COMPLETE: Little Nemo: The Dream Master
Dec. 31st, 2019 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoWhat started out as modifying a spare NES Classic console for the sake of my corporeal sister & brother-in-law's Christmas present turned into re-flashing ours while we had the game list up like that, and poking at various games to make sure they worked turned into trying once more to tackle this old gem that has eluded me for so long.
Little Nemo: The Dream Master is an NES Capcom game based on an anime film (which, due to Development Hell reasons, never actually hit western shores until long after the game) which itself came from the classic Winsor McCay newspaper comic. That's why the game is set in 1905, you see.
You are the titular Little Nemo, a kid plagued with really weird dreams and difficulty sleeping through the night. Whisked off to Slumberland at the invitation of Princess Camille, you go through seven mostly unrelated plot-free stages before getting there and "oh by the way I need you to rescue my father King Morpheus from the Nightmare King who kidnapped him, here's a weapon, good luck" and there's your finale. For most of the game, your only "weapon" is an infinite supply of candy that can be lobbed about a foot in front of you, and even that can never defeat enemies but it does stun them for about one second for jumping-over-them purposes. There is exactly one screen in the entire game where this is useful; otherwise it's typically trouble than it's worth to add the extra step to the dodging process.
Your saving grace comes from a wide variety of friendly animal helpers that, after being fed some candy, allow you to ride/transform into/merge with them, granting you access to different movement and offensive options. The frog has a painfully slow walking speed but incredible leaps, can defeat enemies by Mario stomping them, and is one of the very few helpers in the game that can swim. The lizard has literally no attack or action button at all and a pretty terrible jump, so God help you if you have to take it through a section with enemies, but it has a great walking speed, can climb walls, is small enough to fit through narrow passages, and has an extra hit point. Etc.
For the most part, the formula is that Nemo and his various helpers must scour each map to find enough keys to unlock the door at the end that leads to the next stage. There are certain exceptions--House of Toys, for example, has no helpers at all and is just a long brutal auto-scrolling enemy and obstacle gantlet with all the keys you need just sitting there before and after the train ride of doom. Once you get to the final level, Nightmare Land, the key mechanic is done away with entirely and you even (finally) get a weapon you can use in your base form.
Being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay and graphics are mostly solid to fine and the music is nothing short of incredible. Everyone has their own personal favorites from this soundtrack (mine are House of Toys and Cloud Ruins) but the soundtrack overall is inarguably outstanding by every measure.
Also being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay starts out pleasant enough but very quickly takes a turn for the impossible. The game allows you to continue from the start menu as many times as you'd like if you run out of lives, but it has no save or password feature and that "Continue" option only persists as long as the play session does--90s kids would have been able to take as many tries as they needed to beat this game, but they would have had to do it all in one sitting. There is a stage select cheat code, but using that to continue where you left off or just to cheat like a cheater kind of gets into a whole big discussion in itself. This is not the first time I've ever beaten the endboss and seen the end credits, but younger me always skipped directly to him. I did make an aborted attempt to get through the entire game a few years ago, and made it all the way to the final stage (where younger me would have skipped to,) but the final stage is heinous (more on that in a bit) and I wasn't able to get all the way through the endbosses at that time. Today's entry marks the first time I've ever started it, played every stage in the middle, and finished it. I played this on an NES Classic, and saved my state between levels. Not to give myself an advantage, but just so I could, you know, go to bed.
Actually, you know what? Let's go ahead and tackle that discussion about difficulty and accessibility. That's a hot topic these days, with a lot of very salty arguing on the internet over whether FROM Software should include optional (optional!) "I just want to see the plot" can't-lose Tourist Modes or if that RUINS EVERYTHING and so on. That was something we in clan were discussing, even. Then, the day after we had this discussion, I finally conquered Little Nemo, whilexyzzysqrl took out an old white whale of her own. And now here we are, both reflecting on these in light of that.
First off, let it be said that Little Nemo's final level, Nightmare Land, is some hot and spicy bullshit. It's actually three levels, each with a boss, all in a row. The first boss is a pushover, and the third is only horrible until you find out that you can trick the AI. The second, however, almost pure RNG. Each sub-stage is checkpointed fairly generously so long as your lives supply holds, but if you Game Over and continue from the title screen then you have to start all of Nightmare Land over from the beginning. That means you have to get through three brutal stages in a row on a single continue's worth of lives, which is... whoof. That's a lot to ask, Capcom.
