Since you’re fighting in an enclosed arena, you cannot directly run away, although you can escape if you find the proper hidden block and shoot it. Here, you can attack with either your standard weapons – which include water pistols, lasers, and bazookas – or various esper powers, which drain your EP. Unlike Dragon Quest‘s menu-based battles, these are small action sequences fought in real time. These represent enemy encounters, which will whisk you away to a separate screen to do battle. When walking around each area, you’ll see various footprints roaming around. Enemies include ladybugs, flying fish, mosquitoes, winged monkeys, pelicans, house plants, Gradius-inspired ring spewing Moai heads, and other random assortments of nonsense, which appear to be based on whatever the sprite artist felt like drawing that day. There’s a standard RPG-type field, with green fields and blue oceans, along with a crystal castle, a maze of swamplands, and a world based on chess. The first world, for example, takes place in someone’s house, although the surroundings are very large (or perhaps you are very tiny), and the sub-dungeons requiring delving into computers, where the walls consist of computer chips. Unlike other RPGs, Esper Dream does not stick to the standard medieval fantasy tropes, but since this all happens in some non-descript book, there’s no real cohesive theme to much of anything. It’s not necessary to explore all of them, but it does help.
Each world contains a handful of sub-dungeons, which are small mazes that house various important items. Instead, there is a specific order you’re supposed to conquer the sub-worlds, allowing you to properly equip yourself for the boss fights. Technically you can go to the later stages right at the beginning, although this is not recommend, since you will not only be lacking vital items, but will be crushed by the enemies. For starters, there is no concrete overworld – instead, Brick Town is the center of the game’s universe, and you can warp to various worlds through various grey houses. You, the great outsider with apparently incredible power, are equipped with some measly equipment and tasked with saving her.Ĭoming at the head of the Famicom RPG craze that resulted in the wake of Dragon Quest‘s success, Esper Dream is obviously inspired by such games, but tries to do something different with them. In this alternate universe, the denizens of Brick Town are in peril, as great evil is terrorizing the land, and the mayor’s daughter has been kidnapped. Among them is Konami’s Esper Dream, where you control a young boy who has been transported into his favorite book. During the 80s, the Japanese had a strange fascination with Espers – people who could use extra sensory perception, or ESP – and thus there were handful of manga, anime and games featuring this theme.
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