Oceans Dream

Collectibles

There are collectibles in the game too. I know where the locations of them are so it wasn’t hard for me to find it, but I dunno if that applied to everyone (all 2 people who played).

List of collectibles:

-Tokens. This is used for playing games at the casino (more on that later). So you don’t need to complete a set, each one is useful. There are about 12 Tokens I believe to find, one in each area.

-Crystals. This is once you get the Casino room for the toy store. You can go find Crystals and each will give you a photo. Unlike tokens there can be more in one area or not present in another. I did put in the guy to give you hints if you can’t find them.

-Power ups. You can actually buy them, but there are plenty to be found around. Makes for a nice enough reward for exploring, and obviously you don’t need to find them all. There are various strengths, normal, strong and ultra. +2 to stats, +7 to stats, and +15 to stats.

Minigames

About the casino. I put a bunch of minigames there for the player to play if they want. There’s always a strong prize for winning, like the next level equipment. Some of the minigames were okay, some were simple, some were bad ideas. I could have included these into the levels instead of making one big area for them. It’s okay though, I’d rather not force the player to play some of them.

-One of them involved a piano. You were played a note, and then you had to find that note and repeat it. Very hard to do, especially finding the initial note. Even harder for people not musically talented.

-One of them involved fighting the Last boss in under 4 minutes. You get cheat rings which up your stats by 255. Nothing will ever give you problems after that. I got a player massively frustrated with this one though. I guess it being directly up will do that too.

-One was a side scroller, and not very well done. Besides RM isn’t very good with this kind of thing.

-One was a fire toss, where you had two characters on the opposite sides, one button for each, and you had to hit a fire to go to the other side before it hit the character, and it went faster. It’s a fair enough idea for a simple minigame.

-One was going through a dark forest and avoiding the ghosts/spikes/goats. I made it too dark and I couldn’t even see the ground, which was bad when there were spikes there. Could have been done as a level just fine though.

-You had an area for buying an enemy encounter modifier. A bit too late unless you planned to do new game+ so you can skip all the enemies or even have more enemies.

-One was a race on boat, with various obstacles and an enemy boat. It’s hard to lose unless you intentionally try to do it, but maybe something can be done with the obstacles. I actually used this sort of idea in Paradise Blue, except instead of racing, it was killing octopus.

-The Gem room had a small square, surrounded by water both inside and outside. You had to go around and collect gems that randomly pop up on the path. If you fell off, you immediately lose. This makes the speed shoes you bought a bad idea if you have them on as you go so fast it’s easy to fall. This required too tight of a control.

-The next room had a room with a gem that appeared in various places, and never left until you touched it. So it’s on how fast you can touch them, while the path between one side and another gets blocked off at various parts. It was pretty random where they appear and where the path is blocked so you can do well one turn and poorly the next simply because of the randomness.

Levelling

-Levelling up let you choose your stats. Some games pull it off well. Here, you can gain so many levels in one battle (especially after one boss, where I went up a ton of levels) that it becomes boring to continue selecting your stats. Also, other than the beginning, you end up pretty much putting all your points in one stat. What I do first, is put all points into class so you can learn the stronger skills. At Level 11, you can have all the best skills, and you do gain some stats per each class advancement (it requires 10 points to level that up, and you gain 2 points per level). After that is done, then I put some points into Hit % so that everyone except Angela has 100%. Then after that, all points go into strength except for Sabrina and Angela who you can put in mind instead, or balance out Sabrina. Other than that, there’s really little thought that goes into levelling so it would have been better to be fixed stats. Or have a change to the levelling system and have different stats effect a character differently. Like maybe giving mind points to James allows for learning new skills, things like that. Later on, stat up items do a better job of giving stats, as I got Sabrina to be stronger than James despite his pure focus on power in levelling, stronger weapons, and higher base attack power.

Extras

There is only one town in the game, but you could shop from anywhere, which was a plus in that game. There were also fun things to play around with, like media player, e-mail and photo album. They just added a modern feel to it. They are extras though, and aren’t part of the core gameplay. Toys were part of the battle system, but you couldn’t use it on bosses. Nor can you refuse to use a toy if you have one, which was bad if all you had was one that didn’t work on the enemies you had. They were some that did damage to a certain type of enemy, some that stunned an enemy or powered up an ally. Fun to play around with but not necessary.

There were a lot of bad puns, and silly dialogues. For some reason I actually like the dialogues of Sabrina, Angela, James and William. Lisa doesn’t talk much at all, but they actually felt like a group of friends going around. Maybe I can do a better job with the comedy and dialogue, but I liked that feeling of having them feel like they interact with each other.

I don’t think I expect anyone to read through this, but I’ll keep this handy in case I need to reference it for the future.