I beat it once using the NESC's savestate function after each boss, just to tackle each stage separately without having to do the whole goddamn thing over every time I wanted to try that fucking stingray again. And I got there, eventually. But it felt... I don't know. Unsatisfying, somehow. Like I'd cheated, even though all I was doing was correcting what is honestly a very poor design decision from Capcom's perspective. Those stages should have been separated and checkpointed across continues. There's no valid reason to make the player do the entire run on one continue. All I did was correct a very bad design flaw and add in a feature that should have been there from the beginning--if Capcom had thought of this back in 1990, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. And yet... it just... murgh.
I came all this way to vanquish this unconquered foe from my childhood, and doing it that way still felt like we had unfinished business.
So I went back and did it again, legitimately. I did still quicksave between sub-stages as a precaution, but that ended up being moot because I did it all on one credit and never had to load any of those states anyway. In my final run, I did all of Nightmare Land only losing two lives total (both in the platforming section after the first boss, on the way to the second.) The trick is to just get obscenely lucky with the second boss, it turns out; once I actually somehow got him on the first try of that second run, then everything fell into place from there. The third area is... hard but not as hard platforming-wise as the second was, and the third and final boss can be cheesed if you know where to stand.
When I did it, I... God. I did it. With no questions or asterisks, this time. And it did feel amazing. It felt... everything the git gud Dark Souls crowd crows about when they're doing their gatekeeping bullshit, it's about the feeling of triumph when you finally get to the top of the mountain bluh bluh, I did feel that. It was such a powerful feeling of elation that I cried, compared to the first run which felt unsatisfying because I'd "cheated." Those people are right at least about how that feeling is like nothing else in the world.
However.
The option should be there, you know? I chose to go back and do a 1CC. That was on me, and that feeling was my reward for that choice. That's... not for everyone. Nightmare Land is fucking brutal. It's not even pleasantly brutal-if-that's-what-you're-into like a Souls game; it's just poorly designed and unfair. The deaths do not feel like your fault, or like there's anything you could have learned from or done differently, save maybe doing the entire rest of the stage flawlessly just so you have enough health saved up that you can afford to facetank that part with the unavoidable hit. The second boss's movements are luck. Three stages in a row on one continue is bullshit. Anyone who would rather play this game with sensible design decisions for humans is also 100% right. I completely agree with the moral of Xyzzy's story, is what I'm trying to say here.
Especially because... like... everyone has their own guidelines for where they want to draw the line, anyway. I started Nightmare Land from scratch (I Game Over'd somewhere in the middle of it, continued from the title screen, and thus started Nightmare Land from its beginning) and did it in one continue without needing to savescum any further from there, but I got lucky on the second boss and I cheesed the AI on the third. Is this still a legitimate clear? Or am I only a real Gamer if I do it without exploiting the third boss's patterns? Or do I need to do the entire game on one credit? Are breaks and handicaps in your favor that the game itself includes (the ability to continue infinitely from the title screen, an endboss with weak AI) different from externally applied assistance (the NESC's savestate function?) What about using the savestate function between levels just so I could go to bed and do more stages next time? Is it okay so long as I don't use it to scum hits or whatever, or do I really need to do the entire game in one real-life sitting? Are infinite continues valid if the game itself gives them to you? Would they still be if it didn't?
Meanwhile, Xyzzy exploited a bug (and where do bugs fall if you're differentiating methods included in the game versus externally applied assistance?), her white whale had a weak ending anyway, and she had a whole moral of the story about how cheating freely is valid because the journey is what you make of it. (I swear I didn't see her entry until after I just poured all of my own thoughts out here. Oops.)
Ultimately, purism is... whatever the purist in question defines it to be, I guess, and their definitions are frequently self-serving and hypocritical. Hell, I can't even keep to my own standards without changing my mind from game to game; note that the final victorious conquest of Little Nemo came right after I gave up on Down Ward. I guess all I can say is that games are meant to be played in the way that makes you, personally, feel good about having played them that way. If Xyzzy and I both feel good about finally getting our respective childhood hurdles cleared and neither of us have any regrets about how we did it, then we each played them correctly. There are a near-infinite ways to split hairs over "this is just a convenience feature; that is cheating" and all you can really do is try not to be an asshole about your standards versus others'.
