Goal	Status
🏆 Finished game	✅
💯 Completionist	❌
📋 High Score	N/A
📺 Video	❌

Bonus Goals

Goal	Status
☑️ Created Doll Tracker	✅
🎎 Got All Dolls	❌

Review

I wanted to like Wonder Boy more than I did. I didn't grow up with the Master System, and I find the bright, vibrant color palette very appealing in comparison to the NES games that defined my childhood. The controls are pretty good, very similar to Mario in that you press the left button to fire projectiles, hold it to run and press the right button to jump. It's a very linear arcade-style platformer, which I don't usually like as much because I like to explore, but Wonder Boy still manages to contain some interesting secrets. There are bonus areas to find, and every level contains a doll to collect. Some of the dolls are in plain view, some of them require doing something unintuitive, such as tripping over a rock, to make them reveal themselves. If you collect the doll in every level, an entirely new area opens up once you reach the end of the game. I found this interesting enough that I made a tracker to have on-screen next to the emulator to check off each doll as you find them.

Sadly, this was a bit too optimistic, since I was barely able to finish the game even without all the dolls. I was going to keep track of which dolls I found so I knew which ones I needed to focus on finding for a second playthrough, but I only finished the first playthrough, and that was only after getting a game over and continuing at least 100 times in the last quarter of the game. It starts throwing enemy patterns that are all but impossible to get through if you don't have a hammer, and it would only give you a hammer at the beginning of a level; so if I made it to checkpoint 4 and was in the final stretch of a level, but died and lost my hammer, I had might as well throw away my remaining 2 lives and start the level over, because getting to the end without the hammer was beyond my capabilities. Needless to say, the dolltracker has never been completed, but I still have a strange fondness for this game in spite of the frustrations towards the end.

Score

❤️❤️️🖤️🖤🖤

Gallery

Much-struggled-for ending screen.


The doll tracker I made and never completed.



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