Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 72: Wonder Boy Vs. Adventure Island

Episode Date: August 15, 2016

Ray Barnholt joins Jeremy and Bob in an attempt to make sense of the bizarre lineage of SEGA's Wonder Boy, Hudson's Adventure Island, and the pronunciation of "Westone." It's 100 minutes of confusion! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, a tortured genealogy. Hi, everyone, and welcome to Dennis Dyak's favorite podcast, Retronauts, coming to you live from San Francisco. I know you're out there. Listening, stalking. We're sending our love down the well. Down the law. It's a sentence reference.

Okay. Anyway, hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this week, we got the band back together. It's the original trio. Hooray. It's me. And I am Bob Mackie, otherwise known as Bob World Four, Mackie Boy Five. I don't even understand.

And Ray Barnhol. And it was all about the music, man. And Ray is here because he understands Wonderboy and Adventure Island. And that's what we're talking about today. Torture genealogy puts it lightly. Yeah, he understands it better than anyone else that I know. So Ray is here to walk us through, to navvy us through this hour and a half of confusion and suffering. I mean, I probably should say at the beginning, like the Wonder Boy series or franchise or whatever,

It is really just one of the most, like you said, tortured gaming genealogies ever. I mean, there's close second to like bubble bobble, perhaps, and some other stuff. Maybe I'll mention later. But yeah, this is like the one that is like so, there's so many layers. It's not just renumbering, but renaming, retitling, rejiggering. Somehow, JJ and Jeff is a distant cousin to Wonderboy, according to some people. Well, yeah, we can make the argument, perhaps. That's why I'm here.

Are we throwing bonk in there as well? well? It's part of the larger cave mania fad that we we've covered quite a few times. This has to fit into it. We did do Joe and Mac. Bonk, this Mario

world, like anything that's tropical dinosaurs was huge in the late 80s early 90s. I don't know why. It was, you know, the Kokomo effect, the Peach Boys. Came back and everyone was like oh yeah, that's where I want to be relaxing on the sands on a non-existent island with a coconut in hand.

So this really, yeah, this is a series that kind of is about that, but depending on which games you look at. Because if you look at some of the games, they stop being about tropical islands pretty quickly, but then others don't. It's hard to understand. So, hi, everyone. This is the Wonder Boy Adventure Island episode, and it's probably going to leave you very dazed and confused. But that's okay. We'll try our best.

So once upon a time, there was a company called, wait, wait, Westone. That's right. Definitively, it's Weston. I looked this up. I checked out the Japanese Wikipedia page. It is pronounced West Stone. There's confusion over it's West One or West Stone.

I think it's just nerds second-guessing themselves. Maybe. I always thought it was Westone just like because that's what it looks like to me in English. But then I remember someone was like, no, no, it's West One. The important thing is someone. Oh, no, maybe that's right. You need a second source. Yeah.

But, you know, the name Westone comes from the founder's names, their family names, Nishi and Ishi. And because I think Nishi Ishi would sound kind of goofy like an automatapeia from anime or something. like a manga sound effect splashed across the page. They decided to anglicize their last names and create a company compound name. So it is West Stone,

because Nishi means West and Ishi means stone or rock. So there you go. A little bit of trivia. Anyway, West Stone made a game called Wonderboy, and that's where our story begins. So Wonderboy originally launched in the arcades in, what, 1986? I didn't actually put dates on here for some reason. But, yeah, I'm pretty sure it was 1986. So it was part of the whole kind of post-Gost-Gosting Goblins,

post-Supero Mario Brothers platformer explosion. It was one of the first games to really come along in that, that kind of immediately after Super Mario Brothers and really the first, I think, kind of come close to hitting the same quality as Super Mario Brothers. It offered a slightly different take on things. There were some things about it that were worse than Mario, some things that were better, but it was a really strong, really strong attempt, a really strong take on that platformer concept.

And, you know, there is still a bit of the ghost and goblins about it because the protagonist, Wonderboy has his limited jump arcs. He doesn't have the fluidity and player control in motion that Mario offered. And that was, I think, one of the things that made Mario so accessible was that you didn't have to really be an exacting player. There was a room for some give and take and, you know, a little bit of freedom in there to kind of screw up a little bit and correct yourself in midair. Whereas Wonderboy was a more precise, demanding platformer. Yeah, for sure. And it was also like, you know, born in the arcade, so it's also different from Mario in that it's,

they seem to like intentionally just make it extremely linear. Yeah, every stage is like a strip, basically. There's also the implicit timer, like the hunger meter or whatever, which would go away from, would go away from Monster World, but would retain. Let's not even, yeah. Oh, man, my brain is having problems. Don't start yet, Bob, don't start.

I'm just saying, like, the timer is an important part of. We'll get to all the confusing stuff later. Right now. I'll be here to hold your hand. Right now we're looking at Wonderboy. Yeah, that's simple. It's straightforward. But that timer is important, though.

It is important. Yeah, we should talk about the timer. But what I'm saying is that Wonder Boy itself, like, let's not get, let's not get distracted by all the ephemera and all the distracting clutter. Let's just focus on Wonder Boy itself, because, like I said, it's a very simple, intuitive game. It's challenging. Like Ray said, it was an arcade game, so it was meant to be challenging. Like, it's, you know, it's a quarter-gobler. But it very, I think, conspicuously models itself after Super Mario Brothers in terms of,

of its structure. It has initially seven, but there's actually eight worlds, and each of those is broken into four stages. And at the end of each fourth stage, you know, each world, you fight a boss who is basically the same boss, but with some kind of like weird fake-out difference, kind of like when you shoot Bowser with fireballs in Spiremoremore Brothers, it's always like some enemy masquerading as Bowser until the very final Bowser. And this is kind of the same thing.

It's a lot more grisly, though, because you literally cut their heads off, right? It's like a... Knock him off Like a rocket sock a robot Yeah Yeah I mean The body still is like moving around Yeah I am

I don't know exactly What that's supposed to be I did some reading on this And a few sources say It's like masks I see I see So who knows

Yeah It could be a crane thing Maybe it was a little guy in there Could be Like a biosuit It's a bunch of snails stacked On top of each other Hmm

Snail stacks Okay Yeah so So the Do you talk totally lost me there with the snail stacks. Damn it. Well, it was a master system game, so

snails were everything. Well, it was many things. It was on mini systems. It started in the arcade, and it kind of became associated with Sega. And I'm not sure exactly why. Was it a Sega property originally? Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, distributed by them. Okay. So that's where you get into the whole like Adventure Island spinoff and everything like that. But, yeah, so it was a Sega property, published, manufacturer, distributed by Sega, developed by Westone for Sega. And I do like the Ghost and Gobbles comparison, because, you know, I don't really think

about that too much, but you're kind of right, is that, you know, you do have, in terms of the gameplay, it's like, yeah, you have a very sensitive hero who can get bumped and killed very easily, but also has, like, certain upgrades, like the skateboard, for example, is, like, almost like, not only a fun way to move around the levels, but also, like, another layer of what you might call armor. Yeah, and Wonderboy's weapons work, like, I mean, they're, they're pretty much, identical to Arthur's weapons and the arc that they follow and everything like that. I think people tend to look at Wonder Boy as Adventure Island because it's more familiar,

at least to Americans, as Adventure Island, because it was more successful, better selling that way, and say, oh, well, you know, Nintendo Platformer 8-4 structure, it's clearly based after Mario. And that is true to a degree, but, you know, there were basically three great platform action games before Wonder Boy, there was Pac-Land, there was Ghost and Goblins, and there were Super Mario Brothers. And I don't see a lot of Pac-Land in this, maybe, like, grabbing fruit, I don't know.

It's colorful. Yeah, it is colorful. I read an interview with the... It's much more, like a hybrid of Ghost and Goblins and Super Mario Brothers, in my opinion. Yeah, that's fair. There's a good interview with the creator on Hardcore Gaming 101, where we get a lot of our research from,

and I'm not saying that has a negative thing. They're great. They're amazing, and they're friends. But apparently, Wonder Boy was meant to be an auto-scrolling game, and the skateboard is a remnant of that, but I guess the creator thought an auto-scrolling game, at least the way he designed it, was too hard.

So at least it still exists in some way in the game. Yeah, I mean, if that were the case, it would be more along the lines of like a moon patrol or something or Metro Cross, like a crazy hardcore platform or auto-scroller. But I'm glad they broke away from that. I mean, you know, all these games kind of went through various iterations, despite their incredibly short development cycles. like Mario was originally going to carry a gun in Super Mario Brothers,

but they decided not to do that. But, you know, oh, man, because of that timer, though, the fruit energy timer, it's like you almost have to play it like it's on an Oscar. Yeah, you do. I mean, it's definitely a game that encourages you, encourages you to play hastily. Yeah. And we've mentioned this a few times, but basically, I think kind of the one of the biggest differences between this and Super Mario Brothers is that the things you're collecting

along the way en route. You're not gathering coins for points and for one-ups. What you're gathering are fruits and those build your stamina. You have a stamina meter at the top of the screen. It's almost like a health meter, but it just ticks down over time. And it goes pretty quickly. And every time you grab a fruit that restores one or multiple points of stamina, depending on the kind of fruit you get. That's right. Like pineapples are really potent, right? I'm trying to remember. I'm not too down. I mean, I'm not too knowledgeable. I'm not I don't know the fruit hierarchy. I know the eggplants are bad.

Are eggplants only at Adventure Island? Am I mixing these up? Yeah. The evil eggplants, yeah. It's like a different... It's like a devil or something in Wonderboy or something? Yeah. It does the same thing.

That just sort of curses you, huffers around you, and then sucks your energy faster for a minimum. What the hell is up with eggplants and video games? I did some digging on this. And apparently in Nintendo games like Wrecking Crew and Kid Icarus, it was put in because one of the guys on the staff really liked eggplants. Okay.

And that explains that. But then I read somewhere else. also that eggplants have sort of the connotation that Brussels sprouts used to in America where it was like the yucky, the yucky vegetable that you didn't want to eat if you were a kid. But now I guess Brussels sprouts have come back and they're this hipster

delicacy now. You can shave them. Oh really? Yeah. Are they fuzzy? No wonder no one like them. But yeah, that might explain eggplants. If you're out there, no, let us know. Because it's the mystery of Japanese eggplant fear. Right. So anyway, yeah, because the stamina meter

ticks down so quickly, you really have to play aggressively in order to avoid running out of stamina before the stage in or before your health runs down. What am I saying? Anyway, yeah, you have to really run quickly and you have to take a lot of risks to collect the power-ups, which I think is interesting because, you know, in a lot of platformers like Mario, you see coins in kind of weird out-of-the-way places and you're like, I don't really need to go for those. Like, it's really risky and it's going to get me 1% of a one-up, so is that worth it? But in Wonderborder boy, you see fruit in a risky place and you're like,

I probably need that because I've only got three points of stamina and I might die getting this, but I'm going to die if I don't. So the risk reward is... Less than half. Yeah. The risk reward is, I think, sharper in this game and really lends to the sense of challenge. Yeah.

