Trip World

The European box art.

Trip World is an action adventure platformer developed and published by Sunsoft for the Game Boy and released on 1992-11-27 in Japan, and then in Europe a few months later. In the game's story, Trip World is a peaceful land because a bunny-like race (that can morph into fish and bird forms at will) protects the Maita Flower. However, a rogue bunny-thing has stolen the flower and the elder and princess are taken hostage. You play as Yakopu (Jacob), who must venture from your home to take back the flower and restore peace, but, with flower gone, the inhabitants of Trip World are no longer as friendly as they once were.

Personal

I first heard about Trip World from the review in Game Boy Works. The review was very positive and made the game look fantastic, so I played it. It took me three sittings, and a lot of resets, but after two days, I finally beat the European version on 2020-04-24. While the game deserves a lot of praise, it also has some pretty big flaws.

Status

I don't own this game, but I have beaten it.

Review

5	6	8	7	4

Best Version: Game Boy

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• Toshihiko Narita created fantastic art, both in the character design and backgrounds, and the conversion to grayscale pixel art was top-notch, some of the best graphics I've seen for the platform.
• The monsters are all quirky with fun animations and they interact with their environment.
• The music is quite enjoyable and catchy and fits the game very well.
• I like how the designers made the game's inhabitants less like dangerous enemies, and more like real inhabitants with their own motives. Aside from the bosses and a couple minibosses, the "monsters" are not very dangerous and can just be walked past.
• The manual is quite nice and includes a cute comic of the game's story.

Bad

• The game looks and sounds great, and it's quite creative, but there just isn't enough substance to it for me to find it that enjoyable. Several areas of the game are unoccupied, so you're just left looking at the scenery. It was a fun adventure while it lasted, but it didn't last very long.
• For a game which appears to sell itself as an adventure, it's totally stage driven with only a couple branches in the map. An open world would have fit the theme much better.
• The monsters are really interesting, but you can just skip by nearly all of them. I think a better design would have been to require the player to experiment with them or make friends with them in order to exploit their talents to progress.
• I like that the player can switch forms between land, sea, and air, but they're rarely put to good use, and the air form allows you to bypass much of the game.
• The story is pretty trope heavy. A villain steals the artifact which was keeping the land peaceful, now it must be recovered, and doing so saves the princess.
• Because all the locations of every monster and power-up is scripted, the game is identical every time you play it. There are also very few secret areas to discover, so, after beating the game (which won't take very long), there's nothing left to do with it.
• The game's difficulty swings wildly. Most of the levels are so easy, even a beginner can pass them without much difficulty, but the later bosses are particularly tough.
• Having a score doesn't work for such a game and kind of hurts it since it rewards you for killing harmless creatures.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Box Art

• 

  The original Japanese box is white with the rather trippy Trip World logo in black. The tittle of the letter "i" has rainbow flower petals to symbolize the Maita Flower in the game.

• 

  The European release repurposes the colorful painting of Trip World from the Japanese manual with the logo and Yakopu's three forms in the foreground.

Documentation

• 

  Japanese manual.

Videos

Review - Game Boy Works.

Longplay.

Credits

Role	Staff
Chief Director	Yuichi Ueda
Chief Programmer	Yuichi Ueda
Chief Designer	Toshihiko Narita
Designers	Rieko Sakai, Akiki Mori
Music Composers	"Phase Out" (Masayuki Iwata, Tsutomu Ishida, Atsushi Mihiro)
Music Programmers	Manami Matsumae, Shinichi Seya
Hyper Adviser	Tomomi Sakai
Special Thanks	Hiroyuki Suzuki, Kazuyuki Watanabe, Mihoko Okazaki, Tatsuo Mori

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Trip World
Japanese	トリップワールド	Torippu Warudo	Trip World

Links