Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
A sequel to Wonder Boy: Monster Land (1987), the Sega arcade game that appeared in 1987 as the 2nd title in the "Wonder Boy" series.
The arcade version is included on a "reissue console" released by Sega Toys, the hobby maker in the Sega group, carrying 36 arcade games from the 1980s to the mid 1990s (plus 1 bonus titles).
In the 3rd Gamest Grand Prix run in the magazine Gamest, it took 49th place among the year's hit games.
It scored 8, 8, 9 and 8 for a total of 33 out of 40 in the "Cross Review" in the magazine Famicom Tsushin, entering the Gold Hall of Fame, and reviewers praised the fact that CD-ROM access time is not noticeable and that the music comes from CD audio.
In other game magazines it scored an average of 77 out of 100 in Gekkan PC Engine from 75, 80, 80, 75 and 75, and, in the "Game Report Card" reader poll in PC Engine FAN, 24.30 out of 30, as set out below.
This score also placed it 34th among all PC Engine titles (485 titles in total, as of 1993).
In the "Cross Review" feature of the magazine Famitsu,the game scored a total of 24 out of 40. In the "Game Report Card" reader poll run by Mega Drive FAN,it scored 16.75 out of 30, as shown below.
From 2008 to 2019 the overseas version was distributed on the Wii Virtual Console.
Since 2011 a port of the overseas Mega Drive (SEGA GENESIS) version has been distributed on Steam, whose main platform is the Windows PC.
A console adaptation was made by Hudson Soft and released in 1989 in Japan for the PC Engine CD-ROM² System; the subsequent North American release on the TurboGrafx-CD dropped the Wonder Boy III title.
The music was replaced with a lavish live-played arrangement using CD-DA, but at the time most arcade games ported to the PC Engine Super CD-ROM2 were treated the same way, and here too it was a selling point.
The port of the game itself largely followed the arcade version, but ROM capacity cut the number of stages to 9 in all, and the graphics were redesigned considerably from the arcade version.
It is the third game in the Wonder Boy series and the last one released for arcades.
The sentences quoted on this page were taken from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles exactly as they stand. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) — usable under those terms. They are the work of the people who wrote them.