So let's see. What are some other interesting tidbits about this game? Oh, yeah. It has kind of like the ratchet scrolling of Super Mario Bros. where you go forward and then you can't go backward. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's something that kind of was retained throughout some of the games, even like years later.

You would maybe be able to go back a little bit, but not too far. Although, again, because of the stamina drain, you don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time backtracking. Yeah, yeah. But sometimes, you know, you're in such a hurry that you miss something. The power-ups are all mostly kept in eggs

that are laying along the ground. Some of them are hidden. Some of them pop out, like, and you run past them, and you're like, oh, crap, and you want to go back and get them, but you can't. So you can hit a weapon and it'll, like, bonk against an invisible space, and then you jump on that space, and then the egg pops up, and there's your special bonus. Yeah, I mean, it definitely does that sort of mid-80s, like,

oh, there's all sorts of hidden invisible stuff. And it's a game that really rewards exploration of the very limited space that you're able to play in and rewards repeated play and mastery. It's very much kind of your sort of platonic ideal of the arcade platformer in a lot of ways. There's also a bit of realism thrown in in that boy or TomTom or Bach or whatever the heck his name is.

He can trip over rocks, which won't kill him. It'll remove stamina but potentially throw him into an obstacle and it'll get rid of your skateboard. Yeah, boulders that roll down the hill will kill you, but just rocks sitting in the middle of your way will not kill you. They'll just trip you up.

Which is like the opposite. It's like ghosts and goblins in the opposite direction because Arthur can get knocked back and also fall and get hit before he lands for example and so same sort of thing here just in the other direction so yeah you're running through

eight tropical islands seven tropical islands whatever and each one has kind of its not necessarily its own theme like it's always pretty tropical but I do feel like the settings the environments change up more than in previous games before that

you know ghost and goblins you had like four or five different stages and that stage had its own theme and that was pretty much set but Mario, it's pretty much like overworld, underworld, underworld, mushroom platforms, water, bridge, castle. That's about it. There wasn't a lot of super variety to Super Mario Brothers, but this game definitely has more diverse environments. And I think some pretty interesting changes up in the platform challenges.

There's, you know, like the spring stages where you're just like getting around on springs, which is really tough because of the jump physics. Like before that, you're already contending with, like, the floating platforms moving up and down or left and right a lot. Then they introduce springs, which don't move, but are still very hard to navigate. They're as annoying. You mentioned Packland. I think they're as annoying as the Springs and Packland, which that's when I just stopped playing Packland. They're more manageable in Wonderboy and Adventure Island, but still, they're just like a little off. They don't work the way they should.

Springs are definitely part of that 80s platform or tool kit. They weren't even that great in Mario Brothers, to be honest. Super Mario's platform springs always frustrate me because, I can never get the timing right. And then in lost levels, they make it worse. Yeah, God. The Super Springs. Yeah.

In Super Mario Maker, I made a stage that had a lot of springs in it and then play tested it and immediately said, no, that's a terrible idea. I'll never do this again. Yeah, but then, you know, within those stages, you also have some minor physics variations. It actually has slippery ice floors, which is something that I don't know what game

that was first introduced in, but it was pretty new at this point. I remember, you know, people playing Super Mario Brothers back in the day and talking about, I think, World 6-3, where it's all gray, and talking about the ice world, and that was like an ice world and Mario? No, Super Mario Brothers 2 has ice world. It's a bit frosty. I wouldn't call that.

Yeah. It's not quite a platform, but I was going to say maybe ice climber had the slippery mechanics on the ground at least, and that was maybe 83 or 84. Does it? Man, that's about it. That was actually 1985, early 85.

That plus the bad jumping makes that another known for me. Yeah, like the slipperiness of the jumping is enough to make me not want to pull that. You clip through, like, corners of platforms as bad. But here, yeah, it's,

Wonderboy has more of the traditional like modern style post-Mario jump and slipping physics. So, you know, there's like low friction on the ice floors. So if you can actually make it that far into the game, which is not necessarily easy because it's really tough. You'll start to see these things.

And so it has a pretty good array of ideas and challenges and enemies throughout the game. Most enemies aren't that difficult. Like, they tend to just kind of sit there. But because you're moving at such a brisk pace, that's enough to make them difficult. And then you have, you know, like the frogs that take two hits and they'll jump at you. So you have to take them out really quickly. There's that in the octopi with color variations. And yeah, they'll move differently.

or depending on how close you get or whatever. So, yeah. And by default, Wonderboy does not have a weapon. Like, you can actually play the game just running and jumping and not attacking enemies, but there are different weapons you can pick up the stone axe, the fireballs. Of course, the skateboard makes you invincible. There's a fairy name. Not super invincible.

Well, okay. It gives you a hand. It's like Sonic's rings, but it makes you move as fast as Sonic and it lets you absorb a hit. But the fairy, honey, does. make you invincible. So if you can find her, then she'll fly around behind you. And wait, is Honey and just an Adventure Island? Or what's... Well, given a name in Adventure Island. Okay. So it's not the B. The B was a continue. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I'm like, I did a bunch of research on this and already, like, the details are

confused. Getting fuzzy. All the sprites are switched out and all this stuff. If you're new to Wonderboy, Keep in mind, there are like five variants of every game almost until the end. Just getting started. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, I would say the faster, looser control of Wonderboy, kind of, you know, this being a Sega game, sort of predicted the Mario Sonic dichotomy, like five years in advance.

I mean, I love Wonder Boy's run cycle, which is just like Flintstones-ish. That's true. It's kind of stomping his feet as you run. The one thing I think this game dropped the ball on, and I generally like Wonderboy slash Monster World music. I think it's very peppy. I like the tropical stuff. I like the more fantasy stuff.

But this is basically most of the musical you'll hear in Wonder Boy 1 is this. And this is the Master System version. The arcade music is identical, and this is it. So this is the music you hear throughout, but generally most of the game, and it's basically a four-second loop. And if you're waiting for like a melody or something else, you're going to be waiting a long time because it basically...

never happens. Can we just play this through the rest of the podcast? It sounds like a bad cell phone, a ringtone lights going off somewhere. Well, it's the same as Zavius, you know? I mean, there's part of that that's just like, yeah, it's annoying, but like, again, as an arcade game, it was probably being drowned out.

That's true, yeah. Wait, you think Zavius is annoying? Well, I mean, it was, they made that music into some great remix. I don't know why, but I love that. I love that now, but I mean, average people won't get it. It's better than that, though, isn't it? It's better than that. Zevius is better than this.

It's better than this. It's better than the one monster. I'm not going to split hairs about this. I'm not going to split hairs about this. I have it. We need it on the record. But, yeah, again, it didn't need good music for what it was, but I think Adventure Island actually had some great music in it. I agree.

But we're not to Adventure Island yet. I agree. There's still so much to talk about before we get to Adventure Island. So Sega, of course, naturally ported Wonderboy to a lot of systems. They put it on the SG-1000, which was, it was such an admirable attempt. but really just, oh, man. I played that in a collection, one of the Sega Ages collections, like one of the first ones M2 developed for Sega for PlayStation 2,

and they were like, let's put everything on here. And I was like, wow, awesome. There's all this archival stuff that I never even knew about. So I played the SG-1000 version of Wonder Boy, and that made me sad. It's got the flip screen scrolling. Like, you know, MSX-1, or SG-1000 was basically the same as an MSX-1. Yeah, pretty much. It was like Calico Vision hardware, basically.

and it didn't support scrolling innately. That was a big advantage for the Famicom for the NES when it launched. So you're playing this super fast-paced, challenging platformer, and it flips from one screen to the next when you reach the edge. And it makes it so hard because they didn't really redesign the game for the change in mechanics, kind of like Twin Snakes didn't change the design of the game to account for the fact that you could aim in first person.

Do you like that diacon? But what about eternal darkness? Anyway, yeah. So, you know, it's that same kind of thing. Like, this game functions differently, but it has not been appropriately redesigned. So that's kind of like the version of Wonderboy that you play if you really hate yourself.

Yeah. Well, that is pretty much the worst port. Yeah, I mean. Everything else is pretty good. Yeah. It was 1986, 87. By that point, the SG-1000 was like, who was even buying that system?

It was one of those that they did. You know, like when they would put a Call of Duty game on Wii, just because they were like, someone wants this and will do it. Kind of like how Rise of the Tomb Raider was also on Xbox 360. Actually, that was apparently, I haven't played it, but people have said that's like an amazing rendition of the game. Like, they can't believe the Xbox 360 could do that. I don't think it's like an SG-1000 port, but it's still surprising.

Like, really? It's something, okay, I guess, sure. But the baseline release for Wonderboy at home was the Master System version. And that's a really solid conversion. It has exactly the same graphics. the arcade version, I'm not mistaken, like you... More or less, yeah. Yeah, it's a really, really close conversion.

Even has that great splash screen where Wonder Boy is looking slightly annoyed. I don't know what his expression is. It's not heroic, it's not triumphs. He's, like, just looking out of the corner of his eye, like, this again? Like, is this what we're doing now? Yeah. Right. So he's a cave boy in the tropics.

I'm sure there's logic for all this, fighting a rhinoceros god thing at the end of the stage so he can rescue a princess. But it's very much like a sort of defining game for the Master System, I think. It's probably not a system seller on the same level as Super Mario Brothers, hence the fact that Sega Master System didn't sell nearly as many units as the NES. But it is a solid platformer. It's a really good conversion to the arcade game.

They did make the game for Genesis, and I haven't played that version, but I can't imagine that it offers any real perks over... For Genesis, did they? That's what I read. I didn't... I did not see that. I don't think that exists. Maybe I'm confusing that for something else.

One thing I do want to bring up, though, is that, you know, the Wonder Boy games, after this all got renamed and rejiggered, like I was saying. But Wonder Boy almost made it out to all these platforms without being renamed, except in the Game Gear version, Sega of America, called it Revenge of Drancon, which is ridiculous because, you know, you just released this on Master's System like a few years ago. Now you need to rename it. They didn't change anything else about it. It's just a Wonder Boy on Game Gear, but it's like. Is Draincon the guy at the end? I suppose so. But you really can't name your first game revenge of something.

Yeah, yeah. Something has to have happened first. Yeah. I guess the idea was that it's like a new adventure of Wonderboy. It's the same adventure, but it's new. He's already gone through this mission on Master System, and Draincon came back and said no. Regardless.

Doing the exact same thing. Regardless, Drencon is such a dumb 80s villain name. You can't quite say Dragon. Let's not to do that. Let's make it more insidious. I like to buy a consonant. Yeah. on every Sika platform except, as you say, Game Gear.

