I've had my Sega Master System since I was six and Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is still in my top 5 greatest games of all time. From the score to the gameplay everything about it is a true masterpiece.
Maybe it is something obvious from the small piece of footage included of the game gear version of Wonder Boy III. But I want to add that for this version Sega actually remade every piece of level design in order for it to fit better in the lower resolution Game Gear Screen. Making it a far better port than any of the sonic 8 bit ports on game gear, which are just the master system version zoomed in, and probably the single best game released on the platform.
@@holdingpattern245 yeah the first one is pretty good, it gets tricky at times with the zoomed in screen but not to bad. But the cropping on the second one is horrible.
As the probable-designated Wonder Boy series fangirl in this comment section, I should point out that Dragon's Trap shipped as Monster World II on Japanese Game Gear. Also don't sleep on Wonder Boy in Monster World aka Wonder Boy V: Monster World 3. It's one of the best games on the Mega Drive and as the title implies they basically pulled a Super Mario World on Dragon's Trap.
Wonder Boy III remake is such a thing of beauty. The original is such a masterpiece to the point I hadn't a Master System and still had to play that game! Thanks for the video. Wonder Boy deserves it's own video, down to the latest games. I'm playing Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom currently.
I definitely enjoyed the 2017 remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap. Dragon's Trap was definitely a masterful game by Sega and Westone. Golden Axe Warrior definitely looks like a nicer Zelda at home. Neutopia looks like a pretty good game, but I've never played it.
@@fonkoncl yeah, everytime I see WB IV in a video I tell myself "I need to play that" but I always forget to. I have the means too I just always forget about it. Is there a particular version you recommend? I also see lots of videos on MW IV which is the one with the female character.
This was a nostalgic episode for me, seeing how Wonder Boy III and Golden Axe are some of my favourite Master System games. Regarding the latter of the two, I always thought the cameos of characters from the - otherwise mostly unrelated - original Golden Axe, including some of the bosses, was a neat touch... 😉
WB3 is unapologetically hands down my favorite game of all time and is ground zero for my love of metroidvanias 35 years later. And no PSG soundtrack on the SMS is even close.
One impressive thing about the Dragon's Trap remaster is the new graphics can be switched on and off with a single button press, you don't even have to pause to go to a menu or anything. And it's a good thing to have because while the new animations are really good the old graphics also have a real charm.
i like how for the past few videos, they've ended with you asking whether or not the games reviewed were actually influential on the genre, and the answer has always been "probably not"
I had Neutopia back in the day, even when I got it in 1994/95 it still came across as really well done in the art & music depts. The sequel is bigger and better. As for Golden Axe Warrior, it's completely unfair that people write it off as just a Zelda clone. They also ripped the main character straight out of Hydlide or Dragon Quest too.
I got a Master system late in its lifetime and GAW and Wonder Boy III were the last two games I bought new, from a Toys R Us. I enjoyed both, especially Wonder Boy III, when I fell in the water in that game and discovered new play areas I was blown away, as in the original Wonder Boy game if you fell in the water, you instantly died. Newtopia 1 and 2 I bought after getting a Turbo Duo system. Not bad for Zelda clones. :)
Talk about all heavy hitters with this episode. Never played Golden Axe Warrior but it is an unlockable game on the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I've just yet to do so. But Neutopia and Wonder Boy 3 are two of my all time favorite games. Wonder Boy 3 is one I've found I go back to at least once a year since I got it about 5 or 6 years ago. I try runs in different ways to see how far i can get. Last time I tried to see how far I could get in the mouse form. I made it to the Samurai Dragon boss without getting the Lion transformation but no further as it takes like 2 hits to equal 1 point of damage while 2 or 3 hits from him will kill you. I did manage to get him down to about 40 hit point but couldn't do more than that. Plus after that the game gets brutally hard even using the correct transformation.
