Little Nemo: The Dream Master (NES Review)
May 16, 2024 22 Comments
Little Nemo: The Dream Master
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released September, 1990
Designed by Tatsuya Minami
Produced by Tokuro Fujiwara
Published by Capcom
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The object is to find the keys. The meta object is to avoid throwing your controller through the screen.
Capcom was able to do some amazing things with the 1983 hardware standard that was really created only to be able to run a convincing version of Donkey Kong. By 1990, they were releasing instant classics like Mega Man 2 & 3, DuckTales, and Rescue Rangers. It’s one of the hottest hot-streaks in the entire history of gaming, so much that a game like The Little Mermaid sticks out so much more because it’s this oddly subdued and kind of boring blip on the radar that’s so clearly on a lower level than the highs they were reaching. I mention that because one game often lumped in with the hot streak is Little Nemo: The Dream Master. It’s one of the most famous NES games, and maybe their highest profile NES game that never got a re-release. And I don’t get it at all. Little Nemo is one of the absolute worst NES games I’ve played yet. A title that has no redeeming value from a gameplay perspective. Sure is pretty though. Well, I mean, assuming you overlook the endless flicker. And then it’s mostly just stark colors in the background. In fact, I’d say this has the most overrated graphics on the NES. Most of the settings are pretty dull and there’s only one set piece that stands out. It’s not ugly to look at, but it ain’t all that either.
I would not have been able to use the bee suit if autofire wasn’t an option. Christ, and I thought the arcade version of Balloon Fight was bad.
You have to search levels for six to seven hidden keys. Well, at least to start, and “searching” isn’t always involved. The sixth level just puts the six keys right next to the exit. You can barely jump and there’s no ropes or ladders to climb. The only “advanced” move you can do is swim. Otherwise, to navigate, you have to use a variety of animals that you put to sleep by feeding them candy. Candy famously being something that puts you to sleep. The implied drugging of animals should have been good for a laugh, but actually playing Little Nemo: The GHB Master is agony. Oh, and everything kills you, INCLUDING the animals that you pacify with your roofies. There’s even a window between feeding them the third and presumably lethal piece of candy and the moment they actually finish swallowing it and slip into a coma where you can still be damaged by touching them. Without the animals, Nemo gets no offensive move until the last couple stages. You can stun enemies by throwing candy at them, but I only found this useful two or three times over the course of the game, especially if there’s no animals around. Capcom usually does such a good job with enemies, so it’s downright shocking that the combat is so boring and so needlessly cruel in Little Nemo.
This is one of those games where spikes are instakills, no matter how much life you have left. Oh, and see that little evil dandelion seed? They all but ruin the game.
What’s truly remarkable is that every opportunity Little Nemo has to ping a cheap shot on players is taken. Enemies are always placed in a way to assure that you will take damage, especially the dandelion seeds that heat-seek you and continuously rain from the sky in several sections. There’s no elegance at all to the enemy design, placement, or combat in Little Nemo. No finesse. No balance to it. It feels like a sadist said “wouldn’t it be funny if we put this enemy here?” Not really, because it just makes the whole game miserable to play. Often with the old NES games that people call “Nintendo Hard” I can at least see some redeeming quality that makes me understand why someone would convince themselves it was a good game. You know, when they were children. Battletoads has some good fisticuffs and amazing OOMPH for a two-button NES brawler. Batman had fun combat and, well, it’s Batman. But Little Nemo? I literally have nothing positive to say about this one. Having decent-to-good graphics becomes obnoxious when the gameplay is as terrible as Nemo’s is.
I quit the US version and switched to the Japanese one on the off chance that maybe it was easier, even though Cutting Room Floor didn’t mention it. Some games have easier versions in different regions, most famously The Adventures of Bayou Billy (which I reviewed in my Definitive Review of Zapper/Super Scope games). Sadly, this one was not such a game. The only difference was a couple characters had cigars in their mouths. By the way, in the train stage you need six keys to unlock the door, but it gives you two at the start and two at the finish. Between those two points, the train ride itself, which is the entire stage, offers up five keys. You can actually finish with nine. As far as I could tell, this is the only stage that does that.
