June 2016, Wonder Boy The Dragon's Trap Feature image

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is getting a HD remake!

Yes Sega fans, not only is Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap getting some much needed love, it’s doing so in style.

Published by DotEmu and developed by Lizardcube, this lovingly crafted remake looks set to offer a beautiful visual design that echoes the wonder of playing through the Master System original and pairing it with amazing instrumental covers of Sakamoto’s superb original tunes.

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap sits as one of the best-loved games on the Sega Master System, fusing great visuals and music with clever, open-ended level design. Sega fans unfortunately missed out on Metroid, but Nishizawa and his team went to painstaking efforts in their creation of the third Wonder Boy title (which also happened to be the second Monster World title), and gave us a taste of what Nintendo fans had been experiencing. While it’s not a difficult game, as a kid it made for hours and hours of awesomeness as it rewarded exploration and backtracking. Fans who missed out on playing the original Master System title have also had opportunities to revisit Dragon’s Trap along with the other Wonder Boy games through M2’s revered releases first on the PlayStation 2 as part of the Sega AGES collection, and then on the PlayStation 3/XBox 360 as part of the Sega Vintage Collection.

June 2016, Wonder Boy The Dragon's Trap Screenshot

My brain is literally about to explode to not only see Wonder Boy on a modern console, but to see if being done with such anally retentive care by a team of obvious fans. Omar Cornut is heading the project, and the guy certainly has the chops given he was behind the legendary emulator MEKA and founder of SMS Power’s research and development community. The visual style is courtesy of Ben Fiquet and really pops with organic, detailed animation. If the trailer is anything to go by this will put him up with the likes of WayForward (Duck Tales HD, Shantae) and Lab Zero (Skull Girls [ex-devs], Indivisible), developers renowned for their lush 2D animation design in games.

The game is officially licensed from Sega and has also earned the approval from series author Ryuichi Nishzawa – very impressive to say the least. The fact that the original game has been reverse engineered to get the right feel is wonderful news too, as I’m hopeful that all those years of playing the original should help ensure I can at least make progress in this remake!

But enough from us – check out the official site, then sit back and enjoy the trailer below!

Source: Sega-16