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Left to Right: Sophie, Luna, and Neru
Dream Tactics is a Strategy RPG developed by Spectra Entertainment Inc. and published by Freedom Games. The game was released on April 15, 2024, for Nintendo Switch and PC through Steam. Its primary feature is that every character's combat actions are dependent on a deck of cards, which can be customised in a multitude of ways, such as taking one character's unique cards and putting them into another's deck. An official website can be found here.

Dream World is on the verge of collapsing due to the rampage of a monster known as the Dream Eater. The rabbit knight Luna is prepared to journey across the various realms in order to locate Dream Fragments and muster the power needed to save her world. Unfortunately, she's just a Dream herself, and needs to rely on the actual savior, her sleepy human partner Neru, to quickly learn how the magic of Dream World works and actually save the day.


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  • 100% Completion: The game keeps track of every chest opened and every destructible object broken, with the Steam version having achievements tied to locating every single one. However, some chests can become Permanently Missable Content if the party fails at a Timed Mission.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: Near the end of the Kingdom of Grandia, control switches from Neru's party to the Band of Cheerful Peeps, the collective of different species of Pillow that Reggie is friends with, as they hold the line for a battle while Neru's party takes on King Fluff.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: There are a total of seven playable characters, but only four can be fielded at once against entire battalions of Pillows.
  • Bad Boss: Willow, the (recently-usurped) head of the labs in the Crystal Caverns, has never promoted anyone, cancelled days off and paychecks for being too costly, and terminated employee contracts by terminating their lives.
  • Big Good: Eve is the Goddess of Dream World, and maintains the Nexus at its heart that Neru's party uses to reach other lands in search of Dream Fragments.
  • Blood Knight: Sophie is the most eager of any ally to charge into a fight, advocating for ignoring tactics and negotiation entirely and eagerly hoping to constantly fight stronger opponents. Her love for violence makes her fast friends with Willow, who also loves to fight and blow things up.
  • Brick Joke: Reggie apologises when his plan to infiltrate Grandia by having Neru's party pretend to be guards fails, claiming that it would've worked perfectly if they were Pillows because he's aware that Pillows are dumb enough that they can't even tell themselves apart. Later, when rescuing Reggie's Band of Cheerful Peeps from the dungeons to use as cannon fodder, it turns out that the guards have locked up one of their own in a cell and refuse to believe he's anything but a lying thief, which leads to him actually defecting to the Cheerful Peeps when released.
  • But Thou Must!: While in Ashguard, one of the tasks Neru's party is given by the cult they're infiltrating is to deliver a letter to a Dungeon Master. Upon arriving at the dungeon, which has locked up berserk Ghoul Pillows, the front gate will be locked, and there will be two levers next to it. Regardless of your choice, the first one flipped will accidentally release the Ghouls, and the second unlocks the gate in order to fight them and save the Dungeon Master. Ironically, the letter turns out to be a request from the higher-ups to clearly define the levers before a dangerous accident occurs.
  • Cat-and-Mouse Boss: The boss of the Crystal Caves, The Boss Pillow, aka Willow's second in command pilots a mecha that has an impenetrable barrier that makes him immune to all forms of damage. You have to run away and trick him into stepping on shock tiles to short-circuit the barrier and the mecha itself, allowing you to pummel him for 2 turns before he returns and gets his mecha back online, resuming the chase once more and putting you back on the evasive.
  • Choice-and-Consequence System: The order that the party explores areas can change the dialogue in them; for example, entering Ashguard after finishing the Crystal Caverns has Neru respond to Luna's comment that a Nightmare likely created the cursed vines covering the place by bringing up Willow.
  • The Chosen One: Neru was summoned to Dream World a year before the game's story began in order to save it, though she slacked on her training.
  • Cult: The Pillows of Ashguard are members of one, worshipping Eve through their Dream Fragment and talking about finding "the darkness in the light". Neru initially suggests infiltrating them instead of fighting, but once she figures out that they're just being used for menial tasks like dishwashing and weeding with no chance of ever coming close to the Fragment, changes her mind and decides to fight.
  • Cute and Psycho: Cera is a sweetheart and eager to make friends, but she is equally eager to have her flowers devour pillows (to be fair, they did attack her first), breaks into fits of creepy giggling and goes into a berserker rage when anyone so much as attacks her flowers or badmouths them. Like with Willow, Sophie loves her bloodlust and quickly becomes friends with her.