Hearing ya call the protag of Dragon's Trap 'Tom-Tom' reminded me of a wrinkle of Wonder Boy continuity! The hero of Monster Land and Dragon's Trap is the descendant! Bocke Lee-Temjin. Recent entry Monster Boy and The Cursed Kingdom confirms that Tom-Tom and Bocke aren't one in the same, but the former is the ancestor to the latter by form of the stained glass art in the sanctuary of the Lupia village and their spirits aiding the new hero Jin
@@JeremyParish lol, now ya know. I'm saying this cuz I have been replaying Monster Boy as of late, Jeremy. It's a fun tribute to the Wonder Boy/Monster World series at large
One thing that the WB3 remake fixed was the charm stone system, which really was the Achilles heel of the original game. Those things were rare as rocking horse shit, yet essential to progress
Is it possible Hudson made Adventure Island IV more "Metroidvania" like with "Dragon's Trap" in mind? Probably not to answer my own question, but it's still interesting that both series went through a similar development.
8:05 wait they gave him a GUN in the brazillian rom hack of Wonderboy III?! Never knew that, haha. Anyway The Dragon's Trap might have to be my favorite Master System game ever. It felt like a much improved version of Zelda II minus the overworld map! and best believe I picked up DotEmu's Switch update to it, possibly the definitive version of it with the new remixed visuals/music (or you can go retro if you really want to, I do believe they included the FM sound version of the soundtrack if I'm remembering right?) Lastly shout-out to that ultimate password SEGA accidentally printed in the manual, haha. I remember seeing it in there and I wondered if it actually worked.... sure enough!
After watching this video, I decided to play Wonder Boy In Monster World through Sega Genesis Classics on Steam and finally beat it yesterday. It has a bit of Metroidvania flavor to it, thanks to the swimming and... "pygmy" gear, but seems like a step back from Monster Trap. Also, I'm disappointed that said Classics collection includes *a* Wonder Boy III... but it's basically a platformer/shmup arcade port instead of the one shown off here.
I'm a bite curious about your video turnaround JP? Do you film these ahead of time, or are we watching the previous weeks creative process unfold into the now?
Great episode Jeremy. So much hidden greatness in these three titles. I remember when I bought a Master System after college due to nostalgia. I was looking for games to pick up and happened upon both Golden Axe Warrior and Dragon's Trap. What masterpieces. I remember DT being annoying with the MS due to being able to access the menu only with the pause button on the console -- until I realized that you could use the 2P controller to provide the same function. GAW was also a very solid Zelda clone and I enjoyed it greatly. I foolishly sold my copy (for like 14 bucks) right before the market for MS stuff spiked -- oh well. Also played through Neutopia on TG16. Beautiful graphics but I felt the adaptation was a little generic/bland as compared to the GAW adaptation of Zelda. Was already thinking about the Lickle mouse before you mentioned it in the video. The other reference you didn't mention is the shopkeeper in Cuphead who I have to believe is a tip of the cap to the pig-man shopkeeper in Dragon's Trap. Keep the excellent content coming!
It's definitely a subseries. Of the first nine game entries in this "Metroidvania" series, the first is a mainframe game from the 1970s, three of them are Atari 2600 games, three are home computer games, two are arcade games, and all of them are described only in terms of how they inspired the development of the Metroidvania genre.
It's funny, first Golden Axe Warrior on SMS rips off Zelda, then a year or so later, Ax Battler for GG ripped off Zelda 2. Also, can concur: the Dragon's Curse remake is an absolute delight and well worth playing if someone hasn't.
Golden Axe Warrior also seems to have been sharing a divergent evolution with the Mana series, seeing as in FFA/Seiken 1 you'd have to chop down trees and obstacles with various weapons and SNES Mystic Quest also carries the same exact idea over.
Americans would love it, and complete copies would sell for $300, but Europeans would pretend it doesn’t exist (unless Sega licensed it to Sunsoft to publish).
