• In the third and final installment, the character you choose does slightly affect what powers you get - the costumes are not identical. This adds the smallest bit of replay value, but for this run I went with Donald.
• Of the suit powers you get, I’d rank this group about the same as Magical Quest 1. Still not as good as MQ2 but they do some interesting things (especially the Knight)
• If you are thinking of playing these games, this is the one that is by far and away hurt the most by the GBA screen area. Tons of levels are very vertical, and there are moments (especially in the final level) where you have absolutely no idea where it’s even possible to jump, because the next plaform is not visible on the screen. For this reason, this game is the ‘hardest’ of the three, but obviously not because of anything intentional in the design.
• This doesn’t really matter but once again Capcom did cut down the game system to make this even easier. Now, when you lose a life, you don’t just respawn in place, you get a balloon that you can use to place yourself anywhere on screen.
• Weirdly though, they made the respawn distance of enemies really short? As in, you walk 1 single millimeter away from where you killed an enemy, go back that direction, and it has respawned instantly. All 3 of these games do this, but this is the shortest-distance spawn by far. It’s like NES Ninja Gaiden level.
• This one also has the coolest boss fights of the trilogy; there is way more to do than just memorize the pattern and jump on their heads. The suits do different things to them, some have multiple winning strategies, and as a result there can be a lot more player creativity in how you face them. Though again it would be nice not to feel like you have infinity health.
• Overall none of these are really bad other than being too easy. Playing all 3 of them as though they’re one continuous game is fun since they are pretty short. It also doesn’t matter if you don’t do that; they don’t have plots that depend on one another.

• This one feels even shorter & easier than the first one, but the mechanics are not exactly the same
  • There is no more “infinite coins” trick, because coin count is reset when you game over
  • But, when you lose a life, you are reset in-place, you don’t even start the level over. So your health meter in total is however many hearts you have x how many lives you have. You never have to git gud, you can always tank everything that gets in your way.
• Like the first game, you get 3 different suits which give 3 different powers. The suit powers are much more interesting than in the first game IMO
• The level design, however, is not so interesting; somehow it feels like you are rewarded less for exploring, which doesn’t make any sense because they removed the timer. If levels have unlimited time now, then why not hide secrets all over the place? What else is even the point of removing the timer?
• I didn’t check who composed this, but the music is still incredible; maybe even more memorable tracks in 2 than there is in 1.
• Little variation in boss fights - they all feel about equal in difficulty to the very first boss

• I’ve decided that for a Christmas Break Challenge 2025, I’m going to play through all 3 of the Magical Quest games on GBA.
• 1 game in, this is a very chilled out experience. There aren’t that many “ARRGGHHH EAT SHIT CAPCOM” moments in the level design, the music is A+, and it feels good to control
• People say these games are too easy, which is kinda true, and honestly I think that’s all because of the lives/continue system. There is almost 0 penalty at all for dying in this game. You even keep all your coins between Game Overs, which means it’s extremely easy to go in a level with a bunch of coins at the beginning, grab them, die, rinse & repeat, then be ultra mega rich next time you get to a shop
• But, even if you do this, it doesn’t matter if you’re ultra mega rich next time you hit a shop, because there aren’t any items that make the game considerably easier. We’re already sort of on the floor
• Like other ports on the GBA, some level designs suffer really badly from the chopped-down screen area. To put this in perspective, the SNES versions ‘feel easier’ because there are 0 memorization checks; every single thing is reactable. On the GBA, you will hit a memorization check or 2 just because you had no way of seeing part of the level that was off-screen when something came flying at you. Usually this doesn’t lead to a death, because you get so many additional hearts from exploring.
• Obviously you don’t need this if you’re emulating, but the GBA versions let you Save 👍
• I tried to look up the answer to this and could not find it so I’ll post it here to maybe get the Google juice: There are items in the shops where the description says something like ‘Figure it out for yourself.’ All these do is unlock stuff in Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse on GameCube, if you have the GBA link cable. If you aren’t playing Magical Mirror alongside this, those items are useless.
• Overall enjoyable but too easy/short. Looking forward to playing the rest of this trilogy

Note: not to be confused with Little Nemo: The Dream Master

• This is an English patch of a Famicom exclusive and now that I’m through it, I cannot believe they didn’t bring it to every market they possibly could. This game fuckin rips
• Until the moment this review was published, it was very hard to get a good english-language description of what this game actually is and how the game loop works
• If you try to do this, everything you read will make it seem like just another jarpig. It absolutely is not.
• Also, some articles describe it as a first-person dungeon crawler, which it also is not. There aren’t even any first-person segments scattered around
• Anyway that’s enough about what it’s not. What it is: a series of smaller, self-contained RPG’s where you always start out with 0 items and 0 experience. The game loop involves entering a dream world with nothing (no items or exp carry over from the previous dream world) and trying to fight your way to the boss to clear that dream. There are 7 dreams in total.
• The coolest thing that this system gives you is a RESOURCE MANAGEMENT angle. Every individual mini-RPG scenario has a finite amount of items, heal opportunities, and enemy encounters. It is never possible to grind EXP to make a boss fight easier.
• There are also no save points in the middle of a scenario. You get a password when you beat one, or if you don’t beat it you try the whole thing over from the beginning
• This makes for really, really great tension. I’ve said before that 8bit Final Fantasy games are at their best when you’re trying to fight your way through a dungeon and every single step is a huge risk because you don’t know what enemy formation might 1-shot you and you have to balance that with trying to escape so you can heal up. Dream Master captures that same feeling of tension, but gives you a few more ways to manage your run to the boss which forces you to use your brain more
• One thing working against you here is that there are a limited number of item slots, so you have that Resident Evil element of having to make decisions about what to carry around with you.
• There is also a “fog of war” mechanic where some rooms are shrouded in darkness and not completely revealed to you and you lose health for smacking into walls as you clear the fog of war. The best part about this is if you fail a run, you’ll do better next time if you’ve memorized some of the room layouts.
• Even the battle system is way better than it has any right to be for this era. There does not exist a “push A to win” mechanic like so many other RPG’s. Instead, you have different types of attacks with different accuracy rates, and enemy spells can always be dodged by pushing a certain direction inside a certain time window. This is all turn-based, but it makes it feel more “active”
• Finally, a couple things I almost always say something about: The soundtrack isn’t very good and the story makes no sense whatsoever (🌲). Neither of these things matter. They are made up for with pure GAMEPLAY. When you are playing the game, you do not care.