of the game when you are at the weakest, is not good level-design. Then you become a mickey mouse woman, the difficulty spikes, your abilities suck and it’s a fully melee character in a game with bad combat and bad enemies. The new graphics don’t make anything of it better. When you become the swim boy girl the levels aren’t very fun either, but by that time you accumulated more HP to mitigate it. With the mouse you can reach the near-endgame shop right in the village, and with unlocked shopping possibilities you can farm 10000 gold to get the gear. Bit later you finally discover a character swapping station. Then the ♥♥♥♥-girl forms allows you to reclaim the starting end-game equipment, and to reach a good farming spot. There’s a chest, and if you exit to the main menu and reload the save it will be re-filled with a lot of cash. Thus by the mid-game you can get the good gear to lower the frustration.

I planned to do at least the stones, but after wasting time on the mouse stone — a-ha-hah, thanks no.

The controls are sluggish and unresponsive to match the original game, but the new accessibility features balance most of that. The graphics are beautiful and have to be rewarded for the effort put into art and animations in the sea of indie pixelart vomit.

annoying ass game that won me over by the end. Charming visuals, and cute soundtrack