Retro Weekends Episode 34: Wonder Boy in Monster Land

This was my first experience with a Wonder Boy game and I have to say I enjoyed the game a lot. I always like adventuring elements in games and this one has that in spades. The game really does promote strict budgeting, you need to get all those items or you're never defeating that final Dragon boss, you literally need to collect everything that drops out of these creatures. Graphically the game is nice, musically... well it does what it can with what its given I guess, its adequate. Control wise there could've been improvements, pushing down to use secondary weapons was less than ideal and resulted in many wasted items. Not perfect, but very enjoyable.

This is an important release for the Master System in one of its most important series'. This is where the Wonder Boy series started to include adventuring aspects, giving you shops where you can buy items such as armour, shields and boots and such, and these are integral to the gameplay. Its a fun game, very impressive graphically for the year of release, with lots of varied boss fights with great designs. I do feel for its time its a bit linear as an adventuring game though and as a platform game the layouts are a little simplistic, but its the combination of the two genres and attention to balancing out the different aspects of the game that really raises this above the average and makes it a classic.