Similarly, the Artbook brings up a list of six further “Artbooks” but in reality it’s just a gallery of six images that you can either scroll through or select individually in the menu.
Click on one and it brings up a gallery relating to that item, but you’ll soon realise the next item in the gallery is also the next item on the menu! While there’s certainly a lot to look through, there’s not as much as all these menus and sub-menus might imply for example, the collection menu gives us Artbook and Soundtrack, which both bring up further menus, then twelve more specific items such as Boy, Asha and Landscape. Before we look at those though, quick mention of the very Charlie Brown bit of orchestral laidback lounge jazz playing over the top of all these functional rather than remotely pleasing menus – not sure which game (if any) it’s from but it’s alright! I’ve got more to say on the “soundtrack” once we get there in the Gallery in a second, but first, clicking on that in the menu then brings up another list of the six games as well as one for this collection itself.
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Once you’re past the language select screen, which is very pretty but I really don’t need to see every time I play, you’ve got a menu with each of the six base games, together with a big image of their title screen (which are variably interesting) plus the Gallery where all the extras are hiding. And with all caveats and disclaimers now in place, let’s talk presentation!
I also want to mention that this collection was also not only under review embargo until the release date (which always cracks me up for stuff that’s been around for the best part of four decades now!) but the review codes also weren’t active until then, hence the short delay between first downloading it and it first appearing here while I played through twenty-one games! And obviously, I wasn’t playing twenty-one games to completion for this review, although I have completed almost all of the six base games in some capacity at some time or another so will focus more on the variations we’re presented with here. You may also be wondering what possessed ININ and Bliss Brain to release a compilation of twenty-one Wonder Boy games, and even more so who would want it, but that’s what we’ll try and establish here shortly! The anniversary in the title refers to thirty-five years of Wonder Boy, which would actually have been in 2021, but let’s not be pedantic when we’re getting all this stuff here! Which reminds me, I’d like to mention that I was kindly provided with a review copy for Nintendo Switch by the publisher, it came out on 26 th January 2023, and is also available for PlayStation, and on Switch at least it will set you back a whopping £45. And I think those six games make up the base games here, one way or another, once we consider the arcade and console variants included for each, but while that does make our task slightly less daunting, I’m fairly certain that by the time we’re done we’ll be so confused by Wonder Boy’s insane naming conventions that we probably won’t know if I’m right one way or the other, and we definitely won’t care! By the way, I did go through that minefield once already when I looked at the original Wonder Boy here, and I’ve no intention of ever doing it again, but what I will do is try and order this lot somehow so we’ve got each base game broken down into a look at all the variants for all the versions and platforms no matter what weird names they’ve got! And if you’re new to Wonder Boy, don’t worry, the madness I’m talking about will become clear by the time we’re even halfway through the first title! And if I remember rightly, there was a physical version from Strictly Limited Games at the same time that was also called The Wonder Boy Anniversary Collection and also collected these games plus Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair and Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. I certainly am! I did get a bit of a head-start though because the release of this Wonder Boy Anniversary Collection comes only a fraction over six months after the original Wonder Boy Collection, a digital release containing Wonder Boy, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Wonder Boy in Monster World and Monster World IV, which we also reviewed here.
You may be wondering what possessed me to review twenty-one Wonder Boy games all at the same time.
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