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dartmonkey

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

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After spending a few hours with this I've decided it definitely deserves its own thread. It's a remaster of a Master System game many consider to be the system's best. I never played the original - the easiest way to describe it is Zelda 2, but immediately fun and approachable. It involves travelling down spokes from a hub town and defeating dragons which then transform you into different anthropomorphic animals with abilities that open up new paths: Lizard Man attacks with fire and can duck; Mouse Man uses a sword and can cling to certain surfaces but has limited reach; Piranha man can swim; etc.

 

This version, though: :tup::tup: It's widescreen and you can switch between the original and the new art style on-the-fly by pressing ZR/R2 - it just swipes between the two like you do in Mario Maker, but in-game. I'm obsessed with it! It's like a game within a game, analysing the interpretations and the choices made. The new style is hand-animated and it confidently and coherently puts its own stamp on the original. The original music has been rearranged acoustically and recorded with live musicians and, again, you can switch to the original by clicking the right stick. And again, it's top work. After a few hours of frantically swiping between the styles, I now find myself picking one or the other and sticking with it for a section before dying and swapping to the other. The remaster has new character and item text that fleshes the world out a little (the main vendor is a cigarette-smoking pig.) It autosaves items and money but the old password feature also works.

 

The main menu has a gallery that gradually unlocks sketches, animation gifs and musician videos as you progress and it's fascinating to see the ideas progress through iterations from the original pixel art.

 

It's a clean, elegant package and it gets you imagining what other past games could benefit from this level of attention (Zelda 2, for example!) It's on Switch, PS4 and Xbone, it's coming to Steam and I heartily recommend it. I'd be really interested to hear others' thoughts. Has anybody played the original?

 

 

Here's an interview with the main dev.

http://www.siliconera.com/2017/04/24/wonder-boy-dragons-trap-developer-talks-connection-feel-original-developers/

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I played some of this at my friend's house last weekend and it was so fucking beautiful. However I don't like the game much at all. Seems like the big problem is the new amazing drawings are put on top of really finicky tile based hitboxes from the 80s. Not sure why it needed to switch between new and old on the fly.

 

However maybe I'll give it another shot at one point just to see the rest of the characters. The animation is just so good.

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