If there is one cult adventure game saga from the 80s and 90s that has found itself forgotten by time under the flood of the success of Zelda Fantasy Quest, it is Monster World (also known as Wonderboy ). Personally, I'm only familiar with the saga with Wonderboy 3: The Dragon's Trap on Master System, which I really liked at the time.
It is therefore with a good surprise that I welcome the recent remakes of the saga. The adventures of Asha, the heroine of the 4th opus, initially published on Megadrive being foreign to me, it is with curiosity that I launch, on my PS4, this remake developed by Inin.
From there, the nostalgia took me a little bit: to find the noise marking and driving parts that spring from enemies, and then not much else, since apart from its aspect adventure / action / platforms, the rest is different from The Dragon's Trap, from the protagonist to the story, including the game system. In this opus, Asha, a young girl decides to become a warrior and therefore goes to a tower in order to prove her courage and his abilities as tradition dictates. Very quickly, she will find herself having to save the world from a mystical and monstrous threat, helped by her sword and her new companion whom she will meet very early on her way: Pepelogoo.
The latter is a friendly creature named after its species, but distinguished by its blue color instead of the usual gold. Pepe will be very useful to progress actively or passively by interacting with the environments and with Asha. On the other hand, it will be useless in combat. A bit of a shame in terms of gameplay depth, but the latter being relatively elementary, we don't feel the need... to need them!
The game sports a very colorful visual as has already been the case with previous remakes of the series and, overall, is technically satisfactory. We are dealing with a basic and classic 2D action platform game in line with what was happening in the days of 8 and 16 bits. Asha responds to the finger and the eye and only certain rare problematic situations, but not either dramatic, deserve to be underlined.
Starting with the hitboxes. Individually, enemy hitboxes are completely satisfying; however, when attacking 2 or more enemies side by side or stacked together, the game only registers a single monster hit - usually the furthest of the two while the attack clearly hits both. This phenomenon is very disabling because it usually means that the enemy whose hitbox has not been affected will cause you irreparable damage when he should have suffered the blow.
Another problem with hitboxes, very very rare because located on the moving tracked platforms of the last "temple": the edges of these platforms can be problematic and a jump that should have ended on this platform will see your character cross it. While that in itself isn't a big deal, the fact that the majority of these platforms sit on top of rotating spikes that will irretrievably remove you from life and send you back to the last hard surface, is.
We can also note the lack of responsiveness, even some scrambles of Pepe compared to the original version, but in general, nothing dramatic either on this side.
Apart from that, the gameplay is very enjoyable, although the game is very easy and very short (the game completes in less than 6h on the highest difficulty, but it's 6h enjoyable apart from the sphinx puzzles), coming to question the quality / time / price ratio of the game probably too high for anyone who is not an absolute fan of the saga from the top of his thirty euros and dust ...
However, for those who crack on a physical version (distributed by Inin), it will also be possible to use the code included to have access to the original version of 1994 (see box), boosting a little the lifespan of all. Those who swear by the digital versions (distributed by Studioartdink) will not have this pleasure.
And you, which side are you on?
The biggest changes
Remake obliges, there are, in addition to the technical and artistic upgrade (re-orchestration of the soundtrack, change of sprites for 3D modeling, etc.), differences between the original 1994 version on Megadrive and this new version, to start with the level design.
The layout of the places is a bit different on this remake, but exploits the depth in certain places of the main city as well as for the crossings of "doors".
Backups are still done manually, but in this remake, we can do them whenever we want instead of having to go find the old sage. Note that we are now entitled to 12 save slots instead of 2.
The use of progression objects (bombs, keys, etc.) is done in real time via the press of a key, instead of having to validate it on the menus as in the past. It makes the phases of the game much more fluid.
- PlayStation 4 - €34,99 (tested version)
- Nintendo Switch - 34,99€
