Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure
Score: 89% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Atlus Developer: Nippon Ichi Software Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Turn-Based Strategy/ RPG
Graphics & Sound: The graphics in Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure are hand-drawn backgrounds with sprites moving on top of them. The sprites scale depending on distance, which can look a bit grainy, but generally the characters on the various screens look very good. The facial portraits, which show up for every major character in the game, are very well drawn, and each character has quite a few, depending on the emotion being expressed. Myau’s anger is one of my favorites, and Cornet’s sarcastic face is another. The sprites themselves are extremely cute, well-drawn, and highly distinguishable. The backgrounds are gorgeously rendered, but you’ll notice a whole lot of re-use -- rooms mirror-imaged (or not even mirror-imaged), structures basically cut-and-pasted into different towns, and so on. It’s not terrible, but it’s quite noticeable and detracts slightly from the visual quality of the game. The main detractors from the graphics in the game, however, are the dungeon and cave graphics. With the exception of the last dungeon in the game, the graphics are basically different shades of each other. Every cave and dungeon has identical pathways. Sure, the pathways themselves are very pretty, but after seeing the same overhead beam in an up-down passage in ten dungeons, it grows old. The spell effects are also very bland -- stars bouncing, a rainbow, nothing really spectacular. But these are pretty minor gripes. The sound in the game is excellent. The music, being a “musical adventure,” is suitably memorable, and I’m humming along to the main game tune as we speak. There are tracks with lyrics as well, and in a wonderful, WONDERFUL feature that I hope every RPG company copies from, Atlus allows you to select to hear either the English or the Japanese lyrics. Both are done very well; the English lyrics being of much higher quality than most songs you’ve heard in video games recently (not to point fingers). Both have subtitles, although the Japanese lyrics have Japanese subtitles; it would have been nice to see the direct translation of the Japanese lyrics at the bottom. The sound effects are suitable, although the “Atlus U.S.A.” that appears in a few treasure chests has me boggled. Overall, however, the presentation of Rhapsody is excellent.
Gameplay: The game itself is quite fun as well. You are Cornet, a mischievous young girl who dreams of a fairy-tale prince and can talk to puppets. Funny, that. Well, soon enough she meets her fairy-tale prince in the flesh, and not long after that she’s on a quest to save him. The plot is pretty standard, but Atlus’ translation of it is absolutely superb. You’ll find yourself laughing along with the characters at the hijinks of Marjoly and her cohorts and the various flub-ups that Cornet and Kururu, her flying puppet friend, get into. One note before you go insane: To buy in stores, press to the right to increase the amount from zero so you can buy stuff. This had me terribly confused, and as my review copy didn’t have an instruction book, I thought it was a glitch. Anyway. The battle system in this game was a pleasant surprise -- it’s basically Tactics Ogre/Final Fantasy Tactics light; three-quarters view of you and up to three puppet friends or monsters you control versus the world, turn-based, and all that. The maps that you fight on are based on the area that you’re in, and although they get repetitive, the team actually bothered to come up with some one-shot maps that I really liked (above the Ancient Forest being one I recall clearly). Your characters will level up rather quickly and gain access to a bevy of spells. There are a ton of characters for you to choose from to have in your party -- from puppets you pick up during the plot of the game to hidden characters to enemies who offer to join your party -- leaving a lot of room for experimentation as to party make-up. At least in theory. In practice, it seems that the smartest thing to do is to stick with a powerhouse party and just muscle your way through the game with them. With Sharte, Kid, and L-Kun, soon replaced by Terra, I tore through the game with a minimum of spell-casting and damage. In fact, I cast a healing spell once before I got to the last two battles. And for all its lovable characters and fun gameplay, Rhapsody does have its issues. The game only lasts ten hours, and is almost criminally easy, even on the hardest game setting. You probably won’t use more than a few of the spells, as most of them seemed to be unnecessary, and you almost definitely won’t use all of the characters that you get in the party. Overall, though, A Musical Adventure is a great little game that actually had me emotional in a few scenes, despite its almost saccharine sweetness. The sometimes biting translation (albeit with a few typos here and there) and the intriguing battle system convinced me to slug through the boring dungeons and caves to find out just what happens to all the characters.
Difficulty: Easy. Really easy. Even on hard, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is easy. Don’t think that this is a Tactics Ogre-level tactical game. See it for the fun, lighthearted, break-between-serious-RPGs that it is and you won’t mind breezing through the battles. You’ll get a sense of satisfaction, even. There’s a point near the end of the game where you have four of the five items you need and it’s not clear where the fifth one is, which may have you wandering around a lot aimlessly. But other than that one point of confusion, I never found myself at a loss for where to go next or what to do. The game kept me on the straight and narrow without seeming like I was on rails.
Game Mechanics: As stated before, beware the purchasing system. Remember to press left or right to pick amounts before buying. Of course, I never bought anything after the first town, as everything I needed appeared in dungeons. But never mind. The battle system is tight, if simplistic, and the controls are certainly clean, supporting both analog and digital, although there’s no real point in using analog. There are a few points in Rhapsody that are rather monotonous, especially the dungeons, but if you stay with it you’ll discover a lovely little gem, a sort of resting-stop between serious games, that will win your heart and perhaps even another play-through. Because of its short length, it may only warrant a rental, but for those that want to find all the secrets of Cornet’s world, a purchase is certainly not wasted money.
-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon
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