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Wonder Boy Game Review

Wonder Boy is a 1986 platform video game published by Sega and developed by Escape for the Sega Master System among other platforms. It’s a solid and fun, but flawed platformer.

This game was quite well received during its first release, but nowadays it’s not looked upon as warmly given that ‘Super Mario Bros’ was infinitely better within this genre. I personally find it quite playable and fun, though inherently problematic in a couple of areas. This was the very first game in a series that would in the future move away from this genre more toward RPG and action-adventure whereas the Nintendo take on the series called Adventure Island would remain very similar as this original game.

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The first Wonder Boy is a typical side-scrolling 2D platformer. It consists of seven areas with each area being split into four levels. The final level in each area includes a boss fight. It’s a standard structure that lacked variety and thus it felt rather repetitious. You control a caveman named Tom-Tom and you have to rescue your girlfriend that was kidnapped by an evil demon king. The plot is your standard save the princess narrative, thus it was quite uninspired, but at least the caveman protagonist lent some authenticity to the proceedings.

As you go through the levels, you can gain a stone hatchet, which you can use to throw at enemies, and you can also come across a skateboard, which makes you rush through the levels with extra speed. This dual option to play the game in either slower or faster pace made it more versatile and interesting. Of course, there are benefits and pitfalls of both approaches. The skateboard for instance is very fast, thus it is easier to jump over more distant platforms, but also much more difficult to evade enemies while on it. But it does give you an extra life, which did make it a crucial power-up.

You can also gather an angel, which gives you invincibility for a certain time period. You get all of the aforementioned power-ups by breaking these large eggs scattered throughout levels. Some of those are unpleasant surprises, thus this entire mechanic felt lifted from the first ‘Mario’ game. There is also a doll item that doubles the points collected. If you collect 28 of them, you get a bonus level.

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But the biggest element to this game that made it unique and different from other contemporary platformers is the addition of the vitality meter. It depletes after a certain period, resulting in instant death. You counter it when collecting food items scattered throughout all levels. This inclusion made the game more tactical and interesting.

Wonder Boy is visually quite monotonous. Yes, it’s not bad, but it’s far from great either. All of the levels look almost exactly the same with just the obstacles changing their positions. This made it repetitious to play and quite dull. The level design needed to have been better and the same goes for the world building, which was quite poor.

The game was still quite entertaining to me as a huge fan of classic platformers, but the lack of variety made it inherently dated. The sound is pretty good, but the score is also quite repetitive with the same theme repeated throughout. I did like the designs of the various creatures and the protagonist, but the backgrounds were far from detailed. As for the bosses, they were ludicrously easy. Every single one of them required the same tactic to beat, thus they pretty much came off as an afterthought.

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