Yes. And my internet's not working, so I can't check to see if I'm just hallucinating having read about a Genesis version. But, okay, anyway, let's assume that I was hallucinating. So that's good, because, like I said, I can't imagine that a Genesis version of the game would bring anything to the table that the Master System version didn't, like some minor graphical tweaks and maybe the status bar.

But that's about it. Yeah. Maybe they could have actually given it some music. That would have been cool. Yeah. new better music so yeah anyway that's the original Wonderboy

and from this game two amazing empires respond but we're going to stick to Wonderboy to begin with so our very first sequel is a game called Wonderboy in Monsterland this is Wonder Boy 2

it is not called Wonder Boy 2 anywhere but functionally when you start to kind of figure out what the mechanics of the naming for the series are it's good to look at this as Wonder Boy 2. Yes. So Wonder Boy 2.

Wonder Boy in Monsterland. Yeah. Also known as Bikouryman World. Uh-huh. Do you want to talk about what Bikori Man is? Okay, sure. Yeah. Well, that's the PC Engine port by Hudson.

And Bikuri Man is basically this Japanese candy from the 70s. It was just like a superhero. They still make it, don't they? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. So it started as like this chocolate that, you know, had collectible stickers with it. And Bikori Man was like this superhero character kind of thing. It was sort of the progenitor of like the super deformed.

style in a way, you know. Right, and it was called Bikuri Man. Bikuri means surprise, and each one, like each candy had some little prize or something. It was like a kind of egg. Yeah, there's like a thousand different analogs. There's a thing in there. So after that, you know, it got popular. And then years later they made, kind of crackerjackish, but with chocolate.

So better. So after that, they made an anime series or one or two. And then it just became this big long, longstanding franchise in Japan, much like a lot of other super commercial things in Japan, like On Pond Man, for example. Was Bacuri Man World literally the first PC engine game? No, no. Oh, I thought it was. Nope.

Okay. You might be thinking of Keith Courage was there's another anime-based thing in Japan. It was pretty early, though. Yes, but not the first. Right. So this renaming the game for a different platform is something that happened initially with Wonderboy, which became Adventure Island on NES. And like I said, we'll talk about that because it had a whole lot of sequels. But that was just the beginning.

Like, it happened a lot with this series. Westone was totally happy to license the game out or Sega or whoever had the rights to it were like, yeah, sure, put our prize platform series on your platform, we don't care. So, yes, you've got Bikuriamen World on PC Engine. Which is, you know, I guess sort of like Adventure Island not very changed from the original,

except that, you know, they added Bikurian characters in, like, the shops and, you know, all of the characters that were definable were changed into Buker Man. characters. And like the player characters, no one's special. It's just like you, you the player kind of thing. Right. So that was on PC Engine. Now, when the game came to TurboCD, it became the Dynastic Hero. No. No? I corrected you this before the show. Wait, what? Oh, that's the third game. Yes. I forgot to make the change in my notes. This is how difficult it is

people. It's okay. We all knew this is going to happen. Yeah. We're not going to judge anybody. That's our second mistake. Second mistake. It did become Sayuki World, though. Yes. But even sort, not even 100%. Like Sayuki World, okay, it's an NES game

made by Jalico and NMK, which explains 40% of Jalca's catalog. But yeah, it was, it's a lot like Wonderboy, I mean, Monster Land, and people like to bring it up as sort of like this port of it, but it's not completely one-to-one.

Like a lot of the stages are not exactly the same, but there are... This isn't the same game that came here as Wompom, is it? That's the sequel. Okay.

I was going to say, Wampum is like a third cousin twice removed of the Monster World family. Everything goes to Monster World in the end. We're all tied to it. I'm a variant of Monster World. Anyway, the original... I'm a Wonder Boy. This first game does have a lot of elements of the game. Like, you know, the boss battles are a lot of the same.

And when they die, they'll explode in coins and stuff. But, like, the opening stage is not exactly the same. A lot of other stages, you'll see little bits of things that look like stages from Monster Land, but not really. So it's like, it's like, it's like, somebody was designing Monster Land from memory, remaking it from memory, basically. Right, like when they have those forum threads where you're supposed to redraw a stage of a video game from memory.

Okay, that makes sense. I like that. That makes sense. But, yeah, it does borrow off from it. I don't know if it was, you know, had a licensed or otherwise, you know, blessed. Or if Jalika was just like, what if we change some of the details?

Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, it's valid, yeah. And that, of course, is big. Based on the Journey to the West, which is not a property owned by anyone, right? This was not based on, like, an adaptation of Sayuki. It was just like they're saying, okay, we can do another Famicom game about the Journey to the West. It's got to be better than Super Monkey DiBoken. Yes, for sure.

Yeah, they pick the right inspiration there. Yeah, Wonder Boy has a better soundtrack than that, but that's about it. Okay, but we are talking about Wonderboy. Wonder Boy and Monster Lion. We're still on the second game. Yes. To make this even more confusing I had a very lonely time in my life

I was temping at a bank the person who was hired to train me didn't because he was leaving so I was doing nothing at my cubicle for three weeks until I eventually quit out of boredom but I had a cell phone flip phone port of this game

that was called Super Adventure Island now get the hell out of here are you serious? Yes yes so I played through this game on a flip phone that was my initial encounter with this game but they had it completely wrong in every respect

Yes, but you were playing as Master Higgins even. They replaced the Sprite, too, yeah. Yeah, I've seen it. Isn't this messed up and crazy? How does this even work? I don't know. Oh, okay. They are intentionally spreading the seeds of confusion.

Some of the seeds of confusion amongst the Adventure Island Wonderboy fans. I really think the only video game lineage as confusing as this is like Falcom's Zanadadu Dragon Slayer series. That's the only thing that even comes close. I can't think of anything else that's more baffling than this. Yeah. Like I said, yeah, it's like that. in Bubble Bobble, which is mostly just a renaming problem.

Where does Don Doco Don fit into Bubble Bobble? Close cousin. Okay. Not part of the family train. We need to do a Bubble Bobble episode then. Okay. We'll get into that someday, but not now. Anyway, so let's actually talk about Wonder Boy in Monsterland,

aka Wonder Boy 2. Not a linear, super speedy platformer. No, it is very different. Like it has the Cave Boy still, but now he's like in the medieval times. And apparently... Jump forward in time, a few millennia? All these RPG things come from the creator

and his staff being obsessed with wizardry at the time. So they were all playing wizardry and they just wanted to do RPG stuff from that on. I did not know that. Apparently, there's a through line of all Japanese development. Yeah, basically wizardry. It all goes back to wizardry. So yeah, there is like...

It is an action RPG. It's semi-nonlinear. I wouldn't... It's not like, you know, playing Metroid or something, but there is some freedom of motion going forward and backward. So a big change from the ratchet scrolling in the first game. Like Ray said, it's very, not very fast-paced. It's pretty methodical.

You have weapons by default now. You have a sword, and you have shops that you can go to and spend money and buy upgrades, armor, weapons. Your little sprite changes as you get different stuff. In the arcade version, you literally start wearing a diaper. Yeah. And the creator, even the – I just read an interview, so I'm going to be saying all this stuff. But the creator even insists that it is a diaper. So you are like a wonder toddler.

Great. Is that an upgrade from a grass skirt? I mean, it's a little more modest, yeah. Yeah. I assume nothing is catching your waist in a grass skirt, not to get gross. And it prevents any, you know, awkward experiences if you sneeze really hard. Yeah. Of course, that's part of the great myth of the hero's journey.

He starts in a diaper. Moose forward to. It's all in Joseph Campbell. Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember that part of Beowulf. Yeah, yeah. All right. So anyway, like this seems very strange. If you only know like the master system version of Wonderboy or if you're only familiar with the series from the Adventure Island games. You're like, wait, how did it get into this RPG style game? Like it's slow pace and you're fighting snakes that explode into coins and you're spending money at shops. I don't understand. You could have called it anything else. You didn't have to use even the same blonde-haired boy sprite, you know? Yeah, they could have, but they said, no, this is this is Wonderboy. I mean, this was.

developed by Westone. Westone. I almost call it Westward. Weston. But it almost makes sense if you go back to the original arcade Wonder Boy

where there is a status bar in the menu. This is not in any of the home versions that I've played, but there is, like in the top left corner there's a status bar

and it only shows which item you're current, like which weapon you're currently using. So it's like a four item status bar. But I think if you look at that, you can start to extrapolate

like how they would take that little element, that little visual element that was forgotten in every port of Wonderboy and say, yes, what if this filled up an entire half of the screen and it had like how much money you're carrying and how much experience you have and all that stuff?

So kind of weird, but it's a pretty good game. Very much in sort of the spirit of like Popful Mail or, I don't know, Fizana do or something. Yeah, but very... Sorcerian. Yeah. Yeah, definitely getting back into that Falcom, Zanadu, Dragon Slayer thing. So, Sarian's in there somewhere.

We're all interconnected. Yep. It's big blue marble. But, yeah, like, unlike most of those games, aside from Popful Mail, it's very colorful, has very, like, bold, appealing cartoon graphics. Like, I love all the snake enemies that just kind of have, like, their pop eyes. Yeah. We probably only mentioned this in passing, but this is, like, Bob Katniff, these games,

because it's totally just the big-eyed 80s anime, super colorful. Yeah, big, fluffy hair. I mean, I love it 90s anime. too but this is like my ideal like just super cute everything is cute every possible element is a cute thing yeah it's like it's like peak Japan basically yeah but yeah like the the graphics I really love because they're these kind of like soft gently shaded graphics but then they have a nice strong black outline you didn't really see that style very much back

then it's a really good visual style helps your characters pop out from the screens but it's just a nice looking game I've never played it all the way through but I've really enjoyed what I have played of it and it's one of those that I'm like, it's on my list. I really wanted to play through all of these games all the way before doing this episode, but you know, I am a human being and only have 24 hours in my day,

so I wasn't able to. You don't play the flip phone because it plays as if you're like thousands of... That's an Adventure Island game. What are you talking about? It feels as if you're thousands of feet underwater. I mean, have you ever played one of those JavaScript games on the flip phone? Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, I covered Tokyo Game Show when those were

still happening a lot, and I would be like, oh, here's a familiar franchise and I need to play so I can write about it. But I earn $10 an hour by playing it. Nice. Yes. Thanks, Huntington Bank. So, anyway, that's, I don't really have too much to say about this game.

It's an interesting diversion or divergence, I guess, from the original Wonderboy. And trying to kind of figure out how they got from point A to point B or more like point A to to point Z is interesting. but definitely its sequel has improved quite a bit on it. But this is the beginning of, this is the second Wonderboy game, but it's the beginning of Monster World, which is kind of its own thing and kind of not.