The levels themselves aren’t particularly well made. Besides the train level as seen in the above picture, the stages are sprawling, but in a way that makes them feel underpopulated and empty. The one and only consistent theme is dickhead enemy placement. Wherever you have to climb, make a jump, or change screens, enemies will be positioned in a way where you’ll almost certainly take damage. The animal helpers that have means to attack are basically worthless, with the exception of the frog. With it, you can jump on enemies in the classic Mario hop ‘n bop tradition. The others might as well not have an attack at all. The giant gorilla’s punch barely extends beyond its body and has a big recovery delay. The same with the hermit crab, and if you do miss, you end up buried in the sand. Usually if I tried to play offensively, I was just as likely to take damage. This is mostly because your hit box apparently becomes MASSIVE, while enemies, well, aren’t.
And then you have moments like this one, where the animals walk away from you and hide where you can’t get to them WHILE other enemies continue to attack, and you might have to wait quite a while before they actually move back to a useful position. In fact, usually if there’s an animal close by, there’s some kind of targeting enemy zeroing in on you while you’re trying to subdue the animal. The evil dandelion seeds, or these birds dropping eggs on you, or tadpoles if you’re underwater. It always takes three candies to put an animal to sleep, and usually the area where they’re located is closed in and cramped. Remember, the animals hurt you if you touch them. There’s so many no-win situations. I’m guessing maybe 0.1% of all players ever beat this fair and square and most “fans” are fans in the sense they played it for a single rental, maybe two, made it to the second world, third at most, and quit. Unless they had a Game Genie or used the level select code.
The collision might be the worst of any popular game I’ve played. For me, the most telling section in the entire game is when you have a mouse with a mallet that can break through special blocks, but the blocks seem to have a single pixel of vulnerability that isn’t in the center. Even standing right in front of them, the hammer often just plain doesn’t work. It just clips through the breakable blocks like they’re a background wall. At first, I thought they were. I spent a while looking for the right blocks, because it was just unfathomable to me that even the worst Capcom game could mess up such a commonplace gaming trope as “breaking a block that’s in your way with the special block breaking item.” You know, that thing that’s so common, even from games of this era, that it’s a cliché? Well, the first blocks were the right blocks. The breaking block mechanic is just broken. I had to sort of jump at the blocks from an angle to get the collision to register. There’s tons of NES games that could do the “break a block” mechanic. How could they not get this right? This is basic stuff to screw up. I walked away from Little Nemo with the impression that the people who worked on this game didn’t want this assignment and simply didn’t give a sh*t how it turned out.
Right through the blocks.
It really speaks to how popular Capcom was during this era that even Little Nemo: The Dream Master can be famous for being a fun game. I do have a question for its fans: did you actually play this for more than a rental? Did you ever make any progress at all? Without using a Game Genie or Level Select code? Because I kept waiting for this legendary game to show up, and all that happened was one GOTCHA after another. That is, when the world isn’t just a dead maze of spikes or “puzzles” that involve breakable blocks that don’t want to break. Even after the keys are ditched and the combat is opened up, it’s not like you spend most of your time fighting enemies. You still need the animals, which means you’re mostly not using the scepter. Instead, that’s saved for the three spongy, lazily-designed boss fights. Capcom usually does great boss battles, but these are more about sponginess and hard-to-hit attack patterns. Oh, and you have to charge-up the scepter for maximum effect, because of course you do. I have never been more baffled by a game’s popularity than Little Nemo’s. It’s never fun. Not even a little bit. In fact, it feels like the brakes are slammed every time the potential for fun presents itself, as if the developers said “whoa, whoa, let’s not do it like that. Someone might enjoy this!” The big hook, the use of the animals, is subdued and dull because they aren’t really aren’t useful for anything but temporary transportation. You don’t feel empowered in them. It often feels like you’re just opening up whole new ways to take cheap shots and lose lives.
To be honest, I expected the dandelion seeds to rain down on you during the last boss. I don’t know what it says about Little Nemo’s design that the three bosses couldn’t compare to a basic enemy.
