aprilmarch

An image showing the connection between Monica and Ryu. Each character is shown drawn on a black circle on a white background. The connections are made with black arrows and their names are also written in black. The connection goes: Monica through Monica no Castelo do Dragao to Meka Dragon through Wonder Boy in Monster land to Book through Monster Bou and the Cursed Kingdom to Wonder Boy through Wonder Boy to Tina through Adventure Island to Master Higgins through DreamMix TV World Fighters through Solid Snake through Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to Ryu.

Mônica, famous comic book character from Brazil, has a Ryu number of 7.

Coming to that conclusion was very difficult, and the results are probably debatable.

If you don't know what Ryu numbers are, you can take a look at the Ryu number subreddit, at the tumblr, or at the Twitter account, the latter being the one that offered the ruleset I'm using. But basically: Ryu numbers are a game/concept/activity/pointless waste of time in which one attempts to connect video game characters, through special appearances and cameos, to Ryu. The number is the amount of games that need to be cited in order to connect to Ryu. A character that's in the same game as Ryu has a number of 1. A character that's in the same game as another character that shares a game with Ryu has a number of 2, and so on.

I love this stupid crap. It's at once heartwarming and hate-inducing. It's heartwarming because it shows how there are connections between everything, and how our culture is a big giant soup of references, and how different companies can overcome their alledged rivalry to come together and do something fun. It's hate-inducing because you soon realize how many of the main pillars of the industry come down to Disney-like gigantic monstrosities that own everything their wretched eyes lay upon. I still find a lot of fun.

A funny thing you notice about Ryu numbers is that they tend to be either very small or infinite. It's likely that the vast majority of game characters don't have Ryu numbers, simply by virtue of never having a cameo in their games, or at least a cameo that connects to the larger universe. (Hat Kid from A Hat in Time is a suprirsing example of this.) However, if a character does have a connection to Ryu, it's likely to lead directly into a dense web of connection, meaning there aren't many nodes in the fastest path.

Everyone who makes Ryu numbers is always on the lookout for an interesting connection, and I'm no exception. Since I'm Brazilian, I've tried to find Brazilian characters that link to Ryu, but that's been a mostly fruitless endeavor. This is not to say there aren't any, but I'm not looking for small indie darlings, I'm looking for the big cultural stuff. Stuff like Turma da Mônica.

Turma da Mônica is a Brazilian comic about a bunch of children that has been running for over fifty years, and it's probably the largest Brazilian cultural presence for children. And they do have videogames: a couple of games for the Master System (a SEGA-built console, contemporary to the NES, that was quite succesful in Brazil) and a more recent, multi-platform game. But, sadly, they seemed to be fit the mold for most non-game characters: their games had several characters, but no one outside of their own IP, and no one appeared as cameos in other games either. Intellectual property is a harsh mistress. It seemed that my search was likely to lead nowhere.

Except...

Well. There's a rule in the Ryu number twitter that says that characters need to be identifiable, if not by name, then by appearance. For instance, if a large lumbering zombie with screws on its neck were to raise from an electrified table, it would probably count as an appearance of Frankenstein's Creature, and provide a valid connection to Ryu (such a creature appears on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate). (And yes, I know the creature in the book is completely different, but that's not the point here.)

What does this have to do with Mônica? Well, that's probably related to the other question you've had while reading this article: how did a character from a Brazilian comic get a game made about her all the way back in the eighties, when programming was a rare skillset, specially outside of the Japan-US-Europe axis? Well, the answer is that... she didn't. The 1991 Master System game Mônica no Castelo do Dragão wasn't created from scratch; it's just a localization of the 1987 Japanese title Wonder Boy in Monster Land. All the dialogue is changed, and our hero is replaced with the plucky, freakishly strong six-year-old, but literally everything else is the same.

And you know what they say. If it looks like Wonder Boy in Monster Land's final boss Meka Dragon, walks like Meka Dragon, and throws triple fireballs like Meka Dragon, it is Meka Dragon.

We have a connection.

A comparison between the games Monica no Castelo do Dragao and Wonder Boy in Monster Land. Both screens show a character in a metallic blue chamber, being attacked by a metallic dragon. The image in the left, from Wonder Boy, shows an armored knight holding a sword, while the image in the right shows Monica in a blue dress holding her stuffed bunny

I was hopeful when I found this. The Wonder Boy franchise is quite large, and has had numerous entries. I was certain that I would find a connection between its many protagonists and the gaming world at large.

I didn't.