Sometimes, I feel like the only person in the world who was kind of... disappointed with Dragon's Trap once I finally sat down to play it. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED the gameplay itself, and the progression, and the graphics, and the music... but man, that level design REALLY pushed my buttons. I first became aware of how much I disliked it when I unlocked the mouse man and had to run up that pyramid, which consisted of just... running all the way to the right through a corridor filled with nothing but one specific enemy type in large numbers, then climb up the wall and run all the way to the left through a corridor filled with a different enemy type in large numbers, then climb up the wall and run all the way to the right... etc., etc. It's like Westone had ignored all the lessons learned from the many truly excellent Metroidvanias that had been released up to that point -- Goonies II, Legacy of the Wizard, and of course Metroid itself, to name but a few -- and regressed all the way back to the Pitfall II school of level design. Which... was fine for the Atari 2600, but by the NES/Master System era, it just felt lazy and uninspired to me. The rest of the game's level design wasn't much better. Yes, there were ample secrets to be found throughout, and those were where the game became fun and interesting again... but I think you undersold just how loooooooong those long horizontal corridors are. Most of your playtime in Dragon's Trap is NOT spent finding secrets, but trudging your way through what feels like endless corridors of obnoxious platforming challenges and armies of annoying enemies in order to GET to the next secret. The game world was perhaps TOO big, and much of that size was unfortunately just... filler. I'm much, MUCH more inclined to play a game like Legacy of the Wizard, that's just as massive in scope but makes every single screen distinct and hides secrets absolutely EVERYWHERE. There was no filler in Legacy of the Wizard... aside from that one room in Xemn's route with the endless sea of ladders and vertical block pillars, but we don't talk about that room. ;) Now, none of this is to say I DISLIKE Dragon's Trap -- I actually quite enjoyed the game, and I found the modern remake to be an endlessly impressive work with so much love and passion crammed into it, it was honestly beautiful. I just feel like there IS another side to this story -- it's not quite the perfect shining gem this video makes it out to be -- and would urge anyone going into it to know in advance that they're getting themselves into an ambitious and MOSTLY well-realized game, but with level designs that may prove extremely frustrating to some, and which feel dated even for 1989, to say nothing of today.
I'm of the opinion that Nintendo and other game/system developers sell the game engine of a hit to help make money off of it. In the cases like Golden Axe Warrior & Neutopia, even years after, which I imagine helps recoup development costs, and/or is a bonus so the engine lives on.
It's interesting hearing you sing the praises of Wonder Boy III. I played the remaster a few years ago and had to put it down. The slippery movement, awkwardly small sword hitboxes, and the overall start-and-stop pace of gameplay really turned me off the game. By contrast I rather liked The Dynastic Hero, a remake of Wonder Boy V on pc-engine despite it sharing all the same flaws. Perhaps I should give Dragon's Trap another try, but what a first impression.
That was me when I first tried Wonder Boy In Monster World too. I think it runs everybody the wrong way at first. Eventually you either grok it, or you don't.
![Every Wonder Boy Game [Reviewed]](/img/n.gif)
I've had my Sega Master System since I was six and Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is still in my top 5 greatest games of all time. From the score to the gameplay everything about it is a true masterpiece.
GAW is the only Zelda clone I've ever played that took its mission seriously enough to include the lousy "door repair" guys. That's dedication!
Maybe it is something obvious from the small piece of footage included of the game gear version of Wonder Boy III. But I want to add that for this version Sega actually remade every piece of level design in order for it to fit better in the lower resolution Game Gear Screen.
Making it a far better port than any of the sonic 8 bit ports on game gear, which are just the master system version zoomed in, and probably the single best game released on the platform.
sonic 1 on game gear is pretty good
@@holdingpattern245 yeah the first one is pretty good, it gets tricky at times with the zoomed in screen but not to bad. But the cropping on the second one is horrible.
As the probable-designated Wonder Boy series fangirl in this comment section, I should point out that Dragon's Trap shipped as Monster World II on Japanese Game Gear. Also don't sleep on Wonder Boy in Monster World aka Wonder Boy V: Monster World 3. It's one of the best games on the Mega Drive and as the title implies they basically pulled a Super Mario World on Dragon's Trap.
9:20 It's been [ 0 ] days since a Tower of Duraga reference
;)
Wonder Boy III remake is such a thing of beauty. The original is such a masterpiece to the point I hadn't a Master System and still had to play that game! Thanks for the video. Wonder Boy deserves it's own video, down to the latest games. I'm playing Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom currently.