Did Monster World annex Monster Land as part of the Monster Kingdom? It was just development. I don't know. Where is Monster Land? Property Val. We're in Monster Land, right? Wonder Boy and Monster Land. Oh, Monster Land.

Did I say Wonder Monster World? Sorry. Yeah. It's because Monster World. Oh, God, no, wait. Monster land is right above Bickoryman World in my life. Yes, so this game is a land slash world. Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm only making things more confusing. Well, then to make it even more confusing, the next game. The next game is Wonder Boy 3, Monster Lair, not Monster Land. So, but is Monster Lair part of Monster Land? Do we consider it part of the series? It's sort of like a protectorate, like the Virgin Islands. I don't think it's part of the series because, I mean, okay,

has Wonderboy in the name, but the heroes look different. Like, they look even more, they look honestly more like the current characters. Then the other Wonderboy three, the Dragon's Trap, or Dragon's Curse, depending on which version you play,

is very much in the Monster Land, Wonderboy to, God, whatever, vein. Like, it's very much a direct sequel to that. Which one are we actually going to discuss here? Let's talk about Monster, Monster layer.

Okay. There's not a lot to talk about. No, there's not. It's a shoot-em-up. It's a cute-em-up. It's like, well, they sort of went back to the well of the first game. So they made it, this time, it's basically an auto-scroller, and it's a platformer. And it's a lot, it looks a lot similar.

But, yeah, it has a lot more stuff that feels more like I shoot them up. Because you have, you know, the heroes with their swords that shoot these bullets, basically. And it's just moving, auto-scrolling through these platform-e-ish stages. I like the bosses. They're really cool. And then super big sprites, super cute, super expressive. Yeah. It's not quite parodious, which is.

what I prefer, but it's a nice, like, step in that direction. The character design is a lot more cherubic puffier than Monster Land. I would say of all the games in the Wonder Boy series and lineage, this one feels the most like a TurboGraphics game. I don't think it was ever ported at TurboGraphics, was it? Oh, was it? Okay. That's good, because it feels like it belongs there.

Like, it's very much a, like... It's like the best conservation. How did Hudson not make this game? When I see a shooter... This seems very, like, Red Hudson. Yeah, a shooter of this vintage, I think, TG16. Yeah. For sure, exactly.

But it was also ported to Genesis and started in the arcade, of course. And I really kind of discovered Wonder Boy as it was being published on virtual console, and I was writing about it for one-up. And every game that came out, I never knew what to expect. Like, this one came out, and I was like, what the hell is this? I thought I knew Wonder Boy 3. And today on this episode, we still don't. That's a really good point.

I mean, Retronauts is where I found out about these games. And I think that no one really knew about them too much until those virtual console releases, until people started playing them again. I think it was sort of forgotten, maybe not completely forgotten, but sort of this thing that not a lot of people knew about. Well, it wasn't officially released here.

Monster Lair was not. Right, okay. I met the series in general. I mean, people knew Adventure Island, but I think Monster Boy, Wonder Boy was a little... Yeah, way to go, way to go. Monster Boy?

That's something else entirely. Yes. But not that different. Yeah. But would you agree with me? I mean, I feel like virtual console gave these things so much relevance, at least in my world.

I think it was one of those things where, like, if you were a Sega kid, you ran into it eventually. And so that's how you know him. Yeah. The Sega kids definitely knew Wonderboy and some of the Wonder Boy sequels. Like Wonder Boy 3 is really, the other Wonder Boy 3

is really fondly regarded as probably the best master system game or right up there in the top tier, like the top three. But, you know, a big disadvantage to Wonderboy versus Adventure Island is that it was kind of all over the place. Like the games were, most of them in the arcade, then they stopped being in the arcade, and most of them were on, like, Master's System or Genesis, but not all of them made it here to the U.S. And some of them showed up on other platforms and different names.

It was just, you know, really kind of bizarre and mismanaged. And that does have a huge impact on a game's legacy. You know, if it's not easily accessible for people and there's not just like a single place where you can experience those games, that makes it difficult. And, you know, I think that's a big advantage of, obviously, like, Mario Games or something like Final Fantasy, where you can play every single Final Fantasy game like 1 through 10 on PlayStation Vita.

So that's really convenient. And I think only until recently we realized the power that branding has and just how confused we still are about these things, if they had just one consistent title or maybe just two consistent titles, they would have maybe more of a following than they do now. Yeah, and that's why you see, you know, series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest

doing a lot of retconning of previous localization choices to bring things more in line with kind of like the standard they've settled on. They're slowly bringing those old games back into their orbit and saying, like, let's make some sense of this. I have a good point about this. I'll save it for the other show. Okay, there needs to be, there definitely needs to be some of that going on

with Wonderboy. Sagan needs to, like, reel it back in. And, you know, they kind of did that with the Monster Boy Collection or Monster Land. World, World. God. We're going to be going mad by the end of this. They did that with the Sega Genesis Sega Ages collection.

Yes, for PlayStation 2. And then there was a later collection, maybe 2012, 2013, for like Xbox 360 and PS3. So, yeah, yeah, even as late as then it was still being celebrated in some way. Now there's no way to play these things outside of it. Two of them are on Steam. Well, you can still, you know, there's Elastrian platforms. you can go to the Wii

e-shop and buy them and play them on Wii. I meant like a modern console. Right. Yeah. I was bummed out by that. I wanted to play them on Wii U

because I guess we'll talk more about it later but these games really benefit from save states especially because checkpoints are very, very far from each other and the RPG elements don't play nice with that. So I feel like these games are very checkpoint-friendly, a safe state-friendly. Right. Okay, so there was that Wonderboy 3.

There was the arcade one that was very shoot-em-up and then there was the Sagan Master System one, which did not go to arcades and therefore felt much different in structure and scope than previous Wonder Boys. I mean, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, despite being sort of an action RPG was still, first and foremost, an arcade game.

So it was very simplistic. It was, you know, kind of like the, it was almost like a predecessor to a lot of the sort of the late 80s, early 90s, Capcom arcade action RPGs where we had an account. economy. I mean, I guess it was kind of contemporaneous with Black Tiger. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it was kind of along the same lines. It was like a little bit

exploratory, but still pretty linear. And there was an economy, but you weren't really expected to sort of, you know, be able to buy everything. You had to make hard choices because you had such limited opportunities to gain currency and everything was very expensive. Uh, Wonder Boy, three, the Dragon's Trap. Boy, had to double check that one. designed for SIGa Master System, on the other hand, is a true and proper Metroidvania game. It has, you know, the ability to save your progress. It begins, I mean, it's, it's like,

it did Castlevania Symphony of the Night 10 years early. It starts out with, like, this crazy venture into sort of like a final battle situation. And from there, the real game begins. It's just, it's really, it's ambitious and really thoughtfully designed. It's pretty challenging. there's some, you know, game design elements, like the controls are a little off, but it's still really good.

And like I said, people regard that as sort of, you know, one of the absolute top of the Sega Master System library. It's super ambitious. Just the many transformations you can undergo, how it changes, how you look, how you move special abilities. I think, like, there were things like Mega Man where you had different powers by this point, but I feel like that was a pretty bold move to incorporate a system like that in a, just a simple platformer, you know.

Yeah. So, like, officially in Japan, this is known as Monster World 2, the Dragonstrap. Oh, okay. So it's both Wonder Boy 3 and Monster World 2. Yes. Or Monster Land 2. Okay. Also, here's where it gets even worse.

So we know that Adventure Island in Japan, it's actually, Adventure Island is a translation of Bokenjima, right? Hudson ported this game to the PC engine guess what they called it in Japan they called it in English Adventure Island These fuckers will not stop

The subtitle is screw you Hudson's off Yeah Okay so they And so Adventure Island came out here As Dragon's Curse on Turbographic Question though I believe the The one that's available on Wii virtual console,

the one I own is the Master System one. Is the Turbographic TG161 better, worse, the same? Both of them came out on virtual console. Okay, I think I only own. The one I own is called the Dragon's Trap, so it's the Master System. Okay. So Dragons Curse, the TurboGraphics version. Which is not the same as the TurboCD version, which is the Dynastic Hero, right?

No, that's the next game. We're not yet too Dynastic Hero, Jeremy. He's so excited to talk about bugs. I just want to talk about Dynastic Hero. Bob's question. Thank you. It is pretty much the same game. There's some better sprite work,

but a lot of it looks much the same. It's pretty much identical, so don't worry about that. Yeah. They changed some of the text, too, to make it not sound so Wonderboyish. Yes, Dragons Curse, the Terpographics game, which is the port of Dragon's Trap. Pretty much the same game.

Not much to worry about. Okay. So anyway, the big hook for this game, like you said, is the transformations. At the beginning of the game, you play like an epilogue that is actually a prologue and you go to fight a final battle against a big dragon and he turns you into a lizard basically invincible in that section too you have all the best equipment yeah nothing can barely hurt you yeah very sympathy in night yeah that's what I said

sorry it's that's okay I was too wrapped up no I understand like there's a lot to keep in your head of this episode I'm going to mention castle but yeah it's very it very much feels like a you know a very influential game in that regard. I'm pretty sure the Shantae series was heavily influenced by this game with Shantay's ability to transform into different animals. You know, you saw this in like

a little Samson on NES many years later. Like this kind of... I mean, it's really just... It's a great game. Like, I really love it. And it's really just like... so not like the other Sega action games on Master System. You don't really think of Sega as being a company about sort of like these big, meaty, platform action adventures.

They're much more of like quick hit, big thrill, arcade games, like check out the amazing graphics, check out the really hardcore action. And this is more of a, this is more of an NES style experience. And I don't say that to like say, you know, NES experiences are better than Sega experiences. I'm just saying it is a different kind of game for the platform. There aren't a lot of games like this in Sega's library. I really like the... Oh, sorry. No, that's okay.

And I love the style of games. So I love the fact that Sega and Westone, you know, went into this and kind of explored this area with the series. I really like the whimsical incongruity of the levels and how they hook up to each other. Just like, you'll open a door and you'll be in the desert. And then there'll be no door, like, just disappear. So there's a sort of like magic quality stitching the world together.

It's not quite your... It's not quite like a location, like, in Symphony of the Night. It's more of, like, a loosely stitched patchwork of, like, ideas that are still interconnected. Okay. Yeah. So many other thoughts on this game before we move along to the Dynastic Hero? I mean, it's probably the one I've played the least, I'd say. Really?

Yeah. I know it's the one that's probably the most treasured, but, yeah. I guess I was just more into Zelda, too, I don't know. Well, the good thing is they're making a remake of this. Yes. And it looks really nice. I like the pig merchant. The pig merchant returns.

Yeah. Cat Bailey played it at Bits Summit this year and wrote a really great preview of it that really has me kind of like champing at the bit to play it. It looks great. Okay, I have to be a jerk for a second. Say I'm not fully sold on the art style. To me, it just, it is well done for sure, and I'm not going to judge that at all.

