Treasure Adventure Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Treasure Adventure Game is a freeware sidescrolling Metroidvania / Zelda-style game with a pirate / nautical theme; in it, your character has to search for treasure maps, then use them to sail the two-dimensional seas to various islands to search for long-lost treasure.

In ancient times, the world's landmass was lumped together into one continent. The people of that continent lived peacefully until one day an evil demon invaded and threatened to destroy the world. A hero by the name of Huayin, traveled the continent to search for 12 magical artifacts that he used to battle and defeat the demon, the battle causing the continent to split apart into the world as we know it today. Centuries later, two friends named Gagwin and Baggin have been traveling the globe, accompanied by Gagwin's son, and manage to find all 12 artifacts once again. The trio lands on the island where a mystical temple is held, which can only be opened if one has all of the artifacts, and leads to great riches. The trio enters the temple...and the flashback ends.

Cut to the present day, where a boy lives on a nearby island with an old woman he calls his grandmother. For his birthday, she gives him a boat that he can ride in and travel to other islands, and tells him how she found him washed up on shore years ago wrapped in a map. The map leads the boy to a museum that Baggins has built, and learns about the 3 essentials of adventuring, meets a talking parrot, and is then told about the 12 artifacts which Baggins has built the museum to exhibit. Baggins asks the boy to retrieve the artifacts once more.

Tropes used in Treasure Adventure Game include:
  • Abusive Parents: The main character's father chopped off his own son's hand in order to get the macguffin.
  • Baleful Polymorph: The main character's father was turned into a parrot in punishment for harming his son.
  • Big Boo's Haunt: One of the islands, especially its castle. Most of the ghosts are friendly, but not all.
  • Commonplace Rare:
    • The amount of work you have to go through[1] to get a totally ordinary non-magical flashlight takes the cake. Possibly justified if it's Lost Technology, but it isn't made clear.
    • Your initial compass requires a similar amount of work, and is explicitly stated to be shoddy and commonplace -- one shopkeeper says he 'hopes you didn't pay too much for it.'
    • Heck, early on you have to do a non-trivial amount of work to get totally ordinary, non-magical paper hat.
  • Collection Sidequest: The dimensional shards.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Tony Ward.
  • Devil in Disguise: Tony Ward is actually a demon-like evil deity trying to get his powers back.
  • Disney Villain Death: Baggus dies in this way at the end.
  • Final Boss, New Dimension: The final fight begins in the pocket dimension used for warping between islands. Every time the Big Bad is hit, he flees to a different dimension, which is represented by having him throw sprites from some NES games at you.
  • Greed: The reason for the main character's father and Gagwin's fall from grace.
  • Giant Foot of Stomping: The Big Bad's final fate is to get crushed by one of these.
  • Face Heel Turn: Both Gagwin and Baggus go through one; Gagwin wants to sell the treasures to Tony Ward whereas Baggus is eventually willing to take extreme measures to rid the world of all suffering.
  • Goldfish Poop Gang: Roelof and Lugus are fought multiple times. They're finally killed at the end of their last battle.
  • Heel Face Turn: A very subtle one. Gagwin admits that he had at first accompanied you in hopes of returning to his human form. Eventually, however, he realized that he wanted to make an effort to be a better father.
  • Heroic Mime: The only thing said by the hero is in a flashback near the end.
  • Hook Hand: The main character has a hook for one hand, and uses it both as his primary weapon and to grab on to terrain.
  • Interface Screw: When struck by mushrooms.
  • Interface Spoiler: The interface reveals the number of maps and items you'll get right off the bat... but it's averted in that some items are upgrades or components to existing ones, and don't get their own space on the interface.
  • Journey to the Center of the Mind: Using smoked hallucinogenic mushrooms, no less.
  • Leitmotif: Most recurring characters have one.
  • MacGuffin: The final treasure at the end of the temple is sought after by everyone that knows about it.
  • Magic Versus Science: In the backstory, magic-using animals and science-using humans fought a huge destructive war. In the modern age, both magic and science are Lost Technology to an extent, and both sides use a bit of each.
  • Mega Corp: GloboCorp
  • Minecart Madness: There's a brief chase scene through a mine after getting one of the treasures.
  • Money Spider: Nearly every enemy drops a small quantity of coins on death.
  • Mushroom Samba: Small mushrooms in one area both give you an Interface Screw and reveal hidden platforms. You can use fire to smoke them for a longer, smoother trip. They're also used for a Journey to the Center of the Mind.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Tony Ward would never have regained his powers if you had not deactivated the holy barrier.
  • No Name Given: The main character.
  • Non-Human Sidekick: Your parrot, of course.
  • One Hundred Percent Completion: There's a percent-completion indicator on your save, but getting the Golden Ending requires you do even more; simply having 100% isn't enough (mainly, you need to buy the house and all the various things that go into it. Thankfully, completing the Collection Sidequest isn't necessary.)
  • Only the Pure of Heart: The Hero's pure-hearted nature allows him to access the final treasure.
  • Plot Coupon: You need each of the twelve treasures used by the original hero to advance further into the temple.
  • Prematurely Bald: The Hero
  • Redemption Equals Death: Near the end, the parrot makes the unsurprising reveal that he actually is Gagwin, the hero's father. Then he does a Heroic Sacrifice and dies saying that he feels sorry about what he once did to his son and that he is proud of him.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Tactical Suicide Boss: Both played straight and averted. At one point, you have to fight a robot whose only weakpoint is the huge button on its back, which it regularly exposes... until midway through the fight, when it announces it has analyzed your pattern and stops exposing it. Luckily, some friendly allies arrive just in time. Played entirely straight by several other bosses.
  • Talking Animal: Half the inhabitants of the world are talking animals, not humans.
  • The End of the World as We Know It:Tony Ward's end goal
  • Those Two Guys: Roelof and Lugus
  • Treasure Map: They reveal the location of secret passages that lead to key items and dungeons.
  • Warp Whistle: The bottle doubles as a warp whistle, since it lets you grab and release those spinny circles to turn them into portals to a 'hyperspace' other dimension.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Baggus is revealed to be one in his Face Heel Turn.
  • X Meets Y: Wind Waker meets Metroidvania
  1. Including recovering a map to it from the bottom of the ocean, which you can only find via two other complicated quests involving lighting a lighthouse and recovering a diving helmet; forcing a village of talking animals to lower a bridge; using ancient lost magic to fly through the sky, and navigating multiple huge complicated series of collapsing platforms high above a piranha-infested ocean.