A Journey into Dreamland: Little Nemo on the NES

About a month ago I was introduced to the YouTube channel of Hungry Goriya, and I honestly don't know how I hadn't heard of them before (proof that the YouTube algorithm must be awful)! They had a video called 9 NES Favorites (So far), and the way she spoke of these games made me want to really try them for myself. Not try as in fire up the emulator and play for a few minutes and put them away kind of try, but really sit down and try to learn these games. Two of them on the list I had finished already, Kid Icarus and Darkwing Duck, and I'd only played a few of the others.

One of the games on her list was Little Nemo: The Dream Master by Capcom. This was a game I'd tried maybe once on a rental as a kid, and then a couple of times as an adult I gave a half-hearted try on emulator, but it never seemed to click with me. I'd always found that strange, since it's NES Capcom, and a later NES title at that, so many of their games from this time were so good! So after hearing Hungry Goriya rave about these games, I decided to go back and really give Little Nemo a try. I wouldn't say it completely clicked this time, but I was able to find plenty to like in my latest playthrough.

Little Nemo is a licensed game that I only have the vaguest familiarity with. Originally it was a comic strip in a newspaper in the early 1900s, but I believe this NES game is a tie in with a feature film that came out in 1989. I've only seen a few of the strips and I have not seen the movie, but I'm almost certain that throughout neither of them does he toss candy at creatures to get them to help him, which is primarily what you're doing in this game. And except for the characters that appear in short segments usually at the beginning of a level to say one or two sentences to you, I don't think you're missing much by not knowing the background of Nemo.

In this game, you play as Nemo, a young boy who on his own can't do a whole lot except jump. He has no way of attacking except for tossing candy, which allows him to befriend certain animals that would otherwise harm him. Sometimes he rides them, like with a gorilla, and sometimes for whatever reason he's wearing a suit of them, like with the bumblebee. Using his animal friends grants him additional abilities, such as a frog that can jump high, or a lizard that can climb walls. Some allies have an attack ability and some do not, so it's important to know which you can attack with, and which you'll need to avoid trouble while riding.

I think my biggest problem with the game as a young kid, and which still gave me trouble for quite a while this time too, was how easy I found it to take a hit. On his own Nemo has no attack. And with his animal buddies, you sometimes have an offensive move but often you're now a bigger target and easier to hit! Nemo himself only has three hit points. Your allies have varying health meters, some at three and some as large as five. But even in the first stage of the game, for a while I had real trouble getting to the end of the level without dying repeatedly because I was always getting hit by so many enemies. Now some of this comes down to just memorizing where enemies are and their patterns, and I did get better as time went on. But I can't help but compare this to other Capcom NES games of the era, like Ducktales and Rescue Rangers, and I think even with the same size health meters or smaller, it was easier to avoid getting hit because you had offensive moves to fight off the dangers. But it's hard for me to say objectively, I mean the Amazon level of Ducktales feels much easier to me, but maybe that's because I've played that level hundreds of times and have the muscle memory to get me through it without thinking too much about it.

There are eight levels, and throughout all of them (except the final level) you'll be searching for a certain number of keys to open a door at the end of the stage. It's an interesting change from other side scrolling games in that you are encouraged to explore your surroundings more instead of just making a bee line for the exit. You also need to figure out what characters you can befriend in the level and utilize to get to out of the way areas.

The only time I found this to be detrimental was one of the later levels in the game, which takes place in Nemo's house, but you're very small, about the size of a mouse. There are I believe six keys to find and they are all in very out of the way places. The problem in this case comes from the checkpoint system, or lack thereof. Most of the levels are short enough that starting from the beginning isn't that punishing, especially since it WILL remember which keys you're gotten after you lose a life, so if you needed to befriend a lizard in order to climb up a tree that had hazards to get to a key on top, you can skip that. But in this particular level, in order to reach the next key you need to have gotten to all the points before. For example, you might have needed a frog to jump up high enough to reach an area that had a lizard so you could climb a wall to get to a bee and that been can reach the final key floating near the ceiling. So even if you get all the keys on the way, you still need to do all of those things again because you can't get to that last key without the bee, and you need the lizard to get to the bee, and you need the frog to get to the lizard. The level was equal parts clever and infuriating!

But I would say those frustrations were pretty rare throughout my playthrough. Most of the time what I found was a unique spin on the traditional platformer that we had already become so accustomed to a few years into the NES' lifespan. With the ability to befriend enemies, levels open up in unique and fun ways, and at times offer the player some options on how they'd like to tackle a level.

I can still see where my younger self found frustration with the game, that opening level is so easy to take three careless hits in, and I don't think I was accustomed to searching every nook and cranny of a level to find things to get through the levels. While games like Ducktales and Rescue Rangers had interesting branching paths, you could pick and choose where you wanted to go (well, until Ducktales Remastered made you go through all of it!). Overall I'm really glad I stuck with it this time, because it really is a high quality NES game, and it's great to find something new to you from an era where you feel you played all the best the system had to offer. I'm planning on giving all the NES games on Hungry Goriya's video a fair shake, and I'm excited to get introduced to some new NES classics.