It adds a bit of Europe to a Japanese game. That sort of, you know, Western style cartoon style that is applied to it. It just kind of brings me back to, like, the doldrums of XBLA when it was just like... I'm hoping that it will be a step better than that. I do trust that for sure, but just like that feeling is like, oh, it's like Capcom's making Commando 3, but it's not in Japan and it looks like a comic book. I get what you mean, right? We're making Rocket Night, but it looks like, oh, it's made in Europe.

I looked at this, and I didn't think it looked bad. It looked different, but it gave me the same sense that I saw when I saw the Punch Out for the Wii. And Punch Out is very much rooted in, like, anime. Like, it's a fighting anime. May. And it was like a little too Western looking for my taste. But this, I think I could deal with it because I want to play a better looking version of this game. And I think this is the best one to remake for sure. That's all valid. Okay, so we've seen Wonder Boy.

We've seen Wonder Boy in Monsterland, which is not Wonder Boy 2, but it is. We've seen Wonder Boy 3, two different ones. So now we jump ahead to the next game in the series, which is Wonder Boy 5, Monster World 3. Wait, where was Monster World 2? Monster World 2 was the Japanese title of The Dragon's Trap. So that makes sense. But we kind of skipped Wonder Boy 4. and I guess

I guess because because Wonder Boy 3 was called Monster World 2 or Monster Land 2 or whatever in Japan they like in Japan they just kind of it was like a silent monster or Wonder Boy 4

you just kind of assumed but here they actually put the name Wonder Boy 3 on it so then you just jump ahead to Monster Boy or Wonder Boy 5 I assume because there were two Wonder Boy 3 they recone the second one to being Wonder Boy 4? I guess.

I don't know. We can never say it. Someone was asleep with the switch, I'm sure. To bring it back to Falcom, kind of like how there were two different E's fours. Oh, you're right. Yes. But in that case, they just said the one that we didn't make,

oh, actually, they didn't make either one of them. But they were like, this one that isn't as good as the other one, that one doesn't exist anymore. And then they just went on with Ease 5. But they didn't do that with Wonderboy. They just jump straight ahead to five. So, anyway. This is the dynasty hero, Jeremy.

This is the one that's the Donatose Hero. And this feels, this one feels a little bit like a throwback to Wonderboy in Monster Land. It doesn't build so much on Wonder Boy 3 as it does on Wonderboy in Monster Land. Yes. Someone else talked for a little while. I don't think this is as interesting in the sense of the ideas. bringing to the table as the last game, but I think it's a more refined

action RPG. Yeah, Wonder Boy 3, the Dragon's Trap, aka Dragon's Curse, AKA Adventure Island, whatever. As much as I like it, as much as like playing as cool anime animals, it's a little sloppy, a little messy. You're moving across very monotonous environments a lot of the time. This, I think, fixes a lot of those problems, and it's not as cheap either.

And it does keep a little bit of the transformation element. You don't turn into animals, but there are parts of the game where you have to shrink. and become tiny Wonder Boy, like Wonder Boy Mini Boy. And you have little helpers, too, which sort of replace your animal forms, and they do things for you. I forget what they are, though. And they localized this as the Diastic Hero for TurboCD.

The End, Episode O. It's bug theme that's based on an anime or just wants to be an anime? Not based on anything. But yeah, very anime inspired, sure. But yeah, it's another just, yeah, total conversion from Hudson. Yeah, I mean, it's the exact same game just with different sprites, right? Yeah, pretty. basically here.

The sprites are pretty cool. Yeah. I like the bug theme. I never played this version, though. Yeah. This is a really good-looking Genesis game. I think we neglected to mention that. It doesn't look like a Genesis game.

I'm not saying all Genesis games look bad, but there's a certain kind of dullness to Genesis games that I expect. This is very bright and poppy and colorful. I guess it's just what choices you make in making your graphics. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you tended to see more of a pastel look on Super NES versus like more primary, like bold colors on Genesis and this has a softer look that you more associate with with Nintendo games.

I've come to realize that Genesis games probably make better looking forests. Really? This game has some good forest work. It does, yeah. Interesting.

Mostly, my opinion. But I just think the palette makes sort of darker, but yet brighter color works for making forests. And that was the end of the Wonder Boy series. But there was still

another game. Wait a minute. Monster World lives on. Monster World just kept going. But there's no boy in this one. It's a girl. So we boycotted it, right, when it came out? Monster World Four.

That's right. The MRAs got a hold of it. They were like, not in my Wonder Boy. No girls for me. I refused to review the Wii release. I'm not going to play a Wonder Boy game starring Melissa McCarthy. I refuse. Yeah, so Wonder, sorry, Wonder Boy was gone.

It was Monster World Four. so directly a sequel to Monster World 3, which was Wonder Boy 5. But it was just MW4. That's all it was. And really one of the absolute best-looking Sega Genesis games, just really kind of reminiscent of Capcom's Aladdin games, I think. Not necessarily in like the cell animation, but the sort of Arabian Knight style, like really colorful, just fluid graphics.

It looks so good. and it's more linear than the previous Monster World games had been. It's not like just a start-to-finish action game, but it's much less exploratory and more kind of like cave story where you kind of like have sort of a... You go back to certain areas and then branch out to different places from there. Yeah. There's kind of like a central city that you go to.

That kind of extends the length of it, so... Yeah. I may not feel super exploratory, but it is kind of long. Yeah, it is. I mean, it just feels like you're going through a sort of linear adventure in a natural setting. So there is some backtracking and some, like, kind of returning to sort of your home base. It works really well. Like, it just feels like a good balance between full-on Metroidvania and, you know, something like the original Wonderboy. And the dungeons have a lot of puzzles in them, which the previous games really didn't have a whole lot of puzzles.

and a lot of them are solved by your Little Helper friend who can do a bunch of different things in the game. So that was a pretty right idea, I think. And it had great cover art. It was one of those games they used to do where it was like plasticine models. Yeah. Oh, man, I love that style.

I miss those. What's the name of her little helper? It can, like, float, it can drink water. I don't even remember. It's a really cool idea. Pololo or something? Yeah. My one problem, I bought this game on Wii

and I paid the import tax, whatever, that's in the past. But I really like the game, but I do feel like it's Dungeons Drag on a little too long because, like, I think the majority of this game is just you go into a dungeon and you're in there for about an hour. It's not a super long game, but I feel like the other games

had a lot more variety in them. Yeah, that whole Ice Palace is such a slog. That might have been where I stopped playing. I actually didn't finish this game, but I got pretty far in it. And you're right, it is gorgeous, Jeremy. And it's worth playing, too. Yeah, I think in the same way,

like Crusader Senti on Genesis is a really good knockoff of Zelda 3. Monster World 4 is, you know, exactly Zelda 2-ish, but it's a pretty good, like, you know, it's like another take on a side-scrolling Zelda, I think. And so I'd like that much better. If the Wii had proper save states, not the whole

weird honor system bookmark, I probably would have been, sorry, I probably would have beaten this game, but I feel like... Should have got the H-DV version. You're right. Wait, wait, wait, what? The PS3-3608. Oh, so those have real safe states. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Yeah, I think, again, the check-pointing

in these games is pretty bad. You're punished a lot for failing, so I feel like if you're going to play these, play the versions with safe states, and you won't get frustrated. That's me, the game baby talking. So, yeah, I mentioned Shantae in terms of the Dragon's Trap, but I feel like Shanta is kind of a combination of this game and Wonder Boy 3. Like, you put those two games together, and you have pretty much what Way Forward was going

for with their game. So there's definitely, you know, like the influence of this game was felt even if it didn't come to the U.S. until like 15 years after its initial release. And I'm glad that Sega kind of woke up one day and said, hey, maybe this old Genesis or Mega Drive game that never came to the U.S., maybe we should localize that and release him in the West. Like, that's crazy. I can't believe a publisher did that, but I'm grateful that they did.

And it happened in the era where the Wii was, I mean, everyone had one, but no one cared anymore. So it was like maybe 2010, 2011. I think it was that late. Yeah. But I mean, it was part of the package they did where they also put it on 360 and PS3. Yeah, that's right. But those systems were also fading at that point. So I don't know that necessarily a lot of people have still played this,

even though it did finally become available for easy access and consumption in the U.S. Well, they should. You should, yeah. It's really great. It ties up loose end. Does it? Well, this whole Wonderboy thing, and, you know, it was the last one not released in America, essentially.

But it doesn't tie up the loose end of whatever happened to Wonderboy. Where did he go? Why wasn't he in the final game? By the way, we didn't even touch on the couple of Wonderboy Monster World games that were redone in Brazil for the Monica, the comic book character? Oh, yeah, yeah. There were Monica games.

Go for it. That's about it, really. Another sprite change. Except they were the original Sega versions. They just changed the sprites to like this comic strip character, Monica. Right. Did some of the Alex Kid games

also get remade as Monica, or was that some other series? Alex Kid, I don't know. They changed up some of the Alex Kid games in Brazil, but I don't know if it was for Monica. It changed other cartoon characters, but yeah. Brazil has its own cottage industry of comic characters to turn other games into. So that's pretty much it for Monster World.

We survived. There is one kind of footnote, which is Monster Boy, which is not technically a sequel, but it's being made by some of the original creators, right? The original creator as blasted it and is working on it. That's right. It's made in France. So I haven't really read much about it, but it seems promising. Yeah. I mean, it was going to be a different game entirely.

It was a flying hamster too. Right, yeah. And the first flying hamster was not that great. No. When this came out, I picked up, or when they first started talking about this one, I picked up flying hamster and was like, eh, it seems like a good rough draft. But maybe this one will actually be sort of the finished version.

My only hope is that it's not over animated, sorry, over animated to the point that it disrupts with the gameplay, disrupts the gameplay, because there's a lot of older games where it's like Earthworm Gym looks great and Aladdin for Genesis look great, but they're hard to play because they just try to squeeze in animations into these very minute movements. They need to prioritize reaction versus animation. Like, they need more interrupts and opportunities for players to cancel out of animations. But I do think the art style is more faithful than the Dragon's Trap remake.

I mean, as far as like, you know, more Japanese-style Well, yeah, I mean, this is more of like a pixel retro-style game as opposed to like the hand-drawn flash animation. They're going for two different things. They are. I'm just saying what I like better. I don't disagree. I'm hoping that it turns out well.

But anyway, that's Wonderboy. Next, we'll talk about Adventure Island. Thank you. And you're listening to the best adult contemporary hits on KR&T Retronauts Radio. I feel like my teeth are about to get drilled. Oh, you've got to see this animation, though. It's Tokyo movie Shincha or whatever their name is. TMS, good stuff.

