Characters / Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap

Wonder Boy himself

Bocke Lee Temjin, a.k.a. Book the Hero, and his many forms.

In General

• Cursed with Awesome: The aforementioned polymorphs all provide unique abilities and attributes he lacks by default, so what little he loses in strength he makes up for several times over with utility.
• Forced Transformation: Becomes a Lizard-Man due to a curse, and it just snowballs from there.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: If you're not attacking at the time, all forms but Lizard-Man can block projectiles thanks to his shield.
• Morphic Resonance: He keeps a similar armor design in all forms but Lizard-Man's, and always uses a sword and shield except in the aforementioned form.
• Multi Form Balance: All the game's different forms have their distinct uses, and all but Lizard-Man are required to progress in the final dungeon.

Human

• A Taste of Power: During the prologue, he has the best equipment (the legendary set) and his HP bar is maxed out.
• Lightning Bruiser: The strongest form statistically, though he lacks any special movement or attacking abilities.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: In the remake, you can play as a girl instead of a boy. Nothing changes mechanically, and their cursed forms look identical anyway, so the choice is largely inconsequential, death animation aside.
• Theme Naming: To go along with the "[Animal]-Man" theme, the game calls him "Hu-Man", or "Hu-Girl" in the remake if you choose Wonder Girl.
• The Teaser: The only moment in the game when he's playable, unless you either know the Tasmanian Sword's trick in the original Master System version or know one very special password. The remake lets you play as him after finishing the game.

Lizard-Man

• Breath Weapon: He can spit fire.
• Butt-Monkey: As the starter form, Lizard-Man gets the short end of the stick in a number of ways, being weaker than the rest and not required to be used at all again to progress once you obtain Mouse-Man. His statue is even made to hold up the transformation podium while the rest pose heroically around it.
  • The game itself doesn't treat the poor thing well either; the password pig in the church will mock him. Lizard-Man also sports a deject expression during shop and nurse visits as well.
• Informed Equipment: While changing the equipment does affect his stats, he's never seen wearing armor or using swords and shields.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: He can walk in lava just as fine as he can walk in water. Too bad the only place he can try this out doesn't lead anywhere unless the player is in Piranha-Man form. The remake includes a bonus dungeon exclusive to him where this function helps out immensely.
• Long-Range Fighter: Unlike other forms, his default attack is shooting fireballs at the enemies. Programming-wise, this counts as a weapon item, so he is the only form that can just use one other projectile at a time instead of two.
• Lizard Folk: He is one.
• Not Zilla: Vaguely saurian, tripod stance, spines down the back, breathes fire, it's all there. Except the size.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The only form that doesn't use a sword or shield, attacking instead with fireballs which are also its only means of blocking attacks.
• Shoot the Bullet: The only way he can deflect projectiles.
• Use Your Head: He can't use a sword, so he can't break blocks with it. Instead, he can break the ones above him with his head while jumping, Mario-style.
• Weak, but Skilled: The weakest form statistically, but he has a ranged attack and can duck, so he has his uses.

Mouse-Man

• Blessed with Suck: Sure he can cling to areas with checkered Mouse Blocks, but he has awful attack range with his pin-sized sword and his shield is tiny - so there's higher chance that he'll fail to block an incoming projectile. He does make a smaller target, so some attacks will go over his head unless he's jumping.
• Ceiling Cling and Wall Crawl: He can walk on walls and ceilings made of checkered Mouse Blocks.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: The smallest of all forms, and the third strongest statistically.

Piranha-Man

• Conjoined Eyes: Has them in the original game, but not in the remake.
• Fish People: He is a half-man, half-fish.

Lion-Man

• Cat Folk: He is a half-human, half-feline.
• The Charmer: The Charm Points are off the charts when Wonder Boy is in this form.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: He lacks an special powers like the Mouse-Man or Hawk-Man forms, but his attack is an overhead swing capable of hitting enemies that are above or below him, unlike the straight thrust used by other forms.
• Mighty Glacier: The second strongest form statistically, though his sword swipe has the slowest swing.
• Race Lift: An African lion in the original game, but a mountain lion in the remake as to not appear definitively male or female for the sake of playing as Wonder Girl.
  • In the TurboGrafx-16 version, he's instead called "Tiger-Man" and even has the sprite to match.

Hawk-Man

• Fragile Speedster: The second weakest form statistically, but also the most mobile.
• Super Drowning Skills: He takes damage just from touching water.
• Video Game Flight: Of the "successive Double Jumps" variety.

Other characters

Pig-Men

These benevolent monsters run all of the shops (and, surprisingly, a church) in the game.

• Adapted Out: They are replaced with generic humans in the Game Gear version.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: The Master System version made their appearance even weirder by giving them white horns on top of everything else. All subsequent redesigns removed the horns.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: They are the ones never seen without a cigarette despite not being the bad guys.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Every single shop in the game is run by one of these. The one running the church has a slightly different skin color in the original game and a different outfit in the remake.
• Pig Man: They are nameless, anthropomorphic pigs.

Nurses

• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Just like the pigs.
• Hospital Hottie: She's a beautiful blonde in a nurse outfit and mini-dress that shows off her legs.
• The Medic: Heals you for a price.
• Secret Shop: Some hospital doors are invisible, just to make staying alive that much harder. Lampshaded in the remake after they heal you.
• Token Human: In all versions besides the Game Gear's, they're the only non-hostile humans you meet.