Although the Wonder Boy series includes numerous games, they were much like Mônica's gang in that they only refercence their own characters and they never had a cameo on another game series. Despite my cleverness, it seemed to have been all for naught. I could connect Mônica to a little-known Japanese platformer, but the trail ended there. There was nothing more to go on. Lightning didn't strike twice in the same place.

Except that's not true at all. Lightning strikes some places dozen of times a year. And it turns out that a developer that had licenced a game to create a completely different localization would not do this only once.

In 1986, software developer Hudson decided to port the first game in the Wonder Boy franchise (named only Wonder Boy) to the Famicon. However, at some point in development, they changed plans and instead released it as a new franchise of their own, Adventure Island. I like to think this happened because they saw Wonder Boy pick up a skateboard complete with helmet and kneepads and realized that the game they were porting was probably not as medieval as they had thought. Whatever the reason, the game was a port of Wonder Boy in much the same way Mônica no Castelo do Dragão is; the main character is changed, but the levels are not. Which means we can pull the same manouver as before and connect the games using a similar enemy, correct?

Sadly, no. Unlike Mônica's game, which was a simple localization, Adventure Island is a port to a different console, with different graphical capabilities. Even though the locations in the two games are the same, they are nowhere as identical as Mônica and its original. Confusing the matter further, the games have a single boss enemy, who fights the hero repeatedly throughout the game, wearing different masks with different powers. This enemy is called King in Wonder Boy and Evil Witch Doctor in Adventure Island, and while those are titles that can certainly be held consecutively (in fact, I'd assume the first will make the second much easier to perform),it's an obvious stretch to claim that these two are the same character. Notice in the screenshot below that, even though these two images come from the same boss fight, they don't even seem to be wearing the same mask.

A comparison between the games Wonder Boy and Adventure Island. Both screens show a small man jumping in a brick castle, standing next to a tall man in a toga, wearing a mask and bracelets on his wrists and ankles. The tall man in the first screenshot is wearing a black bird magic, while the man in the second screenshot us wearing a rhino mask, and the protagonist wears a white cap. The images are different enough that one can tell they are for different consoles with different graphical capabilities.

So, are we at a loss? Have we discovered a connection, only to have to discard it? No. There was a way out - brought about by dev error. See, in both versions of the game, the hero has to save a girl from the villain, as was the custom at the time. Wonder Boy wants to rescue his girlfriend Tina, while Master Higgins, the protagonist of Adventure Island, wants to rescue Princess Leilani. Except that Princess Leilani is only mentioned by that name in the manual; in the game itself, she's still called Tina.

If it looks like a Tina, it's been kidnapped like a Tina, and is called Tina by the game, it's the same character. Tina is a connection between the two games.

(At this point, a new connection had to be made within the Wonder Boy series itself, as the titular Wonder Boy is the protagonist of the single game to bear his name, and the series that begat Mônica's games have a different protagonist, Book, who presumably liked books so much he changed his name to it. Fortunately, I was spared from having to dive deep into Wonder Boy's lore to find out if there are any ancillary characters that could connect the games by a crowdfunded revival of the series, the 2018 game Monster Boy in Cursed Kingdom, in which both protagonists appear briefly. Boy, don't you love crowdfunding? I love it so much that I'm dropping here a link to the crowdfunding campaign of a magazine I'm an editor at! It publishes fantasy and science fiction stories from Brazilian authors in English! If you're reading this article, you're at least 60% certain to enjoy it! We have a Patreon too!)

Now I'm feeling hopeful. Adventure Island was made by Hudson. They are moderately important in the modern Japanese game industry, and in fact they are the creators of the Smash Bros. series, which has provided many connections for Ryu numbers. I was confident that I'd find a connection to Ryu through it.

If hope you're not holding your breath for a THIRD plot twist, because there isn't one. The connection is through a game called DreamMix TV World Fighters - a bizarre platform fighter created to celebrate a merger between Hudson, Konami and toy manufacturer Tanaka (the later also allows the inclusion of Megatron and someone from Beyblade). Yeah, sometimes stuff in the real world just happens satisfactorily. I have to say I found this a pretty weird game when I made this connection, but given that in the present day there's a fighting game that includes Wonder Woman, Shaggy from Scooby Doo, Finn & Jake from Adventure Time, and Arya from Game of Thrones, I now consider that game to be a precursor. In fact, I even had a choice of character, since both Simon Belmont and Solid Snake appear in both DreamMix and in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with Ryu; I chose the latter to branch out genres a little.

And that's how Mônica ended up having a Ryu number of 7.