What are we playing exactly? That's the, apparently the theme to the anime, Bugtee Honey, which is a spinoff of Adventure Island, which is a spinoff of Wonder Boy. So we've just spun around so many times that I'm dizzy and about to throw up. Ray suggested that I look this up. Is this a movie or is a TV show? TV series. This is some good animation. Many episodes.

You can get the box set right now. Really? Is it like a million dollars? I mean, so Japanese video premiums, yeah. It's a Japanese bit. That might be the only video game-related music that sounds exactly like MacArthur Park, though. Upon watching this animation... I want to see Dumbledore singing that.

Upon watching this animation, Master Higgins' giant underbite finally makes sense to me. He has a weird, like, Popeye thing going on and in the games with his little sprite. Yeah. Now, the real person sort of does, too. Right. So let's talk about that real person and the games. Okay, so Adventure Island. Westone created Wonderboy.

for Sega. And apparently Hudson was like, that game's really cool and we'd like to publish it. So they said, can we buy the rights from you? And Weston was like, well,

Sega owns it. So they were like, well, we've got this guy who pushes buttons really fast. We can make a sprite of him as the hero. And I mean,

I don't know exactly if that's how it went, but let's just pretend this is console wars and I'm making shit up. Oh my God. Hey, that's historical fiction.

It's legal. It's legal. Well, mine is. Mine is, too, so there you go. You have to get him to sign off on it. The president of Hudson had made a while I smile, as I suggested. I'm pretty sure Zach Gallifanakis is going to option this podcast for a movie. So it's all good.

I want to be played by J.D. Qualls. I want to be played by Melissa McCarthy. It's a different direction. It is. It's a new direction for Retronauts. So anyway, I don't know exactly how it happened, but Hudson published a game for NES called Hudson's Adventure Island, which was exactly Wonder Boy with some slight changes to some of the sprites and music, actual music this time. But otherwise, it's as far as I know exactly the same game.

Are there any differences? I mean, you'd have to go pretty deep, I think, but I think, yeah. I'll tell you one of the differences, which makes me chuckle. Instead of there being dolls you collect, you collect pots, and when you beat level it says pot bonus. And I always giggle at that because I'm a child. Is it worth 420? It should be. So Wonderboy himself was replaced by a guy who in America was called Master Higgins.

In Japan was called Takahashi Meijing, who of course is, what's his proper name? Toshuuki Takashi. Okay. I don't think I actually knew that. And he was kind of like, he was like a human mascot character for Hudson back in the... Yeah, he's like Hudson's analog to Howard Phillips. basically. He was this guy who kind of started at the company doing mid to low level work, and then he eventually got, you know, marketing jobs. And he turned out to be good at the games

that they were making. And he could concentrate his muscles and tap the buttons really fast before there was a lot of turbo controllers back then. And so he just became, yeah, the face of the company. How many button presses in a second? Was it 30 or 60 or? 16 in a second. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And that was Star Soldier. He was a claim to fame, I think. Pretty much, yes. To Star Soldier came up before me. Which, by the way, was Hudson making a sequel to a techno game. Right.

What are you doing? That's an entirely different story. I don't even want to get into that today. Just saying, for the record. The lineage of the Star Soldier series is its own episode. I'm glad Hudson had a template to work from because I think their previous game, or maybe it came after was Mickey Mouse Capade or just Mickey Mouse in Japan. It came after, okay.

Hudson's internally developed games at this point were not that good. I mean, the most recent, like, the most immediate predecessor to Adventure Island, I think, might have been Challenger, which was, uh, it was, it was ambitious. People remember fondly. They do. It's, yeah, it's got that, that kind of like, this game's terrible, but I still love it. Yeah. Not the Hudson stuff. Kind of like Spalunker.

Yeah. Um, I mean, we could, we could talk about Challenger in some other episode, but it was like, it was a very ambitious game. We might. I don't know. It's interesting to me. Okay. Like, your Indiana Jones fighting.

along an express train to rescue Princess Leia from Darth Vader, and then it goes into a top-down action adventure. But it's not Adventure Island. So one major difference between this and Wonder Boy is that in Wonder Boy, you need to find the seven dolls in each world to access the final eighth level. And in Adventure Island, it doesn't matter.

That eighth level will always be there for you in the end. Okay, that makes sense. That was why I was, yeah, when I was putting together notes for this, I was like, wait, this game has eight worlds, but all the references I'm finding for Wonder Boy, say, seven. Okay. That was something that was not clear. Yes.

So because Takashi just was, you know, like we said, the face of the company, they sort of, you know, added his endorsements as much as that means anything to a lot of Hudson games. So they just turned him into a character when Wonder Boy came along. Right. I mean, the closest thing we ever had in America was Nestor's Funky Bowling, which isn't the same ball. Right, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, so and also the, a lot of the covers for the Adventure Island games in Japan were painted by Susumu Matsu. Matsushita, the guy who does

Famitsu covers. He has a very distinctive style. Airbrush style. And would then do the Maximo games, which were based on Ghost and Goblins, which has a spiritual connection to this series. It's all circular. I do love the cover art to this.

I think they retain the same art for the American version. They did, yeah, distinctly. All these, like, creatures and stuff around Master Higgins, really cool. And, like, European versions of the EnS games got original Matsushita work. Cool. Oh, I didn't know that.

That's cool. So, yeah, so anyway, Adventure Island, exactly the same as Wonder Boy. And then they immediately followed that up with a sequel that is like nothing else in this entire lineage, which is Bug to Tay Honey. Yeah.

And I don't even understand this game. I didn't have a chance to play it. I've watched a bunch of videos and sat there thinking, I wish I understood this. I need to play it, but I didn't have a chance. It's a classic license game overreaching, basically. It's just a mishmash of different types of gameplay.

So because the anime is about, you know, the fairy from Adventure Island, Honey, she's like, you know, not quite sex pot, but you know, the fairy character. Well, in Adventure Island, she does come from pots. Yeah, okay.

So, there you go. She's literally a set of pot. I guess she's sexy in the tinkerbell kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. Some people are really into that. You can't pursue that, but it's whatever. I'm not going to.

Some guys are into it. So tell me, stop me if you heard this before. That anime is about these kids who enter the video game world. And so when they die in there. Yeah. So if they die in that,

that world they die in real life versus... Are they part of a rock band? That was the final episode, yes. But, yeah, Takashi Meijing is there, you know, this caricature of him. So he's friends with honey, and he has all these other friends and stuff. So the game, you start playing, you start by playing as honey in these sorts of, you know, it's not quite a platformer because he's flying around all the place. It's kind of like, what's that other Nias game?

I think Chubby Cherub in a way plays a little bit like that. Oh, that's not a good precedent. No, but it's the same sort of look to it. You're flying around and shooting things. then you finish the level and then there's like these Archanoid type stages as well.

Yeah, those are like where do those even come from? It's not quite bonus stages. Does that have anything to do with the anime at all? No, the anime did have some game type references to it.

There's like a random bomber man who shows up in one after that. It was a Scott Pilgrim of its day. Yeah. But after that, yeah, it progresses then to more traditional platforming stages with the Takashi Meiji

character. But even But it's just like the past stages, but without flying, you're just running and jumping. So it doesn't really play much like Adventure Island anyway. And, yeah, it's just kind of a rickety game. Yeah, it seems very awkward and very not polished. Yeah. In the way that so many Famicom games of that era were.

And like we just said, the early Hudson stuff. Like, yeah, they were not quite breaking out yet. Yeah. Maybe they just didn't put their best foot forward on Famicom because their heart was in the turbo and the PC engine. Well, maybe, but they're also pretty closely tied to the Famicom to begin with. That's true. They made, like, Family Basic and stuff. So.

It's a mystery. Yeah. No one knows for sure. Anyway, it's just a licensed game. I think we need to just tuck it away as that for right now. So basically the weirdest offshoot of this entire strange episode. Yeah. I mean, compared to Wonderboy?

Yeah. This is nothing. Yeah, but things get back to normal with Adventure Island 2. And by normal, I mean exactly the same as Wonderboy. Yeah. I implore our listeners, go out and look at the Adventure Island 2, U.S. box art. It is almost as bad as Mega Man 1's box art. And maybe I can just show Jeremy.

That's what it looks like. I mean, no perspective. I mean, Ray, you've seen this before, right? Yeah. And compared to the Japanese box art, same artist, just extravagant, glorious. Everything is rendered well. But it's like medieval art. Like, before they discovered perspective.

It's like, have you ever seen those medieval drawings of, like, babies? They're all just these hideous mutants. I mean, Master Higgins looks like one of those weird, like, devil babies. So basically the cover art is a metaphor for hell and this is one of the sins that you'll commit. Anyway, so where the Wonderboy games just went all over the place. That was Westone basically saying like, let's get creative, let's get weird, let's go exploratory.

Hudson was just like, let's just make some direct sequels. Let's just make games that are exactly like the first Adventure Island. And Adventure Island, too, is. I mean, it looks nicer. It has some more diverse game elements to it. But it's still very much, like, this is a direct sequel. Yeah, if you have the timer, you still have to collect fruit. It came, was Adventure Island 1, 86 or 87?

Adventure Island One actually came to the U.S. in 88. Okay. It was weirdly late. I believe the original was 86. Okay, this is a 1990 game. Yeah. And as you put in your notes, like a first. dinosaur writing predates Mario World?

It does. It predates Super Mario World by about six or seven months, I think. This is why I love this game as a kid, because there are four different dinosaurs, and I think two of them are basically the same. They just fire projectiles on different levels, but it's so cool to see, like, to be able to write a dinosaur at this point in time was amazing. Yeah, I mean, you could swim around on a place, plesiosaur, how are you pronounced it? Something like that, yeah. And that made swimming much easier, which is good because swimming levels are always the

worst. But yeah, like, it's, it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, Nintendo wanted to let Mario ride a dinosaur from the very start, and Hudson did it first. They figured it out, yeah. This game was, uh, you know, totally derivative of Super Mario Brothers, but by God, they beat Mario in one respect. A different fat guy in a hat. Yeah.

Riding a different dinosaur. I think, four different dinosaurs. Adventure Island Island one is kind of a little sloppy, a little, kind of loose. I feel like everything is very tight in two and three and four, uh, from, from, from this point on. I feel like they are very, very good, like B, B plus platformers. Yeah.

The biggest problem with this game, I mean, assuming you can get past the fact that, hey, in 1990, they're making a game that plays a lot like a 1986 platformer. That's okay. But, like, the biggest problem for me

and the reason I've never finished this game is because it's really repetitive. Like, it's... It is. It kind of drops the, you know, the 8-4 structure of the first game has a world map, and it just, like,

I just feel like it just goes on and on and all the levels kind of feel the same. I mean, the first Adventure Island, I felt like every, not every level, but there was a lot of variety in the level designs and styles. This game feels a lot more, like, if you watch a YouTube video of it,

like I was just kind of catching up on this to make sure that I wasn't forgetting anything, like you scrub through and you're like, wait, didn't I just, wasn't I just at this part? Like there's, you know, the spring levels and those show up like five or six times. Every time I fast forwarded, I was like, oh, it's that same spring level.