This is the one time where I’m completely convinced that nobody actually likes Little Nemo and that they only say they do because critics gave it high marks. That includes other critics, some of which place this on “best of NES” lists. Are you f*cking sh*tting me? I just refuse to believe anyone had fun with this, but nobody wants to be the one standing alone saying otherwise. The attitude seems to be hey, if you’re not having fun, it’s probably your fault you’re not, right? After all, everyone else is having a good time. Why aren’t you? It couldn’t be because the game is impossibly difficult, or that the level design is really empty and boring, or the collision is god awful, or that some mechanics just plain don’t work, or that taking over a fairly large variety of animals isn’t anywhere near as enjoyable as it seems like it would be on a paper, right? Actually, yea, all those things are true and it’s okay to come out and say it: Little Nemo is Capcom’s worst NES game that doesn’t involve Micronics, and hell, I’m willing to say it’s their absolute worst 8-bit game. At least Ghosts ‘n Goblins has a fun theme to it and is remarkably true to the coin-op. Little Nemo doesn’t have that going for it, nor is it so inept that it’s actually kind of funny, like 1942. Little Nemo is the terrible game that walks like a masterpiece, and I absolutely f*cking despise it.
Verdict: NO!
Indie Gamer Chick 
Wow. I’m sorry you had a bad experience with this game. I owned it as a kid and I loved it. Yes, it’s very challenging and there was one stage toward the very end that I couldn’t finish without game genie, but I think I could do it now if I came back to it.
It was different from a lot of the games that had come out at the time – having to search stages for keys instead of just rushing straight toward the end. The use of animals was a matter of strategy because each one had a specific skill you needed to utilize. I thought the stages were unique and really played upon the dream world that we were meant to inhabit. And the thing that kept me coming back was the game’s soundtrack. I absolutely adore the music in this game.
Apparently, a newer version of the game is being made. Not a remaster necessarily but another game based on the comic. There was also an arcade game that is drastically different from the NES title. I definitely want to see more content from the Nemo universe!
I guess you missed that I did the arcade game yesterday 😛
Ahh!!! Will report back 😂
Been reading your blog for a few months now and I just want to say your brutal honesty when it comes to games with this sort of reputation is refreshing, even when I don’t particularly agree (this game being one such case; I enjoyed it a lot as a kid despite not being able to get any further than Night Sea without cheating, lol).
(I replied to the wrong comment before, sorry :P) Thanks, and hey, people mostly disagree with me anyway. As as they don’t take it personally. But lately most people aren’t. I didn’t love Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I or II on the NES but people got it. I think they get why I don’t like Little Nemo, and I’m not trying to convince any fans of games they’re wrong. This isn’t war. It’s the games we like and dislike, right?
i grew up with this game, i loved it 😂 along with contra, bubble bubble ect.. I always thought SMB was boring as a kid. Well until SNES , Yoshi was a game changer. Well SMB3 was good with the tanookie suit and the obscure boot used to navigate small piranha plants.
I need to do the NES Bubble Bobble, but hey, Contra is one of my favs. https://indiegamerchick.com/2024/10/20/contra-nes-review/
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Speaking as a 40-something who’s gone through nostalgia phases, I find it refreshing to see the perspectives of people who don’t have nostalgia for the stuff I liked as a kid. And I did like this game as a kid, and even beat it, cheap and full of unfairness as it was. It felt special every time I made it to a new level. And I really loved the “dream” theme.
One thing I’ve learned about myself as an adult, is that I’ve always been a “theme” gamer. That is, I liked games less for the gameplay (which was still important – it couldn’t be bad gameplay, but gameplay was usually not the first draw) and more for the overall feel I got from playing it.
In fact, I’ve written an essay on how I experience nostalgia not from revisiting things from my past that have aged like milk, but instead from trying new things that I enjoy for the same reasons as my childhood things. If you’re interested in the essay, it’s here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1onRznUOxwRVxFTyTOed0urlyIwHewF2ThUyHOSKz-fY/edit?usp=sharing
(Hope it’s okay to share!)
