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.

• Full disclosure, this was not a 1cc run; I just fired it up, didn’t change from the default settings, and ran up against the wall till I hit the ending screen. That being said, you don’t hit the wall too often and the game is pretty easy. Would recommend as a starter-shmup for anybody
• The only thing technically wrong with Harmful Park as a game is that there are sections (especially near the end) where the contrast of enemy bullets is a little muddy and I had a hard time seeing them. It could use an accessibility setting for that
• However, everything else about the experience is really awesome. Great cute’em’up aesthetics, great sprite work, HUGE variety of enemies, and soundtracks for every level and boss.
• (Though, I would not say that the soundtrack is one that you can put on in the car and listen to any time - It sort of only works in the context of Harmful Park)
• If you could say that every shmup has a gimmick, the gimmick in this one is the weapons system. There are 4 distinct weapons you can switch between at any time, which by default are all assigned to the 4 shoulder buttons as hotkeys. Collecting an upgrade will power-up your current weapon, and getting hit downgrades your current weapon. For this reason, there’s an element of strategy where if you know you’re gonna get hit, you can switch over to a lesser-used weapon real quick and not reset a powered-up weapon
• But most of the time you really will not need to go that far. The game is fairly easy and losing all your powerups is not a death sentence like on Gradius.
• All 4 weapons are good in different situations, and also have their own special attacks associated with them - dropping a bomb does not always drop the same bomb. Learning to switch to the right weapon for the right job is part of the fun of the game, none are totally worthless (except maybe the pies, you can get through the game without that)
• Lastly, I’m pretty sure there is an english patch of this game, but I didn’t use it and you don’t really need it.