I like WB3's dragon form's Garfield-esque lidded eyes. Mondays, amirite?
I definitely enjoyed the 2017 remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap. Dragon's Trap was definitely a masterful game by Sega and Westone. Golden Axe Warrior definitely looks like a nicer Zelda at home. Neutopia looks like a pretty good game, but I've never played it.
Have you played Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom? I highly recommend it. It's a great spiritual successor to Wonder Boy III
@@shingotink5062 I haven't played it yet but I'll check it out.
@@shingotink5062 it's more a sequel to Wonder Boy 4, which is Monster World 3, that is a game that is slept on
@@fonkoncl yeah, everytime I see WB IV in a video I tell myself "I need to play that" but I always forget to. I have the means too I just always forget about it. Is there a particular version you recommend? I also see lots of videos on MW IV which is the one with the female character.
This was a nostalgic episode for me, seeing how Wonder Boy III and Golden Axe are some of my favourite Master System games. Regarding the latter of the two, I always thought the cameos of characters from the - otherwise mostly unrelated - original Golden Axe, including some of the bosses, was a neat touch... 😉
WB3 is unapologetically hands down my favorite game of all time and is ground zero for my love of metroidvanias 35 years later. And no PSG soundtrack on the SMS is even close.
Excited to see Neutopia covered. Theres been a "Dirth" ( dearth) of covrrage on this one
One impressive thing about the Dragon's Trap remaster is the new graphics can be switched on and off with a single button press, you don't even have to pause to go to a menu or anything. And it's a good thing to have because while the new animations are really good the old graphics also have a real charm.
I was getting horribly confused seeing footage of Neutopia and hearing your description. Then I realized I was thinking of Ufouria.
Wonder boy 3, Neutopia, and Golden Axe Warrior are excellent. 😀👍🎮
Piranha-Man: Gravity Suit
Mouse-Man: Spider Ball
Hawk-Man: Space Jump
2 years before the first game to use the spider ball no less :)
i like how for the past few videos, they've ended with you asking whether or not the games reviewed were actually influential on the genre, and the answer has always been "probably not"
still, definitely see some of wonder boy 3's transformation mechanics reflected in games like majora's mask
Zelda clone is definitely an understatement. The entire look of GAW feels like Zelda at Home down to enemies burrowing out of the sand.
I had Neutopia back in the day, even when I got it in 1994/95 it still came across as really well done in the art & music depts. The sequel is bigger and better. As for Golden Axe Warrior, it's completely unfair that people write it off as just a Zelda clone. They also ripped the main character straight out of Hydlide or Dragon Quest too.
I got a Master system late in its lifetime and GAW and Wonder Boy III were the last two games I bought new, from a Toys R Us.
I enjoyed both, especially Wonder Boy III, when I fell in the water in that game and discovered new play areas I was blown away, as in the original Wonder Boy game if you fell in the water, you instantly died.
Newtopia 1 and 2 I bought after getting a Turbo Duo system. Not bad for Zelda clones. :)
Talk about all heavy hitters with this episode. Never played Golden Axe Warrior but it is an unlockable game on the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I've just yet to do so. But Neutopia and Wonder Boy 3 are two of my all time favorite games.
Wonder Boy 3 is one I've found I go back to at least once a year since I got it about 5 or 6 years ago. I try runs in different ways to see how far i can get. Last time I tried to see how far I could get in the mouse form. I made it to the Samurai Dragon boss without getting the Lion transformation but no further as it takes like 2 hits to equal 1 point of damage while 2 or 3 hits from him will kill you. I did manage to get him down to about 40 hit point but couldn't do more than that. Plus after that the game gets brutally hard even using the correct transformation.
Correction: without using the lion transformation I meant to say other than to open the way to that part of the game.
Hearing ya call the protag of Dragon's Trap 'Tom-Tom' reminded me of a wrinkle of Wonder Boy continuity! The hero of Monster Land and Dragon's Trap is the descendant! Bocke Lee-Temjin. Recent entry Monster Boy and The Cursed Kingdom confirms that Tom-Tom and Bocke aren't one in the same, but the former is the ancestor to the latter by form of the stained glass art in the sanctuary of the Lupia village and their spirits aiding the new hero Jin
Well, today I learned.