But yeah, I liked Little Nemo more for its theme of being in these dream worlds and then the nightmare world (which is funny, as everything is trying to kill Nemo in the “good” dream worlds), than I did for its gameplay, which I found to be… okay and acceptable in my childhood standards.
Sure, and I’m reading it now actually! You know, I don’t understand how anyone could like Little Nemo for the NES but that’s not to say I don’t WANT to understand. I rely heavily on readers like you for context because I wasn’t there. I’ve said this to other people here: I was born in 1989 and my first consoles that were bought for me (my dad was one of those gadget heads who bought things like the NES, SNES, and Genesis because they were the new hotness and trendy, bought one or two games, and then just kept them around for visitors’ kids until I came around) were the PS1 for Christmas in 1996 and then especially the N64 for my 9th birthday in July 1998. My first day one console was the Dreamcast. Most of my readers are 10 years older than me on average (and it’s been that way from the start, since July 1, 2011, when I was about to turn 22 and I opened IGC), and that’s two full generations of consoles. 10 years is a long time, but there’s more to it. You guys got something I didn’t get. I *JUST MISSED* witnessing and experiencing the dawn of gaming. Nobody can ever take that from you. You were part of history. I’m not. You guys got to get your minds blown by a drip feed of innovation, from Arcades to Atari to NES to Genesis to 3D gaming to VR. I didn’t get that. My first consoles WERE 3D consoles and I’ve had the internet in my home my whole life so that wasn’t a very big deal to me when it merged with gaming. A short ten year age gap and yet the ramification of that are galactic in size. To put it simply YOU F*CKERS WERE SPOILED! 😛
Spoiled… maybe, but I certainly wish I was younger and in better health! Though it was really cool to watch gaming grow up. I’ve literally witnessed the full growth of video game soundtracks for example.
Like, here’s the four phases they went through:
And I got to get really excited over the big changes. As amazing as it felt getting the NES for Christmas at age 7, what was truly exciting and felt super new was getting the N64 for Christmas at age 15. Because games were going 3D. And it felt like gaming would change in a huge way forever, and it did! New ideas were being made that weren’t possible before, due entirely to the third dimension. I hate to sound like the stereotypical old person whining about the younger generation, but I do think that kind of “holy shit, everything is going to be new from now on” feeling is super rare.
For me, even things like the soundtracks were in place as they are today, more or less. I mean my Final Fantasy games were full orchestral soundtracks. I didn’t get the innovation drip so much as the polish drip. I started with the PS1 and Crash Bandicoot which was fine but gaming didn’t hook me yet. Then Banjo Kazooie and a few months later Ocarina of Time did, but everything was pointy and blocky. The one aspect of gaming history I got to experience was those points smoothing out. I got the fog vanishing and draw distance increasing. I got to witness the learning curve of 3D cameras in real time. That last one is basically the only major gaming invention that I got to experience first hand, whereas your gen got to see pretty much everything, or going off your editorial, you seem to have just missed the first home console era with Atari and INTV but you were still around for the freshness of gaming as an entity. And when I say “spoiled” tongue firmly in cheek because the truth is I envy it. I envy the arcade era because I know I would have loved it.
I look at some of the incredible stuff today, and I think, “My childhood self would have loved this!!” But you’re right that I did get to witness the polish of 2D, followed by the introduction of 3D (there were a few rudimentary 3D games even back on the Atari computer actually, but true 3D was super rare and really hard to pull off), and then like you said, the polish. The N64 had synthesized music (though Castlevania for N64 used a real recording of a violin in its theme song), and the PS1 had full recorded music.
But yeah, everything after that was mostly polish, along with the invention of new genres. But there was a bit more: If there was anything that truly changed things with gaming in the 21st century, it was two things: the internet with online gaming, and the indie scene with the colossal explosion of new games being made. Those two things can’t be discounted, as the internet did make new game ideas possible, and the indie scene caused many many new game ideas to be created. Some of the games I’ve loved the most have been indie games.
