It's new to me: Wonder Boy in Monster Land
The game that made the relationship between Wonder Boy and Adventure Island make even less sense.
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.
While I’m a person who is very much a fan of the Wonder Boy games, and has spent a lot of time thinking about the whole Wonder Boy/Adventure Island split and the weirdness surrounding that whole thing, I had somehow never played the game that begat said weirdness in the first place. Wonder Boy in Monster Land — or Wonder Boy: Monster Land if you’re referring to the original arcade version that was initially only in Japan — is the second game in the Wonder Boy series, and it saw the eponymous Wonder Boy trade in his skateboard and prehistoric/tribal-ish setting for one of fantasy, with swords and shields and monsters and also sentient mushrooms. That’s where Wonder Boy has stayed since, while Hudson’s variation on the series, Adventure Island, kept up with the vibes they originally borrowed from the Westone original for a number of sequels across multiple platforms.
Before getting too far into Wonder Boy in Monster Land, let’s unpack what’s referenced above, just in case anyone reading is unaware. Westone Bit Entertainment (then known as Escape) developed Wonder Boy for arcades in 1986. As it ran on Sega’s propriety arcade hardware, it was an easy call for them to port it to their Master System console shortly after. The Master System was losing to the Nintendo Entertainment System in a nearly incomprehensible fashion in both Japan and North America, thanks to Nintendo’s licensing agreements with third parties that created loads of exclusives for the system in those two regions, so picking up an exclusive they would end up with the rights to made all kinds of sense.
Sega didn’t just publish Wonder Boy, but also purchased the rights to the name and the characters, making it their own. This let Westone basically sell the concept of Wonder Boy (a young man, a skateboard, lots of jumping) elsewhere, but nothing else about it: that’s how the world also ended up with Adventure Island. Hudson Soft was the purchaser of those partial, conceptual rights, and they would develop a number of Adventure Island games, often set at least a little bit on the followups Westone would develop, only island-based instead of fantasy-based. Many of these would end up on Nintendo hardware, including the original Adventure Island that, just given the console sales numbers involved, is probably a better-known game than the one it’s based on. Wonder Boy is the better game, however: it just happens to be on a system that barely anyone outside of Brazil or Europe owned.
As mentioned, Wonder Boy in Monster Land ditches the setting of the previous game, and introduces a more fantasy-based experience, as well as permanent equipment upgrades, in-game currency used to purchase said upgrades, boosts to your character’s health based on your score, and one hell of a difficult experience overall. Wonder Boy in Monster Land expects you to finish the game on a single life — there are no extra lives, not really, so once you die, it’s game over. There are revival potions you can buy if you’re lucky enough to find where they are for sale throughout the game’s 12 stages, and you begin the game gifted with one, but other than that, death is not something avoidable in Monster Land.
In the arcade version, at least, you could pop in another quarter and give it another go, but in the Master System port, you just have to start over. The game is kind of designed with this idea in mind, at least, as the real way to succeed at Wonder Boy in Monster Land is to repeatedly fail, but to learn the layout of the land while you do it, so that you can do a better job of preparing and equipping yourself for next time. There are secret doors all over the place that lead to hints or bosses that’ll hand out special equipment or shops, and there’s only so much currency you can pick up to make purchases, so you really need to know where you’re going and what for in order to be setup for success. That’s just not going to happen on your first-ever life, even if you are somehow a Wonder Boy combat savant who rarely takes damage.
The game encourages exploration to find all of these hidden doors and items and such, but also discourages it at the same time. There is a timer, and a short one, for each area you’re in within a stage. Buying something new will reset the timer, and you occasionally find little hourglass items that give you back some time, too, but for the most part, the sands of this hourglass timer are running out, always. This keeps you moving, always, and makes it so that it’s very difficult to stick in one place grinding to increase your health — your health is tied to your score, and your score goes up by defeating enemies and collecting the items they drop. You lose a full heart regardless of your defensive stats whenever the hourglass runs out of sand, so you’ll run out of hearts before you meaningfully add to your score by hanging around in one place. And since a single death is enough to end your game, it doesn’t make much sense to hang out in one place grinding for those scoring items, either, since you might just get wiped out on the next screen, anyway.