@@JeremyParish lol, now ya know. I'm saying this cuz I have been replaying Monster Boy as of late, Jeremy. It's a fun tribute to the Wonder Boy/Monster World series at large
Thank you for your expertise Jeremy! You're my favorite historian. :)
WOOO! Been waiting for WB3 to get covered :) Thanks Jeremy
For a second I tought you were going to talk about Wonder Boy Monster Lair.
Wonder Boy III is my favorite Sega Master System game of all time. 🙂👍
One thing that the WB3 remake fixed was the charm stone system, which really was the Achilles heel of the original game. Those things were rare as rocking horse shit, yet essential to progress
Star Trek V was my favorite one as a kid.
Is it possible Hudson made Adventure Island IV more "Metroidvania" like with "Dragon's Trap" in mind? Probably not to answer my own question, but it's still interesting that both series went through a similar development.
Wow, a sneak peek at some future segaiden games? Very hype
8:05 wait they gave him a GUN in the brazillian rom hack of Wonderboy III?! Never knew that, haha. Anyway The Dragon's Trap might have to be my favorite Master System game ever. It felt like a much improved version of Zelda II minus the overworld map! and best believe I picked up DotEmu's Switch update to it, possibly the definitive version of it with the new remixed visuals/music (or you can go retro if you really want to, I do believe they included the FM sound version of the soundtrack if I'm remembering right?) Lastly shout-out to that ultimate password SEGA accidentally printed in the manual, haha. I remember seeing it in there and I wondered if it actually worked.... sure enough!
After watching this video, I decided to play Wonder Boy In Monster World through Sega Genesis Classics on Steam and finally beat it yesterday. It has a bit of Metroidvania flavor to it, thanks to the swimming and... "pygmy" gear, but seems like a step back from Monster Trap. Also, I'm disappointed that said Classics collection includes *a* Wonder Boy III... but it's basically a platformer/shmup arcade port instead of the one shown off here.
I'm a bite curious about your video turnaround JP? Do you film these ahead of time, or are we watching the previous weeks creative process unfold into the now?
Jeremy is usually about 3 weeks to a month ahead of when videos go public. That's what I've observed.
Love this series
Great episode Jeremy. So much hidden greatness in these three titles. I remember when I bought a Master System after college due to nostalgia. I was looking for games to pick up and happened upon both Golden Axe Warrior and Dragon's Trap. What masterpieces. I remember DT being annoying with the MS due to being able to access the menu only with the pause button on the console -- until I realized that you could use the 2P controller to provide the same function. GAW was also a very solid Zelda clone and I enjoyed it greatly. I foolishly sold my copy (for like 14 bucks) right before the market for MS stuff spiked -- oh well.
Also played through Neutopia on TG16. Beautiful graphics but I felt the adaptation was a little generic/bland as compared to the GAW adaptation of Zelda.
Was already thinking about the Lickle mouse before you mentioned it in the video. The other reference you didn't mention is the shopkeeper in Cuphead who I have to believe is a tip of the cap to the pig-man shopkeeper in Dragon's Trap.
Keep the excellent content coming!
In my mind the metroidvania's real name is Wonderzelda2.
Less catchy of a name, I know.
Wasnt wonderboy 3 called dragons curse in the US. I know dragons curse was on chip.
Neutopia is my favorite Zelda clone. I even like it better than Link to the Past!
So does this fill in the gaps of NES works? I'm trying to keep track of the order of these, or is this a subseries?
It's definitely a subseries. Of the first nine game entries in this "Metroidvania" series, the first is a mainframe game from the 1970s, three of them are Atari 2600 games, three are home computer games, two are arcade games, and all of them are described only in terms of how they inspired the development of the Metroidvania genre.
It's funny, first Golden Axe Warrior on SMS rips off Zelda, then a year or so later, Ax Battler for GG ripped off Zelda 2.