I’m glad to be gaming during the time of the indie boom. It really does make gaming continue to feel fresh for me. As game consoles were getting more powerful, budgets kept going up and that meant smaller companies couldn’t compete, until now, when there’s tons of them. The indie scene arrived when we were starting to really need it!
I don’t want to poo-poo polish as innovation, either. I’m happy that I was 11-12 years old and saw the jump from PS1/N64 to PS2/Gamecube. HUGE leap. In terms of polish, probably the last big leap gaming would ever make when you think about it. Every new generation that’s followed has been incrementally more advanced, but it feels like the modern era began during my childhood with those platforms, with Dreamcast awkwardly stuck between them as a sort of prelude.
The lack of nostalgia has no doubt helped my site, but it’s also a misleading. I mean come on, I’m nostalgic as anyone. It’s why I struggle really badly with reviewing the games of my childhood. Everyone wants me to do Banjo-Kazooie and I’m f*cking terrified of it because how do I review…….. MY childhood? In a way, I’m almost reviewing your childhoods and that’s a safe space for me. Games of MY childhood that I loved? I don’t think any of those have been my best work except Shadow of the Colossus and even that is fringe childhood. I didn’t get to play that at launch because I couldn’t play games for a while after November 2003 until mid 2005 really and then I got epilepsy and that further complicated things. But now I’m getting nostalgic for games that I reviewed when I started IGC. I was just a kid, really. I turned 22 ten days after I started IGC. Now I’m old enough to understand why older people still called me “kid” when I was 22. I don’t know any 22 year old who has their sh*t together. EVERY game of the past is someone’s simpler time, and the only thing that makes me different from my statistical average reader is that ten year age gap.
There’s a video of the 3D Spider-Man games that shows their evolution over time, and it’s telling how rapidly graphics evolved early on, and how much smaller the improvements were later on.
But I think there’s more than just polish in the video game industry. It also went through stages of growth similar to human stages. Like, you could say the Atari years were the infancy. Simple one stick, one button games that either had no ending, or ended after 10 minutes and then repeated slightly harder.
The adolescence, though, was really the PS1/N64 era. The rating system was invented, so they could just slap a “mature” on the box and then put blood, boobs and bad words in there. And lots of little kids thought they were so grown up to be allowed to play such games. It was sad.
I’d argue that the industry truly reached adulthood in the mid-2010s. True maturity is knowing when and where to use “mature” themes. And it’s also recognizing that something doesn’t have to be for you, but can be for other people. And that sometimes it’s better to chase your dreams than to accept money to dilute them.
In other words, the massive burst of the indie scene and the sheer amount of variety we got from it. New ideas for every demographic made by more demographics. It’s awesome. Sometimes something that comes from the heart sells really well, like Undertale. Usually it becomes obscure, like Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. But when it comes from the heart (with possible tweaks made to make it more accessible to a bigger audience, such as difficulty tweaks or explanations), you get truly original ideas made by people who create games for the sake of making games. And not businesspeople who assume every gamer is on average a 12-year-old boy who thinks curse words and blood make you cool.
I reviewed my share of indie games at http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/author/cgallagher/ if you’re interested in checking it out. (I also reviewed two retro games that are rather distinct in their own right. One of which was a big part of my childhood…)
What a thoughtful piece. “The Feeling” for me is yeah, I don’t have a term for it like that but my stated mission is I want to be reduced back to that smiling, giggling 9 year old playing Banjo-Kazooie and having just enough awareness to realize the experience was life changing. I knew on some level on my birthday that this game I was playing was changing my life. That this………. ridiculously shaped controller in my hands was plugging me into a new passion in my life. That’s what I’ve been chasing.
It’s not impossible to get, but yeah, very rare. Mario Odyssey and New Pokemon Snap did it for me. You never know. Dead Cells did it for too. Totally different game. Totally different play style, and a woman in her 30s now on the edge of her seat, smiling and giggling like an awe-struck child. I crave that. That’s what I seek, and I’m open to the possibility that any game could potentially do it. Unless it stars Bubsy.
