'Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap' Is Everything a Remake Should Be

In 1996, I did a bad thing. Well, probably a few. But one thing, one transaction, in particular stands out. I sold my Sega Master System.

Not for anything remarkable, either. I caught the bus into Eastleigh, the town closest to my childhood home. There was a relatively newly opened pawnshop, the kind you now get on every British high street—a Cash Converters, or a version of it. Into it I walked, backpack bulging with an original model Master System, light gun, a couple of controllers and a dozen or so games. Among them, Sonic, Castle of Illusion, Operation Wolf and my absolute favorite, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap.

I got less than £40 for the lot, and immediately spent most of it in the nearby Our Price, on CD copies of Ash's 1977 and The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Compact discs were expensive, y'know. On the bus back, I guess I felt something like regret. But I was more excited to dig into the debut album from one of the most exciting new bands of the time, and this double-disc set that I'd been turned on to mainly thanks to MTV's rotation of the Chicago act's "1979".

As years passed, and I phased in and out of actively engaging with video games, I didn't really miss my old Sega—it'd been decommissioned in favor of a Mega Drive by the time I sold it, anyway, and I hoped that someone bought it for their own kids to enjoy. But, boy, did I ever miss The Dragon's Trap.

I don't know if you ever played it, when it first came out in 1989, or soon after (it landed on the Game Gear in 1992), but it was perhaps the single greatest platforming adventure game of Sega's 8-bit catalogue. I never read about it in magazines, dominated as they were by the latest software; and Wonder Boy himself was no Sonic or Mario, or even an Alex Kidd or Kirby, in terms of public visibility. I'd got the game second hand without knowing too much about it. But when it clicked with me, that was it—I played it every spare minute, exploring all of its secrets, peeking and poking into each and every one of its colorful corners.'

But now it doesn't matter if you played it around the turn of the 1990s or not. Small Parisian studio Lizardcube has remade The Dragon's Trap for contemporary consoles—Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are out now, with a PC port coming in June—and it's just, uh, just glorious.

The expected modern-day polish has been liberally applied to its sound and visuals—what was once pixelated, chunky, undeniably 8-bit is now marvelously animated, with a cute hand-drawn quality to it. And the music's ascended from bleeps to some subtle orchestration that generally keeps the drama on the down-low but nevertheless enhances the action of any given moment.

Above: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap launch trailer

That the layout of the game—the branching routes you can take through its various zones—is unchanged illustrates that the original developers at Tokyo's Westone Bit Entertainment got the design side of proceedings, its core visual language, perfect at the first time of asking. There's always something just out of reach, a door or a chest that you'll file away in your memory to come back to later, once you've "evolved" to access it.

Because, you see, the game's hook, its USP, is that you can only access some areas of the sort-of open-world map when you've adopted a certain physical form. You begin as a boy—or, for this remake, a "Wonder Girl" (the player characters here are called Hu-Man and Hu-Girl, whereas back in the day the "Wonder Boy" himself went by the name of Book)—but soon become cursed during a boss battle, and turn into a diminutive fire-belching lizard, um, man. This, you see, is the (Mecha) Dragon's Trap. As this scaly hero, you can only get so far—those narrow passageways will remain a mystery until your curse takes another turn, and you become a mouse… man.

And so it goes: Hawk-Man can fly, Piranha-Man can swim, you get the picture. As you take on each new form, new pathways open up. Think of each of our hero's guises as Link picking up a new tool to break through a wall or cross a chasm in a Zelda game—they're complete aesthetic transformations, yes, but their purpose is to facilitate progress, rather than handicap your game. And the game telegraphs where and how to use these forms, well ahead of "unlocking" them.

I don't want to steer this too heavily towards review territory, so I'll can the content description there, save for one awesome feature—with a click of the right stick and press of the right trigger, the game switches from remake sights and sounds to the squared-off-everything Sega original. And, let me tell you, there are some memories flooding back right now—about the game, the console, and so much more besides.

That's the power of artifacts so explicitly tied to moments in your life, to periods and passages of time that are long gone, forgotten except for the rare occasions when they've cause to be stirred. This Wonder Boy, however, doesn't deserve to be filed beside the regular retro revivals, releases exclusively targeted to older audiences keen to revisit a part of their past. It's a great game, in and of itself, in 2017, assessed beside the very newest platformers. Which is testament to the care Lizardcube has afforded it. The whole game resonates with love for the source material, and for helping it find a place in today's market.

It's not an RPG, but y'know, if you're looking for something that's a little bit Zelda, mixed up with some Metroid in its level structure, with upgradable gear to give you an edge over an army of cartoon nasties, this is the kind of game that'll easily fill a few afternoons. Its roots might be in the late 1980s, but such is The Dragon's Trap's immediate appeal and measured challenge—this isn't an easy game, FYI—that it feels perfectly at home almost 30 years later. It's never looked or sounded so good, either—something that definitely, disappointingly, can't be said of any popular alt-rockers of the mid-1990s.

Follow Mike on Twitter.