Cocoron is a Nintendo Entertainment System game released in 1991 by Takeru Entertainment.
You are brought into a world of dreams by a Dancing Tapir named Tapir, who bills himself as a wizard who creates dreams for people. Creating an adventurous dream, he informs you that Princess Rua has been kidnapped by Evil Forces, and you, being the hero, are the only one who can save her, and that you can take any form your heart desires in order to do so. However, what starts as a simple Save the Princess Plot becomes a lot more once you realize the truth of the dream world...
This Game Contains Examples of:
- All Just a Dream: Well, the game DOES take place in a Dream World...
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Not just for characters and enemies, but attacks as well.
- Backtracking: You have to travel between each of the different areas several times, exploring all the paths so that you can check the giant egg on each one.
- Baku: Tapir fits a good few of the high notes, but he's a benevolent mage who creates adventurous dreams for people. Except he actually IS Baku, and he creates dreams so he may then eat them.
- Big Bad: Tapir.
- Bottomless Pits: Common in the sky areas and the endgame.
- Character Customization: With 24 head possibilities, 16 body possibilities, and 8 weapons, there's over 3,000 possible character combinations. On top of that, all the different heads, bodies, and weapons actually effect how the game is played, affecting how fast your character is and how many Hit Points they have.
- Character Select Forcing: Certain body types have incredibly useful/important abilities.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: After defeating the Ice Dragon, Santa Claus says he will make him pull his sleigh that year's Christmas instead of Rudolph.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Dying enemies explode into stars.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Harvest Moon and Flint lose interest in killing you after you defeat them and become your allies. No such luck with Titania, Ice Dragon, or the Joker, and even then neither Harvest Moon nor Flint make any additional appearances in the game.
- Distressed Damsel: Princess Rua, and also Cocorin and Cocoron, and even your own teammates at one point.
- Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Everything from armadillos to penguins.
- Evil All Along: Tapir is really Baku, a dream-eating demon, and he wants to eat your dream and everyone within it.
- Evolving Weapon: Your weapon becomes stronger as you collect power-ups.
- Fragile Speedster: Lightweight bodies and heads move fast and jump high, but have low HP.
- Glass Cannon: Combining a lightweight head and body combination with a powerful weapon like the Shuriken can create one of these.
- Improbable Weapon User: There are standard weapons like the shuriken and the boomerang. Then you have these: the parasol which is generally useless and unwieldy as it arcs upwards, the ball (which is plausible as a weapon), the pencil, the crystal (which acts like a frag grenade-type weapon), the flower (which also acts like a grenade, but with a lingering explosion), and the melody, which is surprisingly useful.
- Jack of All Stats: Certain head and body combinations allow you to play as one of these, with average HP and speed.
- Level Ate: The Milk Sea is filled to the brim with various dairy products.
- The Man Behind the Curtain: The Ice Dragon looks like a very large and intimidating dragon, but as you damage it, its icy shell starts breaking apart to reveal a far less impressive and cute little dragon creature.
- Mighty Glacier: Heavyweight bodies and heads have more HP, but are slower and can't jump as high.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Since there are no restrictions on what heads/bodies can combine together, all types of combinations are possible.
- Nothing but Skulls: The area near Trump Castle.
- Point of No Return: With the game's autosaving feature, once you've rescued the Princess and go to the Endgame, there's no turning back except by starting a new game.
- Precision-Guided Boomerang: One of your available weapons. Once fully upgraded, you can toss three at a time, forward, and up and down in the same diagonal direction.
- Santa Claus: Has been frozen in a block of ice by the evil Ice Dragon. We did mention that this is a dream world, right?
- Secondary Character Title: Strangely, the game is named after neither you or the princess you're trying to save. It's named after Cocoron, a fairy-like child who is also a captive. You don't even see him until the end; instead being advised by his brother Cocorin.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the Jet bodies looks just like Astro Boy.
- One of the heads looks like a Gundam.
- The Cyborg body is from Cyborg 009. Hell, if you combine it with the Hero head, the result looks eerily like Joe Shimamura.
- Treacherous Advisor: Tapir introduces himself as a wizard from the dream world who creates dreams for people, and sets you on your quest to save Princess Rua as such. The truth of the matter, as Rua explains once rescued, is that Tapir is really a dream-devouring Baku who eats dreams rather then creating them, and after all the adventuring you've done, he's got his hungry sights set on the dream you're dreaming.
- Unmoving Plaid: The spots on Tapir's pajamas barely move when he does his little spin animation.
