Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

Lemme say i finished this game and i really wanted to love it, but beyond the amazing artstyle and animation the game suffers of one of the worst and most sluggish controls i ever experienced (and i played many retro games and remakes in my life) and that's what ruined it to me. Your character moves incredibly slow compared to everything else in the game and jumps barely enough to get across gaps, let alone when those include some kind of hazard; your attack range is almost unexistent and i think there are hitbox issues too (i clearly remember to have seen in many occasion the character sword going thorough but not registering the hit, especially when using the magic sword on star squares); and whenever you get hit you're knocked a mile away and you cannot move or do anything during the "invincibility frame", many times leading you to bounce around like a ragdoll between the hazards and the enemies on the screen. The list of problems i encountered can go on for a while but i don't wanna make a wall of text and i know there's a lot of people that love this game despite such "problems", but i'm gonna say this: It's an old game which challenge relies on handickapping the player and exploiting/abusing it's own terrible controls, and the only things that have been truly updated are the graphics and the sound. If you don't mind bad controls this game is awesome, otherwise you better spend your money on something else.

Positives: Great graphics and art Overall design is decent Negatives Fairly short, I'm an unskilled gamer but completed the game in under 4 hours Limited replay value Quirky Controls which don't always work if your timing isn't perfect All bosses are essentially the same

This game looks amazing, but sadly, plays like one from early 90's. Controls are extremely inefficient, the character slides before stopping, hitting an enemy with a sword takes an awful lot of practice and good luck avoiding being stunlocked by a boss in a corner. It's one of those cases where upgrading graphics and music is not near enough, and one should upgrade gameplay as well.

While the work done on the updated graphics and sound is commendable, it is quite less so on the rest. The whole gameplay reeks of the obnoxious: slippery feel, idiotic enemy placement, strange level design. Add to that the utter lack of checkpoint (I've always spawned back at the first village each time I died) and that strange roulette I have no idea what is does except make me lose ten seconds each time I lose all my life. I personally do not understand how the public is so keen on this one, I shouldn't have listented to the french critics maybe. :P But I say it again, it is quite a decent remake technically, it's just that the out of time gameplay makes absolutely no point today. At least to me.

I can't remember how many times I've played this game - I played the Sega Master version and the TX16 one (I've owned most all the old consoles during their time). I still play the console versions via emulators. This is a great upgrade! everything was so well thought out and planned. Only thing I didn't like so far is, all the armors, weapons, etc. are ready-available (no need to collect gems to improve your charisma for the vendors?). This makes the game much easier (I don't want easy!). But considering all the other improvements , it gets outweighed - I guess I can live without it, at least during this version.