2.5/5 ★ – Artagah's review of Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair.

It's interesting that this is on some people's fav Genesis games lists. I was surprised how relatively bad this game looks for the system. It is one of the earlier Genesis games, pre-Sonic, but even compared to some other early games it's still relatively low tech. Look at something like Shinobi, a game that came out a year earlier, and how well it shows off what the system can do. As far as gameplay goes, it too is very rudimentary. It switches between auto scrolling on-foot sections and auto scrolling side view shooter sections with very rudimentary weapons and enemy patterns. Once you beat the first 2 levels - you've seen the entire game. The rest of the levels are just re-skins offering very little in terms of new gameplay, only increasing in difficulty due to hard to shoot down or dodge "gotcha" patterns that wreck you unless you have the stage memorized. Idk, a perfect representation of a 2.5 star game. Didn't love it, didn't hate it, but not really worth my time past level 2.