Similarly, enemies continually re-spawn, but they only drop gold the first time you defeat them, so you won’t find yourself grinding for cash to buy better upgrades, either. No, you just have to fight the enemies in front of you, with enough defensiveness in mind that you don’t take unnecessary damage by charging in and mistiming your sword strikes, but not with so much caution that you end up hurting yourself by letting the timer run down, either. It’s a balance you’ll have to learn to achieve, just like you need to learn the game’s optimal pathways and secret collecting.
Wonder Boy in Monster Land is mostly a platformer with quite a bit of combat tossed in. You’ll need to find appropriate upgrades to your equipment so that you can block incoming projectiles before slashing your sword directly in front of you, and buy stronger armor so that you can weather the hits you will inevitably take, especially against bosses whose movement patterns you guess wrong about. You find sword upgrades by fighting optional bosses — these aren’t usually secreted away, despite their optional nature, as the entrances to their lairs look a lot like those of the non-optional bosses that hold the keys to the exit of each stage. Considering even some basic enemies take three or four hits to defeat in the game’s last third — and that’s with some sword upgrades, too — you’ll absolutely need these, unless you plan on dying to some random enemy and not even one of the late-game difficult bosses.
Wonder Boy in Monster Land is good, but if you’re not the kind of person interested in a very specific style of classic platformer, it’s probably not going to do it for you. It’s very difficult, even if it doesn’t necessarily seem so at times, because of the whole one death and you lose thing. Jumps aren’t necessarily a pixel-perfect thing, but sword attacks can be, which means if you mistime or flat-out miss with a swing, you’re going to take damage you might not have been able to afford to. You get some magic and bombs to help you fight at range, but those are placed into a queue and are just worked through on a predetermined list: they aren’t something you can just select when you want, for the correct situation, and once they’re gone, they’re gone until you either luck into or purchase more. Similarly, you have some temporary weapon and defensive upgrades, as well as Wing Boots that can let you float while you jump, but since they’re temporary, acquiring them is only noticeably helpful if you happen to be in a situation where they are needed. Let me tell you how much it stinks to not realize the Wing Boots have run out as you’re attempting to use them over some lava, for instance.
While Monster Land has a more involved and complicated system than the original Wonder Boy, it is well behind the innovation of the Wonder Boys that followed it. The Dragon’s Trap added Metroid-esque elements years before Castlevania had shifted itself to a setup that made “Metroidvania” even a thing, and included character transformations into other creatures that changed the way the game played as well. There is a reason that The Dragon’s Trap cut the line and received a recent remake that earned plenty of glowing, deserved praise for both its gameplay and its look, and that remake is also why I was already familiar with (and really enjoyed) both The Dragon’s Trap and its sequel, Wonder Boy in Monster World (known in Japan by the much more confusing title of Wonder Boy V: Monster World III.) There isn’t quite as much there there in Monster Land, which was just starting out the process of adding layers to the Wonder Boy experience. The early pieces are there, and the game is enjoyable, but Wonder Boy in Monster Land is a good game, while Monster World and The Dragon’s Trap are outright classics.
If you’ve only got the time to experience a little bit of the older portions of the Wonder Boy franchise, then you’d want to play one of those two over Monster Land. If you’re something of a completionist, though, maybe looking to play all of these Wonder Boy games before you dive into 2018’s successor series, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, then Wonder Boy in Monster Land isn’t going to cause you pain or anything. It’s just not quite as fulfilling as its successors, even if it did lay much of the groundwork that helped make those games as enjoyable as they are in the first place.
If you do want to find a copy of Wonder Boy in Monster Land, it’s incredibly easy to do so. You can’t download the Virtual Console release of the original arcade version on the Wii anymore, sure, but it is available on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 stores from the same console gen, and there is currently a $7.99 Sega Ages release of the arcade original on current-day consoles, too. The arcade version is a little different than the Master System one, as stated, and it’s a shame that’s the version that’s available if for no other reason than the gaudy status bar that takes up a large portion of the side of your screen, whereas the Master System version has a much cleaner topside bar. But hey, at least you can continue in the arcade version! That’s not nothing, especially given the ways Monster Land is still very much entrenched in the styles of the time.
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