It's new to me: Trip World

Trip World never released in North America, making it an expensive rarity.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Trip World is a game you might have heard of before. It’s well-regarded in some corners — Polygon listed it as one of the 30-best Game Boy games ever as part of their celebration of the handheld’s 30th birthday, for instance — but it’s more likely you know of it because of its rarity. Trip World released in Japan in November of 1992, and in Europe in 1993. It never did make its way to North America, not even as an import Virtual Console release on the 3DS, even though PAL regions did see it re-released on that service in 2012. So, you can imagine what an authentic Trip World cartridge is going for these days on the secondhand market, nearly 30 years later and without it ever being produced for one massive market.

If you have played Trip World, then you know that paying $800 or whatever is an even wilder proposition than usual. I’m not usually much for the dollars vs. playing time value proposition discussions, but Trip World will take you maybe 20 minutes to complete. And I don’t mean once you’ve put in hours mastering it, like is the case with shoot-em-ups and arcade games where a run takes 20-30 minutes once you know what you’re doing. I mean it takes 20 minutes to complete, start to finish, if you have any kind of platforming skill whatsoever. And maybe even if you do not.

Now, that might be the kind of thing that would make you balk at paying $30 for it in 1992 or whatever, but in the present-day, when your options are “live in Japan or Europe and get it as a digital download that costs 1/10th that much” or, if you don’t live in those places, you just emulate the thing for nothing, the price vs. game length isn’t really an issue. Trip World might be short, and it might be easy, but if you’re the kind of person who enjoyed Kirby’s Dream Land in spite of that Game Boy title also being both of those things, then you would probably enjoy Trip World for as long as it lasts, too.

The comparisons to Kirby do not just stop at the game’s length and difficulty, either. Trip World is also extremely cute, from its round, wide-eyed, bunny-inspired protagonist Yakopoo, to its bosses, which appear to draw from the same well of artistic inspirations that HAL did with Kirby’s own baddies. Hell, there is even a boss in Trip World that looks a little like what would happen if Kirby swallowed King Dedede, and he attacks by blowing out puffs of air at our protagonist. Video games didn’t take nearly as long to develop 30 years ago as they do today, so a game that has some visual resemblance to Kirby’s Dream Land releasing seven months after that title probably isn’t a coincidence, but hey, I’m not accusing anyone of foul play. Platformers of the day were brutal, and the intentionally easy Dream Land was a success for Nintendo, so why not release your own cute, less-brutal platformer on the same platform with some nods to what’s come before in the process?

And it’s really just “some” visual resemblance, too. The game’s backgrounds are their own thing, for sure: Trip World looks like Trip World, in that respect. And the gameplay system itself is different, as it’s based around two things: kicking, and transforming. Yakopoo’s primary attack is an extremely short-range kick, and your goal is to get the hang of the timing of kicking enemies before they harm you by crashing into you or shooting projectiles your way. As for transforming, Yakopoo has three forms: the basic one, with the kicking, as well as one where his ears become propellers so he can float over obstacles and gaps like a helicopter, and another where Yakopoo becomes a fish, making swimming a simple affair.

You can switch into these forms at any time, but they’re purposely limiting so that you don’t just float or swim through the whole game. The latter is easily done, since you can only swim where there is water, and Yakopoo will act like, well, a fish out of water when in that form and out of water. The chopper transformation is a little less obvious: if you bump into a wall or obstacle, Yakopoo careens off course and hits the ground. You aren’t damaged, but your flight is interrupted, and it’ll take some practice to get this form just right.

The disappointment is that there just isn’t that many opportunities to use these forms. They’re here, and fun whenever you get a place to utilize them, but this is a pretty straightforward platformer without much in the way of exploration. So you can go through the whole game without ever feeling the need to use the helicopter form, and there are just a few spots to deploy the fish form. Good ideas, all, but held back by a lack of space to use them.

The same goes for the power-up items found within Trip World. One lets Yakopoo swing a long tail around to attack enemies from a distance. Another allows you to throw seeds at enemies, which will turn into flowers on their heads, keeping them immobile for a time. Another turns you into a bouncing ball, which lets you platform your way through some vertical spaces with ease. All fun, but in a game that’s 20 minutes long, you only see them, and places to use them, so many times.

As a game aimed toward less-accomplished platform gamers, be they younger or just not someone who enjoys the more punishing nature of a lot of what was on the market in 1992, Trip World is a success. For the kind of gamer who barely tolerates the ease with which Kirby games can be completed, though, Trip World would probably be a nightmare. As for me, I see a game that had a lot of potential, just like Dream Land, that was probably a lot of fun on a Game Boy in the backseat of the car as your parents drove you around running errands, but was probably a little harder to stomach if you were of an age where you were paying for it yourself, and realized that it wasn’t a game that gave you a ton of reason to go back after you finished up.

The most significant fault to be had with this game is that there isn’t more of it, and I mean that both in the sense of Trip World, the game, and Trip World, the franchise. It’s going to be the thing I remember most about playing the game, just a constant “What if?” for something that probably could have been a franchise if Sunsoft hadn’t shifted its attention elsewhere after the initial release.

Kirby’s Dream Land is a lot of fun to go back to, in part because you can see the seeds of the franchise being planted, and later games saw those seeds sprouted. Trip World similarly, clearly, had room to grow, and just… did not. There is no Trip World 2, even though Sunsoft hasn’t forgotten about Yakopoo, who most recently showed up as a side character in the excellent 2019 release, Blaster Master Zero 2. There was something here, something that could have been expanded upon and elevated like in the jump from Dream Land to Adventure for Kirby, something that probably would have made Trip World more intriguing to go back to in the process. But as of yet, we haven’t seen it.

Who knows, though. Sunsoft has already revived Blaster Master, so maybe Yakopoo will inevitably get his turn after all of these years, too. And maybe that game will be the more complete, more significant adventure that the ideas contained within Trip World were crying out for back in 1992.

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