If you are a reader of the PlayStation blog you may have spotted the exclusive news a little earlier.
We have held on revealing the 6th character, AKA Wonder Boy in its “Hu-Man” form, and people were wondering which of the multiple designs would we base it on? Will he have blond hair or green hair? So many ever-so-important questions, and we have some answers in this new video!
Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap will be available on April 18 on PS4, Xbox One & Nintendo Switch!
(NB: the PC version will arrive a little later, we are working on it but getting the hardware compatibility right is a little harder than for consoles.)
Wonder Girl??
We started working on our remake of The Dragon’s Trap a long time ago. Early on, when it was a 2-person bedroom project, we contacted Mr Nishizawa asking for the possibility of using their IP. At the time we were such a small team that we didn’t consider talking to Sega of Japan regarding use of the trademark, and we assumed that we could follow the route that Hudson Soft and many others went down decades ago with “Adventure Island”, “Dragon’s Curse”, which was to license the game contents but without the Wonder Boy title. It was at that time, maybe 2014, that we first considered using another title for the game, and among our early characters researchs we considered replacing the Hu-Man character with a female equivalent.
Fast-forward years later: the project has been signed by DotEmu, we’ve moved to work full-time on it, and we have obtained a license by Sega to use the beloved Wonder Boy title. Everything was moving forward like a dream!
We went back and decided that along with the classic Wonder Boy character, we would introduce a new Wonder Girl character! It is a small detail, but keeping in mind that an 8 year old girl could be playing the game today, we felt that it was the right thing to do. When you start the game you can select either character and get cursed all the same after a few minutes! Haha! And because this is a game where your hero undergoes a lot of transformations, we left the animals characters as-is. We also changed the end-game so that you can keep playing as the human character.
(And of course we considered using the amazing Asha from Monster World IV, but Mr Nishizawa was against it because he said that the world of those two games don’t overlap!)
Title Screen
This is how the title screen changes as you start a game with either character:
Characters in the making
Here are some character development sheets, featuring some of the earliest discarded designs, along with the newer designs:
Thanks for reading! Remember, the game will be available on April 18th!
PlayStation players: if you’re in Europe, you can already pre-order the game on the PlayStation Store. PS Plus members gets a 20% rebate! You can search for the pre-order page on your PlayStation 4, or use the web version of PS Store Europe.
Recap: Retro Feature Trailer
Recap: June 2016 Reveal Trailer
New Screenshots
Also see our earlier posts for more screenshots!