  • Defeat Means Friendship: Unlike all the other party members, Amber the Pyromancer initially fights against Neru's party because she's interested in looting the ruins they're exploring for treasures, only to join Neru after she's defeated and realizes how incompetent her Pillow minions were in comparison.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Reggie's plan to infiltrate Grandia's castle is for Neru's party to take a shortcut through the Barracks, where all of the guards are, by posing as new recruits while he sets up a distraction. The plan immediately falls apart because Reggie realizes too late that nobody else in Neru's party is a Pillow and they're trying to infiltrate an all-Pillow kingdom, and Luna calls him out on missing such an obvious oversight.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The Pillow Kingdom of Grandia is using its Dream Fragment to produce an infinite amount of food for its loyal citizens. However, if any Pillows are caught with unauthorized food, they're immediately thrown into the dungeons.
  • Dream Land: The game takes place in the Dream World, home of good Dreams, sinister Nightmares, and goofy sentient Pillow people.
  • Evil Overlord: King Fluff of Grandia believes that Rick selling his own brother and crew out for a high-ranking position is a display of brilliance that surpasses any of his own Knights of the Bedside Table, and also supports Rick's plan to starve their own people in order to gain more wealth by exporting all of the food made with their Dream Fragment.
  • Evil Twin: Rick, Reggie the Thief's identical twin brother (save for a few folds to represent a Beard of Evil), sold out their Band of Cheerful Peeps to the Kingdom of Grandia in exchange for a prestigious position. Whenever either of them talk about their shared past and animosity towards each other, other people tell them they don't want to get caught up in their family drama.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: One of the post-area flashbacks has Neru wake up in time to overhear Luna and Sophie discuss how, since the Dream Eater eats Reverie and Dreams are manifestations of Reverie, they need to prepare to sacrifice themselves so Neru will have enough power to win against it.
  • Horned Humanoid: Willow has two tiny purple horns, befitting her status as a Nightmare.
  • Horse of a Different Color: Sophie rides into battle on a slime blob monster that she's named Slimey.
  • Hub World: The Nexus links all of Dream World together. Once it's reached at the end of the tutorial, Neru's party can choose which areas to access from it, and can warp back and forth between them with no penalties.
  • Humongous Mecha: The Crystal Caverns lab's Boss Pillow, after overthrowing Willow, decide to spend all of their resources on a "secret project" that turns out to be building a giant mech in order to defend themselves from her wrath. It's the boss of the area, capable of setting down landmines and firing machine guns from long range.
  • An Ice Person: Other than summoning Pillows that are initially hostile against her, Willow's main skillset involves setting down ice traps that can Freeze enemies and limit their movement.
  • I Have Many Names: Reggie the Thief introduces himself this way, and then lists them: the Raider of Recliners, the Duke of the Duvets, the Stealer of Silk Sheets, and his real name of Sir Reginald Restington XVII. Sophie is disappointed that he doesn't immediately ask for their names in exchange, claiming that she has six but not stating what they are.
  • Intrepid Merchant: Milo is a Merchant Pillow that always ends up appearing ahead of the party in their travels, thanks to Eve, the ruler of Dream World, hiring him to help procure new equipment. While he refuses to just give them free stuff despite the severity of their quest, he does double as a sort of item storage where any item sold to him can be bought back for the same price it was sold for.
  • Intrigued by Humanity: Willow is completely fascinated by humans, or more specifically, their ability to amass and wield the magical power of Reverie far better than any Dream or Nightmare. She created the Pillows to try and learn more about what makes humans special but only managed to manifest some of humanity's negative qualities in them, and is willing to shut down her entire lab and give up the Dream Fragment powering it the moment Neru promises to let Willow study her in exchange for it.
  • Leaked Experience: Regardless of whether they fall in battle or were participating in it at all, every playable character gets the same amount of experience, with everyone hitting the Cap of Level 50 if every battle is fought.
  • Little Bit Beastly: Luna has two tall rabbit ears and many of her skills involve carrots, but she otherwise looks like a blue-haired human.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Ashguard is covered in vines from an oversized rosebush that eats Pillows, which the local cult has named "the Encroacher". Once Neru's party defects from the cult, they end up befriending the plant, Rosie, and gain the ability to ambush Pillows on the map by summoning her to devour them.