If I may make a suggestion for your editorial, Chris I think you might have a winning idea for an entire series there. The thoughtful comparison of then and now with awareness of where you were at that point in your life versus now? Like, you could probably make an entire blog about that with each segment being different posts by themselves. It’s a really thought-provoking idea.
I’m glad you liked my essay! I wrote it because I really felt like I should, but I didn’t have a place to put it. It would be nice to have it be featured somewhere, somehow.
One thing I’ve noticed that new things have to do in order to recreate that childhood feeling is to be either a super new experience (like when I went on a cruise ship for the first time in 2019, which really felt like something truly new for me, because it was), or a heavily enhanced version of the old experience. Basically, as a kid, things feel both newer and bigger. Time feels like it moves slower, so a half hour feels like what an hour or more does to us now. A world that feels small to us now felt huge back then. We can’t bring back that “WOW” feeling unless it’s on a bigger scale.
And I do remember some of my “wow” moments. Like being 6 years old and playing Ultima III on the Atari computer, and I stole a ship, rode it around, and got sucked into a whirlpool I was trying to escape. My team regained consciousness, and immediately my instinct was to check the map (which the game lets you do a limited number of times, which honestly helped make the world feel even bigger) and I was shocked to find a totally new map unlike the one I was in before. The whirlpool had taken me to a different world. And as a little kid, two thoughts went into my head: “THIS GAME IS HUGE!!!!” and “How many worlds ARE there?” (Answer: two.)
How often can I get experiences like that as an adult? That “wow” experience? I got it on a cruise. Can I get it from a game? A movie? A show? (I loved Stranger Things and have not yet seen season 5, but I don’t remember a “wow” type feeling.)
About your suggestion, comparing where I was in life at the time I experienced the old thing versus now (and therefore, what the old thing may have meant to me then versus what the new thing means now) with the new thing could be perhaps added to the essay, but I’m not sure I can make a series of blog posts on it. I also would have no place to put it – a blog does not magically make visitors appear out of thin air, and I don’t have enough consistent material to keep a consistent blog going. I sometimes write things, like the articles/reviews I’ve written for Hardcore Gaming 101 (you can search my name and HG101 in a search engine and find my stuff), but that site wouldn’t allow such a personal essay. So I’d like to host my essay somewhere, but I don’t know where. But I may add on to it in the future!
I used to host guest editorials a long time ago. Actually it’s been over a decade since the last one. I really enjoyed your piece and the only reason I’m not offering is because I decided a long while back that I needed to keep IGC as just me and my family and rarely (mostly for pinball stuff) my close personal friends. This isn’t a for profit website. This is just ME, and I used to say that Indie Gamer Chick is the real me without a filter but now it’s really just me and I want to keep it where everything people read is just my personal beliefs and thoughts on games.
For your editorial, I have some friends I’m going to show it too who get more traffic than me and they’re a more general gaming site. If it’s okay to pass along your email, they’ll be in touch. It’s really good.
“a blog does not magically make visitors appear out of thin air”
No, it more certainly does not. On July 1 I’ll have been doing this for fifteen years and it’s only within the last four that Google has started pushing my stuff up higher in the results soon after publication. Like, holy crap, my reviews of E.T. and Mario 64 are right near the top of search results. Famous games, and it’s my words being pointed at. What the f*ck?! Like, when does it stop being surreal? But with that comes being mindful that I have this platform and any review I write can have that happen, so it better be good and it better make people think about the game in a different way. Even if it’s just in one different way, that’s a win for me. Like with Mario 64, if the takeaway is it takes too long to get the flying cap or the first level is kinda weak compared to other first levels in big groundbreaking games, I’ll take it, because that’s the stuff that I think leads to people being more mindful of why they like games. They don’t have to agree with my opinions, but if they’re thinking about it, and from that, thinking about when players get the big new play mechanic in a game or the strength of the opening stage, great! Mission accomplished.
My friends will take your editorial. They want you to reach out to them on Facebook. They liked it. So did I. They get a lot of traffic.
https://www.facebook.com/TheOtakuAuthority
I reached out to them, and I’ll see what they think. Thanks!