"Obscure Fighting Games" Dream

 

This dream simply involved watching a YouTube video from JMCrofts. It was about "obscure fighting games", although I didn't realize until after the dream that the throughline was them all being GBA titles (and the fact that none of them were really fighting games). In retrospect, the topic moreso fits a Stop Skeletons From Fighting video, although the video was still very much felt like a JMCrofts video.

 

The first game was a Nicktoons beat-'em-up, which JMCrofts simply noted as strange for being developed by Sega. Even in the dream, I thought that was a pretty shallow thing to be brought up as the only thing of note.

Nicktoons Unite on GBA is the closest visual approximation, despite not being a beat-'em-up.

Second was an Incredibles character-action game, which featured pretty impressive 3D graphics for the GBA, although it had a comically shallow moves list in the pause menu, featuring only 2 combo strings, and a lot of empty space (in the dream I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and figured you'd probably unlock more strings along the way. The dream version of JMCrofts sure didn't even consider that though; the video didn't seem very thought out, which I guess makes sense for a dream).

Here's an Incredibles game on GameCube.

Lastly was another impressive looking 3D adventure game, in which you played as a Bomberman samurai. The game looked so high-res though that even in the dream I questioned its validity, the video's ending in particular definitely featured a fanmade animation made to to resemble the game, and tell some joke that I don't remember.

 

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is my closest approximation of what the gameplay looked like, although being a dream, the environments looked a lot more full and open.

After waking up, the player character in that Bomberman game stuck out to me as having the highest possibility of being real, so I browsed Power Bomberman's character select, because if a Bomberman character is of a remotely notable status (such as being a protagonist), it would almost surely be featured somewhere within Power Bomberman's expansive roster. (For those who don't know, Power Bomberman is a fangame with hundreds of characters and stages that touch base on pretty much every aspect of the entire franchise.)

I found 2 characters which pretty closely fit my mental image, Bomber Musashi from Bomberman Wars, and Bomber Samurai from Bomberman Online (2003).

Only Bomber Musashi has official artwork I believe.

Bomber Musashi is the closer of the 2, although there were 2 extra elements to the character in my dream, an eyepatch, and big pipe like what Goemon has; looking it up, the type of pipe is called a kiseru I guess (the Bomberman character didn't fight with it though, they just had it on their back).

 

 

Jubei in Samsho looks pretty similar to my mental image. The pipe was grey though.

 

This all left me in the mood to play a bit of Power Bomberman, so here's a match of that:

 

I lucked out a good bit here, prior matches were a lot tougher to play so passively in.

On this specific ruleset and stage, it took me a couple of tries to get a win, which reminded me that Power Bomberman used to have a challenge mode. I first played Power Bomberman right around the tail end of when those challenges were a thing. The challenges actually used to be how characters were unlocked, although that changed when the roster size skyrocketed by hundreds of characters, and the entire challenge mode was removed in a single update.

 

I'm not really sure why the challenges were removed. I was glad that the character unlocks were tied to a simple gacha mechanic instead (since it allows you to play any game mode to obtain coins), but it's unfortunate that the challenges are gone. The only other single player offering, besides playing against CPU's, is the Score Attack mode which I don't really like. Granted, Power Bomberman has extremely flexible match settings, so you could just come up with your own challenges.

 

 

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