  • Mooks: The majority of enemies in the game are different types of Pillow, from the completely ordinary to ones with specialized roles like archers and scientists, with most bosses being a Giant Mook Pillow. They are notable in Dream World not just for their prominence, but also their extreme idiocy and peskiness, to the point that the non-native Neru is the only one that's hesitant to fight them en masse.
  • Mook Maker: Willow the Summoner, recruited in the Crystal Caverns area, is a (semi-)heroic one. In addition to being the Nightmare that made all the world's Pillow people in the first place as an experiment to harness the power of humans, her starting deck includes cards that summon basic Pillows as hostile enemies, which she can then charm to attack other Pillows or explode for an Area of Effect attack.
  • Pointy-Haired Boss: The new lab head in the Crystal Caverns, the Boss Pillow, is a member of the idiotic Pillow race and thus not actually very skilled at management; one example of his ineptitude is to order the execution of the head of his "secret project" because he's worried that the arrival of Neru's party means there's a traitor that leaked information, then replace him with their most recent employee (who doesn't even know what the project is) and order him to finish everything in under an hour.
  • Power Trio: Due to the other party members joining in any potential order and not having speaking roles outside of their personal arcs and the endgame, the first three mandatory recruits of protagonist Neru, heroic knight Luna, and lancer Sophie tend to be the most prominent characters throughout the story.
  • Story Arc: Every world in the game has its own self-contained arc, in which Neru and Luna search for a Dream Fragment, fight against misguided or sinister Pillows, and pick up a new party member along the way. After the tutorial, during which Sophie joins, the following four worlds can be tackled in any order.
  • Sustained Misunderstanding: The game starts with Neru and Luna on their way to the center of their Dream Land to prevent its collapse, but get held up by a pair of pillow bandits. A rookie from a nearby pillow community only sees them fighting and reports that Neru and Luna are bandits killing Pillows, causing other Pillows to stand in their way for the rest of the tutorial area, not helped by Luna (and Sophie soon after) being more willing to fight than talk things out.
  • Talking to Plants: Cera, the Nightmare Archer befriended in Ashguard, is against the local cult trying to prune "the Encroacher", and her family consists of her and three plants: Rosie, Tulip, and Jacob. Her talking to them when they can't reply is interpreted by the party as partly madness, but mostly to show her loneliness. It then turns out that Rosie, who is "the Encroacher", actually is sentient enough to move parts of herself out of the way when befriended and help defeat the cult by summoning vines on command.
  • Timed Mission: Some treasure chests found in combat areas have a timer over them, and if the battle isn't won or the chest reached before time's up, it will remain locked and become Permanently Missable Content.
  • Token Evil Teammate: Willow behaves, thinks and fights like a villain, subjecting her minions to cruel work conditions and outright kills them for so much as being a bother to her, but is firmly on the side of the heroes due to her fascination for humans. Her love for violence and explosives quickly wins her over for Sophie, who is herself a Blood Knight.
  • Token Heroic Orc: Pillows as a whole are the embodiments of humanity's worst aspects, with even Milo the Intrepid Merchant not willing to give anything away for free despite the threat of the Dream Eater. But Reggie, while as idiotic as the rest of his species and prone to bad plans that initially make Luna suspicious of him, genuinely cares about his band of thieves and is willing to fight alongside Neru's party to keep them safe...and also so he can sell whatever remains of the Dream Fragments after they're used against the Dream Eater to provide for them.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: Neru, as a human, has the ability to wield enough Reverie to instantly smite any threat that opposes her, but has been slacking off for an in-game year and is only at roughly the same power as her guardians Luna and Sophie. A flashback to just one month into her training has her learn she'll likely have to sacrifice them both when the time comes to fight the Dream Eater, indicating that she's willingly putting off her training instead of just slacking off.
  • Weird Currency: Milo the Pillow Merchant only accepts Buttons as payment.
  • Year Inside, Hour Outside: While Neru has been training for a year to save Dream World, a flashback to shortly after her arrival states that once it's saved, she'll wake up back in her own world as if it was all just an ordinary dream.

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