Well, the thing is, I think you can say the same thing about the first game, but I think what you might be getting at is just that they don't just change up the formations that much. Like they are probably just, you know, copy and pasting pieces of that level design. Right, which you totally expected in, you know, 1985, 86, but... No, no, I'm saying that, they did that for the second game. Right. In the first game, they at least tried to, you know, actually ramp up the difficulty and add more

complexity to stages that otherwise looked pretty much the same. Right, right. Yeah, and that's what I'm saying is like, you expected copy. copy pasting in kind of like the sort of older generation of NES games. But by the time Adventure Island 2 came out, just felt a little flimsy. One slightly more advanced thing in this game that I feel like is a one-up on Mario World, which I think is way better, and I like it a lot more. But you can store items more than one item.

Let's say you finish a stage with a dinosaur. You can choose to put that dinosaur in storage, along with a lot of other ones. So if a particular stage is difficult, you can... Keep them in these little custom shaving cream. Yes, that that's... Get them through security. subtle way to do it. But yeah, you can put any kind of weapon or dinosaur in storage and you can have a great

amount of these in storage for later levels, which is really cool. I mean, Mario 3, I guess that's sort of more like a takeoff of Mario 3 than, yeah. So maybe it's not super innovative, but... This came out around the same time as Mario 3 in Japan. They were both 88 games, weren't they? Oh, really? I don't think so.

No. I don't have to check. But it does have that nice Mario 3 touch also at the bonus stages where you can rack out more items and then store those away. So yeah, I like that. Oh, in fact, that was wrong. This is a 1991 game apparently. Yeah, and it was 91 in Japan and in America. Yeah, like I said, it came out about six months before Super Mario World in Japan, I think. Or no, I guess if it was 91, it came out after this. So you can ignore everything we said about it predating Mario World. Oh, man, I got my dates all wrong. It's okay. I think somewhere else I read it said 90, but I'm seeing 91 in a lot of places. Well, the title screen says 90, and I think that means it was being made in 90. No wonder, no wonder. Yeah, I was playing it this morning, so that's probably why I walked away thinking it was 90. It was probably meant to be like a Christmas release or something, probably, which would make sense. Nevertheless, I do like two and three the most, and I will not deny that that's because of nostalgia.

Okay, that's fair. I mean, this game does have some nice elements. The bosses are a lot more varied, and there's a kind of interesting element where if you lose to the boss, then it will go to a different level and you'll have to go track it down and find it. That's also like Mario 3. I think there was a lot of Mario 3 rubbing off on this game. Like the airships will move. Yeah, I forgot about that. Mario 3.

Yeah. But, you know, I also like the art style a lot better. I mean, it's really so 90s and very angular sort of like, yeah. Yeah, it's like, totally surf design a bit. It's like, yeah, the video game equivalent of Memphis style. Do you mean, right? Are you talking about three? Two and three.

Yeah. Three really takes it to, like, the ultimate extreme. Yes. It's like polygons before polygons. I think it loses a little bit of the anime cuteness I like, but I do appreciate the more cohesive style. Well, we can just roll right into. Adventure Island three because it's so much like Adventure Island

2. Yeah, yeah. It's like an invention pack. It does change the visual style. The backgrounds become extremely angular, especially at the beginning of the game. But the characters, I think, are actually cutter. Like, they're more, they're like more cuddly. They're almost like the Funco Pop versions. Yeah, no, those are hideous. Those are. Let's say they're the Nendroids, right? Unfortunately, yeah, it's right. I will not be on this podcast. Yeah, there's a new dinosaur that has, I guess, yeah, even bigger eyes. Is that the one that's sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog? Yeah, the green one. Definitely, I felt like they wanted to have like a sonic-like ability in this game.

Sure, why not? So what's the date on Adventure Island 3? I think it might be 92 or 93, but you can keep talking it on. I don't know why I didn't put the dates down on these notes. Like, these are the longest notes I've ever put together for any retronauts episode and for good reason. But I didn't put the date to the games. Like, I guess I thought I'd remember that. It's enough work just trying to memorize the tree.

Okay. So, yeah. So, yeah, we're getting into like the very late NES era, but it's still like this kind of simple, very basic-looking platformer. But I just appreciate it also They made Master Higgins look cuter So I mean I appreciate it And yes, three is identical to two Otherwise besides that angular art style

And speaking of TNC surf design This game features not only the skateboard But also a surfboard So just getting all those late 80s, early 90s Grunge hasn't hit yet But there are also aliens in this game that's a key plot point aliens are aliens

and there are more secrets and kind of adventure elements in this game it's not an exploratory platformer but you know starting with Adventure Island 2 the stages started to become less of like run left to right and more you know they started adding vertical stages and

adding some some you know some variety to the platforms you know some at a depth I guess you say like when you're in a vertical stage you kind of can scroll left and right a little bit. And this one takes that even further. There are secrets hidden with, like,

there's treasure boxes and you have to find keys to collect them. There are more, many, many more weapons you can use and a more evolved and robust inventory system. So it feels very much like, you know, the same as before, but just with more stuff added. Like I think if these games came out, you know, maybe two years apart from each other, like starting 86, 88, 98, 90,

90, 92, it might have felt like a more natural, like, oh, yeah, these are, these are timely and relevant. I think the delay and localization. Well, when you're eight or nine like me, like I was then, like, yeah, that's long enough. Feels enough like an interview. I think at this point, I was not super discriminatory

against SNES versus NES. They were both looked up to my TV, so I had an SNES, but I also wanted Kirby's adventure, and I was renting these games as well. So, it was nice to have, like, additional software while the S&ES was getting off the ground. Yeah, and I'm one of those jerks who, I got a Super NES in 1992,

and I was like, that's it for the NES, goodbye. Threw it right to the fire. Basically, yeah. Through the equivalent, I sold it to Funco Land or something, I don't know, all my games. Fire would have been a better choice. So let me add, I guess, cap this off. Hudson also had their own Wonderboy-esque

insane numbering scheme that happened to this because the Game Boy port. The Game Boy version of Adventure Island 2, it's just called Adventure Island. And Adventure Island 2 on Game Boy is Adventure Island 3. Oh, my God. They will not stop. Someone at Hudson and someone at West 1. It's a conspiracy.

I think they're afraid of success and they're just sabotaging themselves every step of the way. West Stone. All right. And so then keeping in the bi-annual release schedule, we finally get to Adventure Island 4, or rather Booking Jima 4 because it never came to the U.S., which is a shame because this was. finally the game that was like, let's break out of the linearity, let's do

something, you know. Yeah. Like a game that would have been really very timely and very much in fashion in about 1988. Yeah. On NES, they finally brought it out in 1994. It was the final official Famicom release ever. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. So it's pretty expensive. We got Wario's

Woods and they got this. Okay. I want to trade. Yeah. It's I haven't played all the way through this one either, but I did play a fan translation quite a ways. Oh yeah. It's really good. It's been fan-translated for quite some time, and I think it even carries the stylized graphics of 3-2 and even further points.

Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, I can see that. The harsh shadowing. Yeah. Just the black hadling. Eric Larson's shadowing. It's an interesting game. It's, yeah, just kind of like this weird video game relic.

Like, I can't believe that this game came out when it did. Yeah, I had really no idea about it until, you know, it was pirated and showed him, you know, in the later 90s when everybody was getting hyped about emulator. It's like, they made a four, like, research. So, like, I noticed that Master Higgins is even smaller and cuter in four. It's like a portrait of Dorian Gray thing, but in reverse. Like, as the sprite of him gets cuter, the real Takahashi gets uglier and bigger. Possibly.

I mean, that's just the, the, you know, the march towards death. He does on superannias, yeah, which is ironic. So, yeah, it's been a long time since I've played this. Do either of you want to say a little more about adventure on core? I can, yeah. It is fully non-linear, like you were saying. Yeah, for sure. You very sort of Metroid progression.

You get new items to bust down a barrier to lead you into the next area, and then that cycle sort of repeats. It's not as long as a Metroid, I think, unless you're speed running. But it is a capable game. It does basically take all that stuff that was in those previous adventure islands and all the sorts of ice worlds and desert worlds and those stuff. It just compresses it into this smaller but interconnected. Right.

It gives it more like a sense of place. opposed to just a series of levels. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's pretty much the gimmick. And once again, you're rescuing a cave girl. Yeah. Tina, your love to be.

Plus they change. Okay, so that's it for the Famicom games, NES games. Pretty straightforward progression, I think. Oh, yeah. Each game kind of builds on the previous. Yeah, it makes so much more sense. And then there's Kiki Inland or Kiki Island, which came out for Gamete. Is it Game Mate or Gamete?

I say Game Mate. Okay, Game Mate. And I know nothing about this game, and apparently that's because no information exists about it in the world. I mean, I only knew it because of you and your notes, basically. I mean, I knew what the Game Mate was, and I know that it had... is a crappy knockoff Chinese Game Boy thing, but I did not know about this game. And then I looked it up a little bit more,

and there is, game-made stuff is emulated, but this game has not been dumped as a ROM yet. People do own it, but it hasn't showed up widely yet. Unfortunately, I have no idea. A playground in Germany has the SEO on this, so I can't really find anything about it. So Jeremy, allegedly, it is just Adventure Island or what? Wonder Boy?

I mean, I looked for images of it, and I can't even find screenshots. Well, I don't even know how you came upon it. It was listed on one of the lists of games that might be like Wonder Boy or what? Yeah, no, I mean, it's, I don't even know. Like, I just know that supposedly this game is a Adventure Island game on Game Mate. All right. Well, I know there's people out there who own a game mate, so tell us, show us, take some damn photos.

Yeah, we're crowdsourcing this element. You don't have to dump it. Just give me a picture. So anyway, Adventure Island then made this. transition to the 16-bit world in visual style and platforms, but maybe not so much in gameplay. Like, Super Adventure Island

is, uh, well, actually, before that, there was, um, well, did New Adventure Island come before or after Super Adventure Island? Okay. So Super Adventure Island actually came out before Bokinima 4. Yeah.

So, it's an early Super N.S. game. Yeah. So, and it reflects that. Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's, It's like a shorter, prettier version of the original Adventure Island. It doesn't add pretty much any of the elements of Adventure Island two or three. There's no animal friends. It reverts to the fruit stamina system. It even has mind card stages.