Little Nemo: The Dream Master is an NES Capcom game based on an anime film (which, due to Development Hell reasons, never actually hit western shores until long after the game) which itself came from the classic Winsor McCay newspaper comic. That's why the game is set in 1905, you see.
You are the titular Little Nemo, a kid plagued with really weird dreams and difficulty sleeping through the night. Whisked off to Slumberland at the invitation of Princess Camille, you go through seven mostly unrelated plot-free stages before getting there and "oh by the way I need you to rescue my father King Morpheus from the Nightmare King who kidnapped him, here's a weapon, good luck" and there's your finale. For most of the game, your only "weapon" is an infinite supply of candy that can be lobbed about a foot in front of you, and even that can never defeat enemies but it does stun them for about one second for jumping-over-them purposes. There is exactly one screen in the entire game where this is useful; otherwise it's typically trouble than it's worth to add the extra step to the dodging process.
Your saving grace comes from a wide variety of friendly animal helpers that, after being fed some candy, allow you to ride/transform into/merge with them, granting you access to different movement and offensive options. The frog has a painfully slow walking speed but incredible leaps, can defeat enemies by Mario stomping them, and is one of the very few helpers in the game that can swim. The lizard has literally no attack or action button at all and a pretty terrible jump, so God help you if you have to take it through a section with enemies, but it has a great walking speed, can climb walls, is small enough to fit through narrow passages, and has an extra hit point. Etc.
For the most part, the formula is that Nemo and his various helpers must scour each map to find enough keys to unlock the door at the end that leads to the next stage. There are certain exceptions--House of Toys, for example, has no helpers at all and is just a long brutal auto-scrolling enemy and obstacle gantlet with all the keys you need just sitting there before and after the train ride of doom. Once you get to the final level, Nightmare Land, the key mechanic is done away with entirely and you even (finally) get a weapon you can use in your base form.
Being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay and graphics are mostly solid to fine and the music is nothing short of incredible. Everyone has their own personal favorites from this soundtrack (mine are House of Toys and Cloud Ruins) but the soundtrack overall is inarguably outstanding by every measure.
Also being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay starts out pleasant enough but very quickly takes a turn for the impossible. The game allows you to continue from the start menu as many times as you'd like if you run out of lives, but it has no save or password feature and that "Continue" option only persists as long as the play session does--90s kids would have been able to take as many tries as they needed to beat this game, but they would have had to do it all in one sitting. There is a stage select cheat code, but using that to continue where you left off or just to cheat like a cheater kind of gets into a whole big discussion in itself. This is not the first time I've ever beaten the endboss and seen the end credits, but younger me always skipped directly to him. I did make an aborted attempt to get through the entire game a few years ago, and made it all the way to the final stage (where younger me would have skipped to,) but the final stage is heinous (more on that in a bit) and I wasn't able to get all the way through the endbosses at that time. Today's entry marks the first time I've ever started it, played every stage in the middle, and finished it. I played this on an NES Classic, and saved my state between levels. Not to give myself an advantage, but just so I could, you know, go to bed.
Actually, you know what? Let's go ahead and tackle that discussion about difficulty and accessibility. That's a hot topic these days, with a lot of very salty arguing on the internet over whether FROM Software should include optional (optional!) "I just want to see the plot" can't-lose Tourist Modes or if that RUINS EVERYTHING and so on. That was something we in clan were discussing, even. Then, the day after we had this discussion, I finally conquered Little Nemo, while
xyzzysqrl took out an old white whale of her own. And now here we are, both reflecting on these in light of that.First off, let it be said that Little Nemo's final level, Nightmare Land, is some hot and spicy bullshit. It's actually three levels, each with a boss, all in a row. The first boss is a pushover, and the third is only horrible until you find out that you can trick the AI. The second, however, almost pure RNG. Each sub-stage is checkpointed fairly generously so long as your lives supply holds, but if you Game Over and continue from the title screen then you have to start all of Nightmare Land over from the beginning. That means you have to get through three brutal stages in a row on a single continue's worth of lives, which is... whoof. That's a lot to ask, Capcom.
