Creature feature: Wonder Boy III / Neutopia / Golden Axe Warrior | Metroidvania Works 21
1,013As the 8-bit proto-metroidvania heyday comes to a close (along with the 1980s), Sega and Westone deliver a real humdinger of a swan song. Er, lizard song. Wait... mouse song? Piranha song? Lion song!? Anyway, Wonder Boy III is real, real good—arguably the finest distillation of the action-RPG-platformer concept we've seen to date in this series. It does everything, more or less: Strong platform action in an interesting world divided up by creative keys that players need to seek out through skill and observation by controlling a hero whose strength and skills grow and change as they uncover more of the map. Put a little blue-box minimap in there and you've got yourself a metroidvania stew going, baby. Little surprise that the game would hold up to a scrutiny even as an HD remaster with few changes beyond a small touch of fine-tuning.
Less durable (not to mention less inventive) are this episode's Action RPG sidebars: Neutopia for TurboGrafx-16 and Golden Axe Warrior for Master System. Friends, I'm going to be honest, here. These games are just The Legend of Zelda. Like, just straight up duplicates. And they're pretty OK, but it really kind of feels like developers on non-Nintendo consoles decide that the top-down action RPG was about to undergo a boom and literally decided to calibrate their work by revisiting the genre's baseline. Nothing wrong with a good Zelda knockoff, which both of these games certainly are, but this format would get a welcome shot in the arm soon.
Production notes:
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Why watch when you can read? Check out the massive hardcover print editions of NES Works, Super NES Works, and Virtual Boy works, available now at Limited Run Games (https://limitedrungames.com/collections/books)! Look forward to SG-1000 Works: Segaiden Vol. I in August and Metroidvania: The First Decade in 2024.
NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister.