Moco Moco Friends is a 3DS RPG published by Aksys Games. It came out on November 17, 2015 in North America, and an unspecified amount of proceeds from the game went to
the Make-A-Wish foundation.
The game is set in Dreamtopia, a world much like ours, except it's filled with adorable, plush creatures called Plushkins. Plushkin Masters are held in high regard throughout the land. A Plushkin Master can wield magic, and use their control of the energy known as Dreamtropy in order to befriend Plushkins. Every year, numerous young girls attend the Plushkin Magic School in hopes of becoming a Plushkin Master, and someday achieving the ultimate position of the Charisma Master, the highest ranking Plushkin Master in the world.
The Plushkin Magic School has just completed its graduation ceremonies for this year. A young girl named Moco somehow scraped through her classes and graduated, although she got the lowest scores in her grade. She triumphantly returns home to Konpei Tower, where her master resides...
Has a character page that is currently under construction.
This game contains examples of:
- Balance Between Good and Evil: To stabilize Tormentopia and save Dreamtopia, Moco, her friends, and Neva create a barrier using Dreamtropy and Tormentropy.
- Big Eater: Moco has food on her mind a lot, to the point that her contract spell is a list of foods she loves most.
- Com Mons: Mochis and Pans. There's one of each of the six alignments, and fully half the monsters you'll encounter in the storyline dungeons are them.
- The Corruption: Tormentropy causes Plushkins to become violent, signified by a dark aura. It can also choke the life out of, and, in extreme cases, possess humans.
- Cute Witch: The heroine and her rivals are all adorable witches.
- Dark Action Girl: Neva, who looks like a palette-swapped version of Moco.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Dark-type Plushkins are as nice as any other Plushkins. In fact, on boss teams, the Dark-type will often be the healer. It's also eventually revealed that Tormentropy, while harmful to Dreamtropy users, is just another force of nature and isn't inherently bad. In fact, Dreamtropy is bad for Tormentropy-based beings, too.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Defeated Plushkins may offer to join you.
- The Ditz: Moco and Kaede are both this; Moco is just not that bright while Kaede is more of a Cloud Cuckoolander.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Fire beats nature, nature beats water, water beats fire, and light and dark beat each other.
- Endgame+: Beating the final boss puts you back to right before you put up the barrier to protect Tormentopia storywise, though the final dungeon itself becomes cleared. However, new dungeons open up, and you finally gain the ability to befriend the other sixty or so Plushkins you didn't have access to.
- Friend to All Living Things: Moco can befriend any Plushkin. In magic school this was her best talent.
- Generation Xerox: The reason Moco resembles Neva is because she inhabits the body of Moco's mother. In a flashback it's shown they looked exactly the same, right down to clothing style.
- God Was My Copilot: The Charisma Master is Neko, who's actually Moco's mother whose spirit is stuck in the cat staff.
- Gotta Catch Them All: There are over 120 Plushkins.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: Neva defeats the heroes in their first proper encounter.
- Idiot Hero: Moco barely graduated from school.
- Is It Something You Eat?: Moco mistakes the Stella Medal, the highest award granted to rookie witches, for the Castella medal and thinks it's a kind of cake.
- The Lad-ette: Lin is tough and unafraid to fight, often getting herself into trouble through impulsiveness.
- Let's Get Dangerous!: Moco becomes enraged when Neva defeats her friends, vowing to protect them and the tormented Plushkins. This causes Scrunchie to evolve and gain a powerful magic attack.
- The Lifestream: Dreamtropy is made from positive emotions, is what magic users use to seal evil vortexes, and Plushkins feed on it. An evil counterpart called Tormentropy also exists, which is made from negative energy and causes Plushkins to become tormented and violent.
- Limit Break: When the Fever Gauge gets full, Moco goes into Moco Fever, and she can spend infinite magic power that turn.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Moco is the only one who doesn't know that her living staff, Neko, is actually inhabited by the spirit of her mother. Whenever Neko says something about it, Moco always manages to just miss hearing it through sheer ditziness.
- Luck-Based Mission: Crafting is entirely up to the RNG. Lucky Clovers can increase the chances of rare items appearing, but this makes common items much harder to find.
- Meaningful Name: Moco Moco means fluffy, and our heroine Moco is quite fluff-headed.
- Medals for Everyone: Moco, naturally, ends up the recipient of the coveted Stella Medal... somehow. However, since her friends were also hard workers, she breaks the medal into five pieces and gives each of them a shard.
- Mons: The mons are adorable plushies.
- Palette Swap: The Pan family of Plushkins all look the same, including their evolutions, but are colored to match their element. Their Data Book info even calls their color into attention.
- Parrot Exposition: Since Moco isn't the brightest, she often learns what to do by repeating what the other person said.
- Play Every Day: Neko will give you a free item every day that you play. Plus, the secret variants of Scrunchie, Lard, Fel, Pemo, and Nyaru can be fought once per day.
- Pocket Dimension: Tormentopia is a pocket dimension Neva created where Tormented Plushkins could live happily.
- Save Both Worlds: Once the heroes learn the truth about Tormentopia, they decide to save it and Dreamtopia.
- Shoot the Medic First: Many late game bosses include a Plushkin who can heal and resurrect. You'll be there a long time if you don't quickly disable the healer.
- Shrinking Violet: Shizuru is very shy and not confident in herself at first.
- Starter Mon: Scrunchie, a mysterious Plushkin who no one had ever seen before Moco befriended her. She's quite powerful and evolves through story segments, and you won't be able to find more of her until the end of the game. That's because she comes from Tormentopia natively.
- Status Effects: Confusion, Sleep, Paralysis, Blindness, and Poison.
- To Be a Master: Moco has lofty dreams of being the Charisma Master, who can befriend any Plushkin.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Moco loves a lot of food, but especially loves steak.
- Tsundere: Nene is directly referred to as a tsundere in dialogue; she pretends to not be worried or hurt when she actually is.
- Untranslated Title: "Moco Moco" (Moko Moko) is a Japanese word for "fluffy".
- Useless Useful Spell: Averted, as the late game dungeons can actually be quite challenging. In particular, bosses are exactly as vulnerable to status effects as any other Plushkin, and hitting them with Confusion or Paralysis can be invaluable against those bosses that have healers and resurrecters.
- Wham Episode: Mission 21, the heroes' first battle with Neva. Neva defeats Moco and Nene, then unleashes a massive evil vortex that she can't properly control, resulting in Nene becoming hit by a wave of Tormentropy. Miss Michiru appears and reveals that she and Neva know one another, and she tries to seal the vortex. Neva then takes Nene with her back to her world. Back at Konpei Tower, Miss Michiru reveals that Neva was in fact Moco's mother, who was her master five years ago. A wave of Tormentropy struck them both, and while Moco's Dreamtropy powers pushed it back, the powers colliding caused an explosion that sealed Moco's mother's soul inside Neko and allowed her soulless body to be inhabited by Tormentropy, which later developed a mind of its own named Neva.
- White-and-Grey Morality: The Tormentopians aren't evil, they just run on the opposite of Dreamtropy and feel pain from positive emotions. Neva was working to save Tormentopia before it disappeared from the influx of Dreamtropy.