Also, can concur: the Dragon's Curse remake is an absolute delight and well worth playing if someone hasn't.
Are those boxed Neo Geo Pocket Color game boxes behind you in the on camera segments?
Might be, I have some games I sold on eBay but the seller never paid so they're just sitting around.
11:30 I know you've played Final Fantasy Adventure, I've seen the video.
Nice, always great to see TG-16 games here especially ones I got world records on.
Golden Axe Warrior also seems to have been sharing a divergent evolution with the Mana series, seeing as in FFA/Seiken 1 you'd have to chop down trees and obstacles with various weapons and SNES Mystic Quest also carries the same exact idea over.
I sometimes wonder (no pun intended) how WB3 would be regarded today if it was an NES game instead
Americans would love it, and complete copies would sell for $300, but Europeans would pretend it doesn’t exist (unless Sega licensed it to Sunsoft to publish).
@@JeremyParish I think the actual "Dragon's Curse" was the game releasing on the SMS/GG and TG16 in the States haha
Sometimes, I feel like the only person in the world who was kind of... disappointed with Dragon's Trap once I finally sat down to play it.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVED the gameplay itself, and the progression, and the graphics, and the music... but man, that level design REALLY pushed my buttons. I first became aware of how much I disliked it when I unlocked the mouse man and had to run up that pyramid, which consisted of just... running all the way to the right through a corridor filled with nothing but one specific enemy type in large numbers, then climb up the wall and run all the way to the left through a corridor filled with a different enemy type in large numbers, then climb up the wall and run all the way to the right... etc., etc. It's like Westone had ignored all the lessons learned from the many truly excellent Metroidvanias that had been released up to that point -- Goonies II, Legacy of the Wizard, and of course Metroid itself, to name but a few -- and regressed all the way back to the Pitfall II school of level design. Which... was fine for the Atari 2600, but by the NES/Master System era, it just felt lazy and uninspired to me.
The rest of the game's level design wasn't much better. Yes, there were ample secrets to be found throughout, and those were where the game became fun and interesting again... but I think you undersold just how loooooooong those long horizontal corridors are. Most of your playtime in Dragon's Trap is NOT spent finding secrets, but trudging your way through what feels like endless corridors of obnoxious platforming challenges and armies of annoying enemies in order to GET to the next secret. The game world was perhaps TOO big, and much of that size was unfortunately just... filler. I'm much, MUCH more inclined to play a game like Legacy of the Wizard, that's just as massive in scope but makes every single screen distinct and hides secrets absolutely EVERYWHERE. There was no filler in Legacy of the Wizard... aside from that one room in Xemn's route with the endless sea of ladders and vertical block pillars, but we don't talk about that room. ;)
Now, none of this is to say I DISLIKE Dragon's Trap -- I actually quite enjoyed the game, and I found the modern remake to be an endlessly impressive work with so much love and passion crammed into it, it was honestly beautiful. I just feel like there IS another side to this story -- it's not quite the perfect shining gem this video makes it out to be -- and would urge anyone going into it to know in advance that they're getting themselves into an ambitious and MOSTLY well-realized game, but with level designs that may prove extremely frustrating to some, and which feel dated even for 1989, to say nothing of today.
I'm of the opinion that Nintendo and other game/system developers sell the game engine of a hit to help make money off of it. In the cases like Golden Axe Warrior & Neutopia, even years after, which I imagine helps recoup development costs, and/or is a bonus so the engine lives on.
It's interesting hearing you sing the praises of Wonder Boy III. I played the remaster a few years ago and had to put it down. The slippery movement, awkwardly small sword hitboxes, and the overall start-and-stop pace of gameplay really turned me off the game. By contrast I rather liked The Dynastic Hero, a remake of Wonder Boy V on pc-engine despite it sharing all the same flaws. Perhaps I should give Dragon's Trap another try, but what a first impression.
I was a little iffy on it too at first, but it's grown to be one of my favorites.
That was me when I first tried Wonder Boy In Monster World too. I think it runs everybody the wrong way at first. Eventually you either grok it, or you don't.