The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair
The final Wonder Boy arcade game blends the platformer and shoot ‘em up genres and offers two-player co-operative play.
RELEASE DATE: 1988
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Westone Bit Entertainment / Sega
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade, TurboGrafx-16
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
Escape and Sega’s 1986 arcade game Wonder Boy is a magnificent scrolling platformer that hopefully needs little introduction – if you’re not familiar with it, you’re probably instead familiar with Escape and Hudson Soft’s 1986 NES adaptation Adventure Island, which is basically the same game with a few changes made to avoid licensing issues. Escape‘s next Wonder Boy game, 1987’s Wonder Boy: Monster Land, evolved the action platforming and monster slaying into something of an action-adventure game. But it gained much more of a critical following from its Sega Master System release, retitled Wonder Boy in Monster Land, than from its original Japan-only arcade incarnation.
Escape changed its name to Westone Bit Entertainment in 1988 and released two more sequels: Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair for the arcade in 1988 and Monster Land II: Dragon no Wana (also known as Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap) for the Sega Master System in 1989. The latter has gone on to be regarded as one of the greatest games of the 8-bit era, but the former is definitely lesser-known, perhaps because it was only released in North America by Hudson Soft as the TurboGrafx-16 game Monster Lair and also because it plays so differently from the other games in the series, fusing the platforming and hunger meter from the original Wonder Boy with the mechanics of run and gun and shoot ‘em up games.
Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair alternates between side-scrolling platforming stages and sequences where you ride on the back of a dragon and fight flying enemies. The first player controls the green-haired Leo while the second player controls the pink-haired Princess Purapirl (though the princess is named Priscilla in the North American edition and the duo are renamed Adam and Laura for the TurboGrafx-16 version). Both characters fire a stream of ball-like projectiles that can be temporarily enhanced with power-ups that allow them to shoot rings, beams, fireballs, swirling shuriken spirals, fire rings or missiles. Both are also constrained by a constantly diminishing stamina bar that must be recharged by eating food items found scattered all over the game’s world during the platforming stages.
While the original Wonder Boy has a reputation for being both brutally tough and surprisingly lengthy, Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair dials down the difficulty but keeps the length, offering about an hour of continuous play over its 14 rounds. It’s a fast-paced game that’s constantly pushing you forward and forcing you to shoot at anything that moves, but the platform stages can also be mildly challenging due to bottomless pits and elements like boulders, moving platforms and trampoline jumps. While I’d argue that anyone who’s mastered even a few stages of Wonder Boy will have no trouble with this game, timing jumps still requires some trial and error, and it doesn’t help that the enemies are relentless and the best of the fruit you need to stay alive loves to appear in hard-to-reach places.
The real attraction of this game is the boss battles, and they are suitably epic, with creatures such as a giant bat, a huge segmented snake, a crab that tosses her young at you, a honeycomb that fires bees at you, a humongous skull surrounded by a rotating shield of ghosts, an ice cube man with a frozen heart, a stretchy cactus that’s constantly changing shapes and sizes and, just to cap off all the weirdness, a mushroom with a slot machine above his eyes who randomizes his attack patterns. Many of these enemies attack you with beach balls that sap your stamina, which seems to be the preferred projectile in Monster Land. But perhaps the strangest aspect of the game is the final battle, in which you fly up into orbit and fight a fully armored Wonder Boy from Wonder Boy II Monster Land riding that game’s final boss, the MEKA Dragon, only to learn that it’s actually an invader from space masquerading as the legendary hero.
While Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair isn’t quite as inventive or as deep as Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, it’s still a fun game that’s especially well-suited to co-operative play. I personally prefer the arcade version, which was recently released as part of Strictly Limited Games’s Wonder Boy Anniversary Collection on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, but the TurboGrafx-16 edition is pretty close to the arcade original and has even better audio. The Sega Mega Drive did receive a European and Japanese port of the game as well, but it’s inferior graphically and missing two levels, so I’d recommend skipping it unless it’s your only choice.
And if you’ve somehow missed out on the rest of the Wonder Boy games and the Hudson Soft Adventure Island series (which sticks far closer to the original Wonder Boy than any of Westone’s sequels) do yourself a favor and check the entire run of games out. You won’t be disappointed, and modern ports or sequels like CFK’s Wonder Boy Returns, DotEmu’s remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, Artdink/ININ Games’s Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World and Game Atelier/FDG Entertainment’s Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom are all very much worth playing.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!