Sonic-Boy in Monster Land

When I pulled this thing out of the cartridge, I expected a tolerable Sonic on the Master System. Instead, I got a girl in a cross-pattern dress jumping on monsters and collecting hearts. Sonic-Boy in Monster Land is what happens when someone translates a license too creatively — and doesn't say a word about it.

It's a platformer about a girl lost in a treacherous landscape full of monsters. The goal? Get to the end of the level and defeat bosses. All relatively straightforward and nothing surprising for 1991. The game plays like a slightly more laborious version of something you'd once have seen in the crowd of tank girls and platformer paradigms on the Master.

You play exactly as you'd expect — you jump, collect things, avoid enemies or bounce on their heads. The controls work correctly without any quirks. Hitboxes are understandable, you feel both the sequence and the precision that won't let you wave your hand and count on luck. Problems come elsewhere — namely when the game decides to be frustrating for no reason. Random enemy placement, moments when it seems you should have gotten through yet you didn't, it's all here.

Today it's looked at as a curiosity — an attempt by the Master System to compete with the Game Boy and its Sonic, which everyone knows. The nineties were full of such bold or naive experiments. The music is catchy in the way games from thirty years ago were — nothing special, but I won't complain about it.

If you have time left and want an obscure platformer from when publishers were still experimenting with licenses, it'll do. It's not bad, it's not nice either — it's just something that exists and shows what the Master System's middle class looked like. You can play it in an emulator without guilt, but you'll never come back to it.