Past meets present: Snow Bros. Wonderland
Snow Bros. is back, in 3D, and even developed by Toaplan's successor studio.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
This past March marked 30 years since Toaplan, the developers of a number of arcade staples and innovative classics, shut its doors forever. Toaplan continued to exist on in other forms, however, through successor studios like Takumi, Raizing, and Cave, which pushed the more hardcore elements of Toaplan’s arcade past to help evolve shooting games throughout the era of the arcade fighter. And, much more recently, came the formation of Tatsujin: a true successor studio founded by one of the original six members of Toaplan, Masahiro Yuge. To this point, Tatsujin had acted as the holder of all of Toaplan’s various intellectual property, and are the reason why there’s been a rise in re-releases and remakes and compilations of their work across various modern platforms. But Tatsujin has now reentered the development space, as well, and used Toaplan’s Snow Bros. to do it.
Snow Bros. is a fitting revival point for this Neo Toaplan, given that Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves was the original company’s final release: it arrived in arcades during Toaplan’s bankruptcy proceedings. Much has changed in those three decades, however, so Snow Bros. has, as well. No longer is it a 2D, single-screen platformer where the goal is to clear out all of the enemies as efficiently and quickly as possible. Instead, Snow Bros. Wonderland has been designed as a 3D platformer, with worlds and levels and multiple rooms and arenas within those levels, where the end goal for progress is now making it to the end of the stage’s exit to warp back to the map.
However, the core experience is still very much Snow Bros. — whereas mobile spin-offs for the series took advantage of popular trends on those devices, like Snow Bros. Runner, Snow Bros. Wonderland is very much a mainline game akin to the numbered originals. It just so happens to be in 3D, and comes with those kinds of trappings. Clearing a screen of demons doesn’t end the level like it used to, but is instead an objective within the levels themselves — and one that sometimes has to be completed multiple times, as more and tougher waves of foes arrive. You’re still throwing snowballs at one foe until they become a giant snowball you can kick and ride into other enemies, in the hopes of clearing them all out in one go in order to earn some huge point bonuses. You’re still trying to avoid taking damage, though, now you’ve got health since it’s not an arcade game, but an at-home one, so you can afford to take some hits. You’ll just lose your bonuses like a faster or more powerful shot if you do, and losing a life means you have to restart from the last checkpoint — at a cost of in-game currency that you earn through your end-of-level score — or go back to the stage selection to start from the beginning of the level or refit your character with abilities purchased with that same currency.
So, yes, Snow Bros. Wonderland is very different from Snow Bros. classic, but it’s also very much still Snow Bros. And, not that it should be a shocker considering Tatsujin is at the helm here, but despite the massive departures from the original format it still manages this feat, unlike the bonus levels in the remake published by Daewon Media in 2022. Those were a mess.
As I wrote in my Snow Bros. feature earlier in 2024:
Those stages don’t fit in, aesthetically or in level design, with the original ones that you played in order to unlock these. The bosses are frustrating and and lengthy bouts instead of tests of your reflexes and thinking, enemies are mostly there in huge numbers as a challenge instead of strategically placed to force a quick solution from you — they’re just very obviously not as well put together as what came 30 years prior, which is a real shame since the core product is so enjoyable, especially with a friend.
In Snow Bros. Wonderland, that’s not an issue: everything is of a piece, difficulty scales appropriately as the game introduces new mechanics and challenges that all feel of a piece — I hope you like precision platforming where you and your snowballs are being blown by the wind, or are used to temporarily cool lava, and so on — and the only bit that’s overwhelming is the end-game boss rush. Though even there the real challenge is in trying to get through it in one go, with your score intact — each boss is its own checkpoint for revival, so you don’t have to clear them all in one go in order to complete that rush. That thing with the score is true for every stage, by the way: completing levels in Snow Bros. Wonderland isn’t the challenge. Completing them without dying so that you get the most points possible, instead of having your score reset to zero, is. Oh, and don’t forget to be careful and intentional, but not slow, or else the reaper is going to appear and instant kill you when it catches you, just like in the arcade. You’ll get fair warning for this, as ominous purple waves start to appear on the borders of the screen — when you see these, get moving, or else you’re going to lose your head and score.
There are still some minor complaints, however, despite the successful transition of the original design to 3D. I’m not in love with the visual design of Nick Jr. and Tom Jr. — the sons of the heroes of the previous Snow Bros. games — but you mostly see them up close during cutscenes and after levels are completed, anyway. They switched from a “so ugly they’re cute” to “so cute they’re ugly” design, is the thing, and it bears noting. The demons you fight all have the weirdo looks of the original arcade designs, at least, only now polygonal, and hey, the snow all still looks like snow. The voice acting is a bit much sometimes — not bad, just that there’s an awful lot of it for an arcade-style multiplayer platformer. And, to round out the critiques, it feels an awful lot like a Nintendo 64- or Playstation-era 3D platformer, in ways that are mostly good, but on occasion not. The bad is mostly on the side of the platforming never feeling quite as precise to control due to some odd moments where a platform might appear, visually, as if it’s in one place in relation to another platform or object, but it’s actually closer to the foreground or background or more elevated than it seemed to be, and so on. It’s all stuff that’s mostly just an annoyance the first time you whiff a jump, though. Once you realize oh, it’s actually more over here, it’s all fine.
