Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World | Switch Review

Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World hails from a time long ago: a time of arcade machines and lost quarters. A time of sparse save points and blowing on cartridges to make them work (yes, just like the reddit memes). And a time when games took wacky concepts and made them into action platformers. Asha in Monster World is a remake of Monster World 4 first released on the Sega Genesis in 1994, and while it brings with it a wonderfully colorful and cheery graphics update and some QOL features, it also carries with it some of the baggage from that earlier time in gaming.

Tell Me a Story

Asha in Monster World puts you in the shoes of Asha, who sets out from her village to become a hero of the realm and save it from an unnamed impending darkness. Why? Because it’s evil, don’t ask so many questions!

She receives the blessing from the queen and sets out to rescue the four elemental spirits kept captive by evil forces. It’s a pretty simple game overall: you can run, jump, attack with your sword, and soon gain the assistance of a blue flying bird-like thing called a Pepelogoo. By calling on this animal companion, you can glide, double jump, and use him to help solve puzzles.

So…What’s New?

This is all pretty standard platformer fare, though Pepelogoo was certainly a novel addition to the genre back when the game first came out. Nowadays it feels a bit more clunky, as you have to call Pepelogoo to you to double jump every single time you want to get up to a high ledge or activate a switch, for instance. Other notable absences of modern convenience include a minimap for the game’s maze-like dungeons, and obscure objectives that are often hidden behind talking to a particular NPC or finding a certain hidden item. They’re gameplay relics that were prevalent in the 80’s and early 90’s, and feel out of place in a modern game.

This wouldn’t be that remarkable if this were more of an updated port, but the developer, Studio Artdink, added in some new QOL features, most importantly the ability to revisit past stages so you can collect all of the game’s life stones. You can also hold multiple elixirs, the only guaranteed way to restore your life in dungeons, and the main hub city also saw a redesign to ease navigation.

If It’s Broke, Definitely Fix It

However, all that goes out the window once you start delving into the game’s dungeons. They’re a veritable maze of indistinguishable corridors, combined with puzzles that mostly require you to find a particular item, then find the spot where you need to use that item. And since the game has no minimap or objective marker, you’ll often find yourself running into that dungeon’s equivalent of a locked door and having to backtrack to find the key. This, again, wouldn’t be so bad if the dungeons were more interesting, but since enemies don’t respawn, you’ll just be going back and forth through empty hallways looking for the one MacGuffin you need to proceed.

This is an area where the developers really should have updated the game to bring it more in-line with modern sensibilities. Not so much because gamers these days expect objective markers and handholding, but because the original game really wasn’t that great. The dungeon design is plain and boring with the amount of backtracking you have to do, and the lack of respawning enemies only exacerbates that.

Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World Final Verdict

At a $40 USD price point, Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World doesn’t do enough to sell itself to a modern audience. Kids would certainly enjoy the bright, colorful world and relatively simple gameplay, but unfortunately there are plenty of other, better games for the price, including other games in the Wonder Boy franchise.

To hear me talk more about Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World, be sure to listen to Episode 348 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:24:38 time stamp.

This review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy of Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World provided by PR Hound for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation 4.