How shocking. There's a lot of stuff I like about this game, but I think it makes up the problem a lot of games doing when they're playing with new technology. In this game, especially, the sprites are too big, and you don't have a pretty big field of view, and there are constantly things coming on from the side of the side of the, the screen, so I thought maybe it was too hard for me as a kid, and I tried playing it again today, and I'm like, no, it's just a really hard game. And maybe they wanted you to go

into this thinking, like, I played one, two, three, and four, now I'm ready for the harder one or whatever. That could be the philosophy they wanted you to approach this with, but I think it's just too hard off the bat. Like I said in my notes, it's really reminiscent of Mega Man 7 with bigger, lusher, more beautiful graphics that also kind of crimp gameplay a bit. Yeah, for sure. It's more detailed, but feels a little bit like a throwback in a lot of ways. This game does not deserve the amazing soundtrack you got. That's true. By Yuzo Koshiro.

Yes. It's a mix of salsa or maybe Mambo and early R&B. So it's like you've got your everybody dance now sort of beats with like a whistle blowing in their background. Pinch of acid jazz. Yeah. It's like it's this crazy like genre mashup that I only really. It has nothing to do with a cave boy in the tropics. That that mombo salsa music is just like it's hinted at in the background but it's overtaken by the dance music.

It really feels like streets of rage, like a tropical streets of rage. Yeah. And only recently have I begun to appreciate this. Sorry, I didn't mean to slow your fire ray. Jungle paths of rage. No. I was going to say streets of rage goes calypso. Yes.

And there are, okay, there are probably like 19 hipster genres based on this kind of mashup to begin with. Please let me know. It'll be called like Adventure House or like a trap island or something. I don't know. All right. And my favorite thing about this game is that the final battle, the final boss is basically like a giant pink elephant. It's like you're fighting Ganesh or something. Yeah.

You're fighting like an alcohol withdrawal hallucination. It is literally a Super Mario Bros. 3 final battle ripoff. Like, it's exactly the same. You have to trick Ganesh or whatever to falling through the floor. There's something like that. I watched a play-through of Venture Island One for this podcast. And the final boss of that game, after you knock his head off, you have to lure him into a pit. You jump up to where Tina is and he falls into the pit.

So it's sort of like that in a way, right? Right. I mean, he's not breaking through blocks. Maybe they're just calling back to that as well. Could be. Yeah. Could be. But yeah, like I said, very kind of a regressive game, but it looks nice and great soundtrack. And then there's New Adventure Island, which, Ray, I think that's your favorite, right? I would say so, yeah. Or right up there. And I just played that because it just came out on Wii Virtual, Wii Virtual Console and got a refresher on it. Yeah. Yeah, it's really well done. It's a favorite 16-bit one, yeah.

It's, it is very much, like, in the classic Adventure Island vein, not a lot of complexity to it. but it's just really well done it has great tight controls it looks nice it sounds good um yeah i mean the sprites are bigger but in a more sensible proportion so it's just like you know kind of like it doesn't be compromising yeah not taller necessarily so yeah it works out a bit better you were you were writing also that it's like new super margar brothers in a way it's just taking the elements that we all kind of remembered from the first game and sort of like upgrading it before it makes sense. Not into polygons, but just into

a nicer looking version. More candy-like. Yeah, so that's good. I mean, Hudson kind of did that also with their half-enhanced port of Jackie Chan's action kung fu. Like this and New Adventure Island came out the same time, so it's like, yeah, enhanced

versions. We should kind of speed up through the rest of these because we're almost done. Okay. And then finally, really the last game in the series for all intents and purposes. One that counts, yeah. Yeah, it was Super Adventure Island, too, which is where Adventure Island

finally kind of said, let's do the Wonderboy thing. Yeah. And turned into like a full action RPG. Finally, they met together in heaven. At the very end, here at the end of all things, we meet again.

Doesn't it slightly resemble Joe and Mac too? A little bit. Yeah, that's what I always confuse these two games, even though they're different. Yeah, I mean, this game is like, if I wanted to compare it to another game in terms of like, structure and design, I'd probably compare it to Demon's Crest.

Yeah, that makes sense. It has that same, like, kind of non-linear style combined by an overworld map where you're gaining different powers and abilities that help you get through different areas. It really feels heavily influenced by the Gargoyles Quest series, which is, I can't bring it back. Oh, you know, actually, no, ghost and goblins. Uh-huh. Yeah, so there we go. There we go.

Yeah. That's right. Of course you can bring it back. It's all connected. The grand theory continues. The Great Conspiracy. I was never into this one, though. I mean, for one thing, it looks drab.

Like, they kind of did the bad thing that a lot of Super Nintendo games did. Is that, okay, this system has 32,000 colors. We're going to make things look more earthy. But no, don't do that. Not with Adventure Island. It was just getting us ready for the HD generation. I guess so, but God, it doesn't work.

Yeah, it doesn't really pop like the other games used to. Like, Master Higgins almost has, like, annoyed face. he does get significantly uglier with the S&ES games I mean it's a detailed sprite in Super Adventure Island but it's a hard one to look at

for long like I'm really this guy for the next few hours all right Well the nice thing about this one is that his sprite changes constantly Kind of like some of the Wonderboy games Like every piece of equipment you get It changes his sprite

To become, to reflect what he's equipped with Which you didn't really see in a lot of games back then So especially Super NES Because it required more assets, more time So there is that nice element I don't know I like this one even if it isn't

quite as nice looking I know yeah a lot of people like it it's very much my my kind of game so it's definitely one of my favorites and feels

you know really like a proper sequel to Bokenjima 4 like it feels like they kind of you know just did the proper

like what if we took this game and made it a 16 bit version yeah so I'm a big fan but this game is really expensive

now isn't it what super NES game isn't yeah I don't know, balls. A lot of the Hudson supernance games are like that. Also, like, Hagané is like the most expensive superanus game. Yikes.

U.S. release is really rare. But, yeah. People do enjoy it, so maybe that helps build the value of it. And that was pretty much the end of, I guess at this point, both Wonderboy and Adventure Island. They both just kind of stopped evolving and changing. And we saw a lot of remakes and rehashes. and I guess the most recent Adventure Island game was Adventure Island the beginning.

On Wiiware. Yeah, and it sure does look like a Wiiware game. Well, we skipped over also the GameCube remake, GameCube and PS2 remake of the first game, which kind of made the almost more realistic graphics in a way, but still kind of kind of cartoony. Adventure ride in the beginning is kind of like a half-assed version of that remake. That's right.

Yeah, because Hudson did those three, it was like three games. There was cubic load runner, there was the Bonk game, And then there was just an Adventure Island remake. And that was probably the least ambitious of the three. But it was good. It was good, as opposed to cubic loadrunner, which was just like, what the hell is even happening here? But as a straight remake, it worked out.

I think Bonk was probably the best looking of them because it had that kind of like, you know, Yoshi's story, papercraft look to it. It tried. I liked that. So it's a WiiWare game so you can never buy it again, correct? Shop still open. Okay, I thought for some reason the Wiiware games were already listed.

Okay. I mean, some games get listed, but the shop is still. open. Oh, oh, here we go. No, I'm just saying a lot of people get confused about this. What Nintendo shut down was the Wi-Fi connection internet multiplayer service. They didn't shut down any of the shops yet. So you can buy it, you can go to the shops, you can't play online

games on the Wii anymore. Got it, cool. Yeah, so I recommend people go get their copies of Dracula X or whatever while you still can. Because that won't be up forever. Most if not all of these games, I mean, sorry, most of not all of the Wonderboy games are on virtual console on the Wii at least. Pretty much all of them.

Not so much with the Adventure Island. The dynastic hero. Yeah, that too. You can buy two versions of the same game. The all-important dynastic hero. Confuse yourself even more. Have your own retronauts episode. You can buy Dragon's Curse and the Dragon's Traff.

Anyway. Yeah. So do we see a future for either of these series besides remakes? No. Okay. Unless they're Pachinko machines. Because Konami owns it all. Well, that's Adventure Island.

Well, what about Wonder Boy? Adventure Island. Well, Wonder Boy, obviously. We're remaking Dragon's Trap. something. Yeah, they are, but I mean, like I said, remakes. But, yeah, the creator. Do you think we'll ever see something new happen with them?

I don't know what the creator's been doing since the mid-90s, but he seems like he's still interested in making games. I don't know if that would ever be a possibility. I don't know what he's doing now outside of like sitting on the rights to things, but... He missed his chance of the Kickstarter bubble. I guess so, yeah, now we're all disappointed. Speaking of things that look like we wear games. What could you be talking about?

You figure it out, kids. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I think Wonderboy The fact that they're remaking Dragon's Trap is kind of a fluke in my opinion because like I thought Monster Boy was going to be good enough and kind of be it for a while. But then it's like

oh now now there's also this and it has the Wonder Boy name. It's like okay but like after that yeah what I don't know. All right so listeners send us your dream for what you'd love to see for the future of Wonderboy and Adventure Island. Which genre will it be? The writer of the best letter gets

I don't know a prize, a cookie something. Or at least the most confusing title. Yeah. Wonder Boy 6, Monster World 5, Adventure Island 3, Orgins. So this has been Retronauts episode, Whatever. Ray, thanks for coming in and

helping us to make sense of all this because we would have been lost without you. At least grateful I could help you figure out what the NASIC hero was. Thank you. Yeah. That one was giving me a lot of trouble. So I'm glad we got that sorted out. Bob, of course, thank you also for sharing your adventures of mobile phone games.

I thought that I was over. It was terrible. And thanks everyone for listening to this episode. We hope you've come away less confused rather than more. I'm not sure that I can say that for myself, but it's been a long day, and there's not a lot of oxygen in this vault. So anyway, of course, you can find Retronauts at the website,

Retronauts.com, U.S.gamer.net, on iTunes, on social media, and probably on Dennis Dyak's dartboard. Let's see what else. Oh, right, we're on Patreon where you can support the production of this show. We'll send you cool stuff twice a year. Go to some live events that if you are in the area, can join up and see. And what else?

Oh, yeah, we rent this vault with no oxygen. So it's great. We send us your air. Yes. In the very spaceballs-like manner. Send us some hairy air. The greatest pun ever. Thank you, Mel Brooks.

I already drinking Fiji water. Let's get some Fiji. air. Anyway, you can find me on the internet at various places, including Twitter as GameSpite and writing for usgamer.net and gameboy.world. Bob. Oh, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, and you can read my writing on something awful.com and check out my other podcast, Talking Simpsons.

It's Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons on Lasertimepodcast.com. And Mr. Bartolt. I'm basically just on Twitter. R-D-B-A-A-A. What about your concept, Ray? Your content. Your hashtag brand. Even my content, which would be my podcast, No More Wopper, is even that sporadic now.

Not my fault. Still listen to it, people. But yeah, No More Wopper's at Tumblr.com. All right. So thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with a smaller episode and in two weeks with a bigon. I don't know. I'm sorry.

I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going I'm going to be and the

I'm I'm I'm Thank you. I mean,