Which is a pretty good result, as far as complaints go: Snow Bros. Wonderland isn’t a perfect game, but it’s a fun one. It’s going to feel long [derogatory] if you compare it directly to the arcade originals, but it’s a different kind of game released to a different kind of world than those were, so adhering to that same setup wouldn’t have made sense. This is an adventure where you play a few levels here or there, or clear a world or two at a time, then stop, rather than taking it all down at once being the goal. A game where you can go replay past levels to try to best your previous high score, or find the hidden items that reveal themselves either through some secret passageways or paths, or by fulfilling secret objectives, like managing to avoid taking damage for 30 seconds in a chaotic battle, with Snow Bros. Wonderland only telling you this objective existed after you’d managed to fulfill it or fail it. It succeeds at what it is, but never more so than when you’re in multiplayer.
Snow Bros. Wonderland isn’t as fast-paced as the arcade originals, but it replaced that speed with more complicated platforming and more dangerous obstacles to overcome. And it managed to retain the difficulty level for achieving higher-level scoring of those games — again, made with arcades and quarter revenue in mind — while also translating the madness of a busy multiplayer model over. Now, instead of two players, you can play with up to four.
Multiplayer is where the game sings — Snow Bros. Wonderland is perfectly playable as a one-player experience, but it’s also clear that much of the game was designed with the impression that you’d be bringing at least one friend along for the ride. This design leads to some coordination and prioritization issues when going solo, sure, as is normal for this sort of thing, but you can also solve quite a few multitasking issues that arise by playing with a buddy. There are puzzles where, if you’re going at it solo, you need to be able to move multiple snowballs to specific switches to open up a path for you to fire off another snowball at a floating wall switch, and do all of this before those snowballs disappear, as they do after a set time. If you’ve got a friend or two, though, it’s a more cooperative experience where everyone handles part of the puzzle themselves instead of it being a challenging gauntlet for one.
Consider, too, that faster completion times means more score bonuses, and since scoring feeds into upgrades and also being able to retry a level, that’s no small thing. All of the points scored feed into the primary player’s in-game currency, but the additional players can all use the same upgrades that have been unlocked by the main player, without anyone having to fight over who gets to equip the one that doubles your health or the shotgun equivalent snowball spread shot, either. You can all gear up in the exact same way if you’d like, or have everyone assigned a different kind of assist that makes the levels a bit easier, like the one that reveals the location of hidden items, so that you all benefit from it. The aforementioned hidden items, by the way, are the source of many of these equippable skills and attacks, which is even more reason to work together to get them.
It is kind of funny that the presentation — and the ability for four-player local co-op — makes Snow Bros. Wonderland seem like it’s a game meant for younger or less experienced players, and then it requires a level of precision that those groups just might not be capable of. But hey, that strategy worked for Bubble Bobble, and the fact you can set the difficulty to provide either more or less challenge — with a higher or lower conversion rate for score to currency coming with that — helps balance things out so that one experienced player can have a good time with their kids, for instance, or said children can try the game out solo with less challenge ahead of them.
The multiplayer is local only, which might seem odd given the direction the industry has taken towards online even at the expense of couch co-op, but Snow Bros. Wonderland also feels much more like it belongs in a living room, exclusively. The kind where you’re supposed to sit next to a friend or a family member in close proximity, rather than over a headset or with your playing partner unseen and unheard. I understand anyone who sees this as a big oversight or missing feature, but it’s an evolution of an early 90s arcade game with some mid-to-late-90s design sensibilities in it, so something about making everyone gather around a single screen for to enjoy it together is fitting, at least. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I’ve got a house full of kids who appreciated being able to pick up and play as they saw me kicking snowballs into a row of demons.
Toaplan built their reputation on shooting games, and the fact that so much of the revival of their brand has come through that avenue has only reinforced this. Snow Bros. was a rarity for them, though, in that it was a non-shooting game that saw enough success to spawn a sequel and multiple ports, including a Mega Drive version that Toaplan developed themselves. That this is how Tatsujin returns to outright development is fitting, then, and it’s encouraging that, in its newness, Snow Bros. Wonderland did not forget what made the originals so fun in the first place. Instead, it built on that base in a transition to a more modern format, and came out with another enjoyable entry in the series in the process.
Snow Bros. Wonderland released on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Playstations 4 and 5 on November 28. A review copy for Nintendo Switch was provided by publisher Clear River Games.
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