The coins were all it took. A sudden burst of them, twisting into the sky and then scattering along the ground. Thick coins and golden, edges wide enough to spin and spin and never fall flat. Mario has the best coins I guess, using dancing, dipping lines of them to lead and to teach. But Wonder Boy has my favourite coins, each downed baddy lobbing them into the air in greedy gouts.
Wonder Boy: Asha In Monster World is a remake of Monster World IV, a mid-1990s sequel to Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Trap – a mid-1990s sequel that never properly got released in the west at the time. I am not a Wonder Boy expert by any means, and the history of this series seems dense and tangled. What I am is a Wonder Boy enthusiast, and particularly an enthusiast for Wonder Boy 3, which seemed, when I was eleven, to be a game so beautiful and rich that the world did not fully deserve it. It looked like a platformer, and you certainly jumped and raced around. But the world erupted in all directions – fall off screen, and you would land somewhere else. To ruin this with the dry bones of genre, it looked like a platformer but it thought like an RPG. I guess you’d call it a Metroidvania now, but back then it didn’t feel like anything other than a kind of magic: a world branching off all over the place.
It’s been a decent few years for people who love that game. Firstly we got a deft and loving remake of Wonder Boy 3. Then a spiritual successor, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, an original beast that took the ideas in Wonder Boy 3 and twisted them into strange and new – but oddly harmonious – shapes. Now, we get this remake of that bona fide sequel to the original Wonder Boy 3. A cheerful lead, a middle-eastern-tinged setting, a very minimal plot to worry about – you want to be a hero, and here are some elemental dungeons to go and be a hero in. This is the game I never got to play back in the day. And now it’s here.