I beat it once using the NESC's savestate function after each boss, just to tackle each stage separately without having to do the whole goddamn thing over every time I wanted to try that fucking stingray again. And I got there, eventually. But it felt... I don't know. Unsatisfying, somehow. Like I'd cheated, even though all I was doing was correcting what is honestly a very poor design decision from Capcom's perspective. Those stages should have been separated and checkpointed across continues. There's no valid reason to make the player do the entire run on one continue. All I did was correct a very bad design flaw and add in a feature that should have been there from the beginning--if Capcom had thought of this back in 1990, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. And yet... it just... murgh.
I came all this way to vanquish this unconquered foe from my childhood, and doing it that way still felt like we had unfinished business.
So I went back and did it again, legitimately. I did still quicksave between sub-stages as a precaution, but that ended up being moot because I did it all on one credit and never had to load any of those states anyway. In my final run, I did all of Nightmare Land only losing two lives total (both in the platforming section after the first boss, on the way to the second.) The trick is to just get obscenely lucky with the second boss, it turns out; once I actually somehow got him on the first try of that second run, then everything fell into place from there. The third area is... hard but not as hard platforming-wise as the second was, and the third and final boss can be cheesed if you know where to stand.
When I did it, I... God. I did it. With no questions or asterisks, this time. And it did feel amazing. It felt... everything the git gud Dark Souls crowd crows about when they're doing their gatekeeping bullshit, it's about the feeling of triumph when you finally get to the top of the mountain bluh bluh, I did feel that. It was such a powerful feeling of elation that I cried, compared to the first run which felt unsatisfying because I'd "cheated." Those people are right at least about how that feeling is like nothing else in the world.
However.
The option should be there, you know? I chose to go back and do a 1CC. That was on me, and that feeling was my reward for that choice. That's... not for everyone. Nightmare Land is fucking brutal. It's not even pleasantly brutal-if-that's-what-you're-into like a Souls game; it's just poorly designed and unfair. The deaths do not feel like your fault, or like there's anything you could have learned from or done differently, save maybe doing the entire rest of the stage flawlessly just so you have enough health saved up that you can afford to facetank that part with the unavoidable hit. The second boss's movements are luck. Three stages in a row on one continue is bullshit. Anyone who would rather play this game with sensible design decisions for humans is also 100% right. I completely agree with the moral of Xyzzy's story, is what I'm trying to say here.
Especially because... like... everyone has their own guidelines for where they want to draw the line, anyway. I started Nightmare Land from scratch (I Game Over'd somewhere in the middle of it, continued from the title screen, and thus started Nightmare Land from its beginning) and did it in one continue without needing to savescum any further from there, but I got lucky on the second boss and I cheesed the AI on the third. Is this still a legitimate clear? Or am I only a real Gamer if I do it without exploiting the third boss's patterns? Or do I need to do the entire game on one credit? Are breaks and handicaps in your favor that the game itself includes (the ability to continue infinitely from the title screen, an endboss with weak AI) different from externally applied assistance (the NESC's savestate function?) What about using the savestate function between levels just so I could go to bed and do more stages next time? Is it okay so long as I don't use it to scum hits or whatever, or do I really need to do the entire game in one real-life sitting? Are infinite continues valid if the game itself gives them to you? Would they still be if it didn't?
Meanwhile, Xyzzy exploited a bug (and where do bugs fall if you're differentiating methods included in the game versus externally applied assistance?), her white whale had a weak ending anyway, and she had a whole moral of the story about how cheating freely is valid because the journey is what you make of it. (I swear I didn't see her entry until after I just poured all of my own thoughts out here. Oops.)
Ultimately, purism is... whatever the purist in question defines it to be, I guess, and their definitions are frequently self-serving and hypocritical. Hell, I can't even keep to my own standards without changing my mind from game to game; note that the final victorious conquest of Little Nemo came right after I gave up on Down Ward. I guess all I can say is that games are meant to be played in the way that makes you, personally, feel good about having played them that way. If Xyzzy and I both feel good about finally getting our respective childhood hurdles cleared and neither of us have any regrets about how we did it, then we each played them correctly. There are a near-infinite ways to split hairs over "this is just a convenience feature; that is cheating" and all you can really do is try not to be an asshole about your standards versus others'.
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Date: 2020-01-01 05:50 am (UTC)