About a month ago Lizardcube and DotEmu announced that they’d partnered up with Playdigious to bring their fantastic remake of the Sega Master System classic Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Trap to iOS and Android devices. They also announced that the game would go up for pre-order and that those who did grab the game early would receive a 30% discount off the game’s normal price. This was true of the Android version which has been available for pre-registration on the Google Play Store since that announcement, but for iOS users there was no pre-order and no pre-order discount to be seen. With Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap set to release this Thursday, the developers are cutting it PRETTY CLOSE but today they have indeed made the game available for pre-order on the iOS App Store for $5.99, a 30% discount off the regular price just as promised.
As mentioned Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap originally launched on the Sega Master System way back in 1989, and being one of the somewhat rare American’s that owned a Master System (the console was phenomenally successful in Europe and Brazil, not so much in the US) this was a game I was absolutely obsessed with when I was a kid. And being so familiar with the original I can really see just what a wonderful job Lizardcube and DotEmu did with their 2017 remake, which is available on consoles and PC. The gameplay remains exactly as it was but the visuals have been completely redone and drawn by hand, giving an illustrated cartoon flair to the entire game. You can also switch back to the original visuals with the press of a button, and it’s so much fun just to switch back and forth and see these game locations I remember from my childhood reimagined through a modern eye.
It’s not just a nostalgia trip though, as Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is a truly fantastic Metroidvania-style action platformer, and it released several years before the whole Metroidvania term was even coined. It’s a bit on the short side, especially when you’ve played through it before and know what to do and where to go, but it’s such a fantastic experience that first time through and its brevity actually makes it easy to just replay through on a lazy afternoon, which I’ve done several times since getting the game on my Switch a couple of years ago. And I’ll absolutely be doing it again when the mobile version arrives this Thursday, and I’ll be very interested to see how well it plays with virtual controls (though it will have full MFi support too). If you are an old-school fan like myself or you simply like what you see in the trailers above, you should definitely take advantage of the 30% pre-order discount on either iOS and Android for the mobile version of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap ahead of its launch in just a couple of days.
