Our Hero
A little-known Action RPG developed by Blam! in 1999 for the Playstation.
It plays very similar to The Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana. You control Monkey, a, well, monkey who must defeat the Nightmare King, who is trying to take over the Waking realm. In order to defeat the Nightmare King, Monkey must collect all the pages of the Magic Storybook, which are scattered in dungeons all over the world.
Has no direct relation to the 2019 Monkey King: Hero Is Back, although both are loosely Inspired by… Journey to the West.
This game provides examples of:
- And I Must Scream: The Great Dragon in Dragon Mountain. Also the fate of the Nightmare King in the ending, being sealed forever in a book. It's even shown he's still conscious.
- Armless Biped: The Fontunes, though they weren't always like this. Their arms were removed by the Nightmare King because they turned against him.
- Bald of Evil: The Boss monk of the ruins dungeon. He even shields himself with other ,smaller monks and attacks with difficult to dodge energy beams
- Big Bad: The Nightmare King. Duh!
- Creepy Cemetery: The Mausoleum.
- Death Mountain: Dragon Mountain.
- Dream Land: The Dream Realm, apparently.
- Feathered Fiend: The Phoenix, which is the boss of Dragon Mountain. The divebomber enemies (the birds that drop eggs on you) also qualify.
- Final Boss Preview: Played with. The first boss you fight is the Nightmare King (or at least his head), but you actually CAN defeat him, and quite easily too (this is justified, since the boss fight takes place in the Waking realm). However, he scatters the pages of the Magic Storybook upon defeat, thereby kicking off the main plot of the game.
- Heart Container: The Magic Big Peaches you collect are pretty much the monkey hero equivalent of Legend of Zelda's heart containers. Each Magic Big Peach adds an extra peach to your health bar.
- Heroic Mime: Averted, despite being a zelda clone. Monkey occasionally speaks throughout the game.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: The pie pieces which restore 8 peaches of health and also the mushrooms which not only fully restores your health but also doubles as an Auto-Revive
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Dream Staff which is obtained when you collect all 20 dream crystals
- Interchangeable Anti Matter Keys: Each key only works on a door or a treasure chest once, after that it disappears.
- Invincibility Power-Up: The Guardian Statue which makes you temporarily immune to almost all forms of damage (You can still be damaged by falling into a bottomless pit though), but is a permanent inventory item which costs coins to use and can be used at any time.
- MacGuffin: Arguably, the pages of the Magic Storybook.
- Mordor: The nightmare realm, which is home to the Nightmare King. Everything seems like a run down, rusty version of the dream realm.
- Mooks: The Nightmares.
- Noob Cave: The Mines.
- Palmtree Panic: Sandy's Beach, which is also home to a dungeon called "The Ruins"
- Playable Menu: The Main Menu is represented by three rooms you can enter called "Load" ,"Start" and "Options". You can't use any of your items/equipement here but you can fiddle around with the sound and volume in the "Options" room by pushing two slides.
- Shout-Out: The password that Sandy creates for you to enter the spaceship is Klaatu. Also, the whole game could be considered a Shout-Out to The Legend of Zelda and Journey to the West.
- The Maze: The Bamboo Grove, which must be navigated to order to find a dungeon.
- The Reveal: near the end of the game it's revealed that the Nightmare King and his nightmares are aliens
- Underground Level: The Mines which is also the very first dungeon in the game.
- Warp Whistle : Monkey can use his cloud to warp to areas he previously visited, similar to Sūn Wùkōng's "somersault cloud" in Journey to the West.
