Emulator Hour: Psycho Dream (SFC)

 

Psycho Dream is a game that I noticed had been added to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online app back in February, but I apparently forgot about it until sometime in late March when I was pulling up Mario's Super Picross.  In the North American version of the app, it is pretty rare for there to be Super Famicom games included because oftentimes there would be no English translation unless it was officially localized.  So with the name of Psycho Dream in English and not knowing anything about the game, I decided that it would be a decent game to at least jump in and see what it was about.  Well, I beat the game after several play sessions and I still could not tell you anything about it.  Then I read the Wikipedia article (specifically about the plot) and it actually makes a whole lot more sense.  Kind of.

To say that Psycho Dream gave very little context as to what is happening is a bit unfair on my part.  There are a couple of screens during the intro that gives some explanation (I presume) but because the game was never officially localized for English-speaking audiences, that exposition and context are in Japanese.  What you are told (that I only found out through Wikipedia) is that your two playable characters, Ryo and Maria work for a special division of Japan's National Public Safety Commission as Debuggers and are tasked with rescuing people who have become too immersed in virtual reality games/settings called D-Movie.  In Psycho Dream, a girl has lost herself in one setting called "Story of the Ruined Capital" and has fallen comatose in the real world.  Ryo and Maria must rescue Yuki in the VR world before her real-world body dies, so they enter "Story of the Ruined Capital" but have to locate her first.  Now, imagine not knowing any of that information and this is the game you are playing:

Well, I guess you could chalk a lot of this up to playing a character and fighting off some type of alien invasion, which kind of works as far as the settings and enemies go for most of the game.  What was confusing as hell was the character design and the power-ups.

When you start the game as Maria (I also played through the first stage as Ryo and did not like his powered-up abilities as much), you are what appears to be a leather/spandex-clad woman attacking random blob-looking creatures with a whip.  The first power-up I got upgraded me from whip to a laser pistol of some kind, followed by a more spinning-type attack followed by sprouting wings and gaining the ability to hover (think Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2) and you now have homing projectiles that fire out in six different directions.  Let me tell you, this powered-up form for Maria felt severely overpowered, more so when you take into account how much I spammed the rewind feature in the SNES app.  Having the ability to just constantly press the attack button and have projectiles fly out and seek out enemies was very cool, especially against bosses.  Case in point, the boss for Stage 2 (Mothra?):

There was practically no strategy besides avoid the enemy by moving away from it and pressing X as fast as possible.  I nearly did not have time to see its own projectile attack before killing it.

The levels themselves were strange enough to be interesting, even knowing now the context of the story, they seem oddly varied especially for a VR story that is supposed to be about a ruined capital.  The building tops, sewers, subways all seemed to make sense, but the jungle setting I guess could have been an overgrown Central Park type-local.  Then there was a cave setting with a minecart, an area full of waterfalls which you might have been contractually obligated to put in all action platformers made between 1985 and 1997.  But then there was a whole flesh-like area with nodule/pustule-filled corridors complete with flaming prominences and floating bloated whatsits, all of which seemed to exist for the sole purpose of drawing out the length of the game because I do not recall there being a related boss battle at the end of this stage; and even preceding it with the minecart level with no location transition seemed odd and jarring.

There was a pretty interesting auto-runner section which would have worked better as the lead up to the final stage.  I ended up not having the wings, for which I kind of regret because I wonder how that would have worked in an auto-runner stage; it also would have made the stage so much easier.  I seem to recall having lost them in the previous stage and figured I would just play through and hopefully earn them again, but then the stage ended, this stage began and I did not get them again until halfway through the minecart stage.  But holy damn did I spam the rewind feature against this boss because even as interesting this stage was compared to the rest of the game, I really did not want to restart from the beginning of the stage again and hope for the Wings power-up.

Something else that confused me (as if the entire game was not confusing enough), was how what power-up you earned was determined.  I recognized that Green Crystal power-ups would give you a protective shield for a short time, the Red Crystals would refill your life, and the Gold Crystals would give you attack power-ups.  But sometimes one of the crystals would change to I think either purple or blue.  The best I can guess is that they were somewhat randomized as I only saw the laser gun in the first stage and did not go through all of the different claw attacks and varying whip attacks before getting the wings power-up.  There were a couple of power-ups that would change color too, although I would typically try to grab them before they disappeared (assuming that they disappear after a few seconds) so I was never really able to properly analyze what was going on with the crystals when they changed color.

Secondly, and really only having to do with the minecart stage was getting lost in levels, although I did feel this way at various other areas like the sewers and subway.  In most of these stages and in good video game fashion, you would progress through the stages from left to right.  Sometimes you would move vertically through stages too, but that would also include moving from the left side of the screen to the right.  The atrocious minecart stage just seemed to go on forever.  You would enter from the left riding on top of the minecart (not actually in the minecart) and the minecart would plummet when going across broken tracks, but you would fall with it.  So I tried jumping off of the cart and walked through, passed through a tunnel, then entered through another identical-looking cavern riding on a minecart, but I could not tell you if the tracks were broken in the same place (essentially redoing the same room) or one that only looked the same.  I want to say it was in this stage that I learned that if I pressed L/R I could sprint and high jump.  This was a

The last thing (maybe?) that I questioned was how the game would save your progress, if at all.  Thankfully the SNES app has up to four save states per account per game, so I could have saved at various stages to replay while maintaining one that I would use for my primary game, but I never noticed any file select or password option.  So if this game was designed to be played and beaten in a single sitting, then I applaud your buttocks, hips, and thighs, because my entire lower body would have fallen asleep before even getting to the Mothra-lite boss.  Unless you know what you are doing and you could just sail through and beat the game in fewer than 45 minutes.

Psycho Dream was definitely an interesting experience.  On one hand, I am glad that I played it because it was a game that I had never heard of before and I love being able to play unfamiliar games.  On the other hand, I do not know if I would fully recommend the game, especially if it is being played outside of an emulator without save states or a rewind feature.  I can almost promise you that I probably would not have made it past the first level if I played this on a native system.  That is not to say that there is no merit to this game, just that it was interesting from the character design, the level layout, to the mechanics and power-up feature.  Just. . . interesting.  And I feel like that is enough.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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