I have
piles and piles of RPGs of massive magnitude in my treasured collection. Bravely Default, a Link between Worlds, Dragon
Quest IV to VI on the DS, all the Final
Fantasy titles that ever graced handhelds, you name them. They are all
here, waiting to be picked up and played, and somehow begging for the
opportunity to lavish their awesomeness on me. And yet, for some reason, I keep
snubbing them and instead anoint some little-known RPGs to grace my precious DS’
slot. Like Rhapsody: a Musical Adventure.
Rhapsody: a Musical Adventure, developed by Nippon Ichi Software
and released in 2008(jp/na) and 2009(eu/au) for the Nintendo DS, is a remake of
a Playstation game of the same name released a good ten years earlier. It’s a
rather mellow and easygoing game obviously aimed at a young audience, and maybe
more specifically at kids wanting to get their first bite of RPG without having
to put up too much of a fight to get through.
Playing
that game when you’re a RPG veteran is like ordering fast-food or cheap Chinese
takeaway when you’re a seasoned cook: you know that you could do so much better
and feel a bit ashamed of your own laziness, but you nonetheless appreciate the
dish because it really tastes quite nice, and because it’s oh so good to let go
and relax once in a while.
The Lovely
Rhapsody casts you in the boots of Cornet Espoir, an
orphan teenager who one fateful day meets the kingdom’s prince in the local
forest and—drums rolling—falls in love with him at first sight and vows to
conquer his heart. Yeah, I know exactly
what you’re thinking here. I was thinking the same, until I discovered better
by playing the game. Granted, the story seems horrendously déjà-vu at first
sight, bristling with tropes so worn out that you can see through them: the
brave orphan, the fairy godmother-like creature protecting her, the resident
spoiled bitch, the kind-hearted prince and so on. But the game manages to avoid
falling into cliché abuse territory by putting a humorous twist to nearly every
situation. For instance (spoiler),
early in the game, you have to enter a beauty pageant at the royal castle and
find a fancy dress in order to do so. I was ready to roll my eyes and perform a
facepalm, until I discovered that this quest implied exploring a BBQ restaurant
full of enemies before dueling with cats wanting to roast you and basically
turn you into Today’s Special. The quest culminates with you discovering a
furry outfit instead of a fancy dress, taking it home on the inspired advice of
your fellow fairy guardian Kururu and… parading in front of the prince wearing
that stuff at the beauty pageant. (end
of spoiler) Yep. When I saw that, I knew I was in safe territory, with cliché
indulgence avoided, and breathed a sigh of relief. As a whole, the story and
characters pack up some unexpected complexity and turn out to be deeper than
you’d expect from this kind of game, while avoiding the pitfalls of stereotyped
storyline and character development. The resident bitch remains a bitch, but
she reveals a rather complex personality and ends up being quite endearing.
Cornet travels around the world to fulfill a personal quest, but messes things
up as she goes and earns people’s animosity instead of making everything better
in classic RPG fashion. The prince falls in love with Cornet not because she’s
the prettiest girl around, but because she stands out as a loveable weirdo. Then
there is the musical feature hinted at in the game’s title, which has the
characters breaking into singing mode at some points in the story and
expressing their feeling through soulful tunes. It’s fairly original to say the
least, and if you love musicals and Japanese singing, you’ll lap this up. And
if you don’t, which is my case, you still have the blessed option of skipping
all the numbers.
Gameplay-wise,
Rhapsody is old-school at heart. It
features your classic four-member party with various abilities, all sorts of
classic healing items and pieces of gear and good ol’ random battles. The
seasoned RPG veteran will feel at home here, and the newcomer will be given the
opportunity to discover the wonderful world of classic RPG in a cute and
lovely setting.
Battles
take place on a separate screen and are displayed in a side view similar to the
one used in Final Fantasy I and II on the PSP. There is nothing
special to say about them, as they feature a fairly classic turn-based system
and fairly classic attacks and abilities, but I’d like to mention one special twist
that sets them a bit apart. By using her buffing and healing abilities, which
she performs by playing her trademark horn, Cornet can fill up a special meter taking
the shape of a music sheet line that will allow her to perform special attacks
involving all sorts of sugary delicacies being thrown at enemies. Don’t be
fooled by the apparent goofy cuteness of the whole thing, for these attacks are
quite powerful and can do miracles when fighting bosses. I usually don’t resort
to buffing abilities all that much when playing RPGs, but I found myself
diligently using them in Rhapsody just
for the sake of these amazing special attacks. Well done, NIS.
As a whole,
Rhapsody is a surprisingly well-balanced
game. It actually manages to balance gameplay elements much more efficiently
than some high-profile titles, which is somewhat unexpected and ironic. The
number of items and pieces of gear available is just right: there are enough of
them to give you a decent range of customization options (albeit rather classic
ones, granted), but no so much that your head will be reeling when browsing
through a shop’s inventory. The financial balance, if I may say so, is also
quite neat: if you don’t shy away from battles, you will reap just the right
amount of money to buy the best items and pieces of gear, without having to
grind for it nor ending up swimming in it à
la Uncle Scrooge. And since I’m mentioning them, battles were quite the
nice surprise in Rhapsody. They are
very short and dynamic but numerous, with a random encounter rate much higher
than what I expected to find in a game like this. The sweet point is that you
level up quite fast, and if you don’t run away from battles, you should be
strong enough to tackle any challenge that comes your way, which is yet again the
signature of a neatly balanced game. (I only needed to level-grind a tad before
the final boss battles, but since this happened at the very end of the game, it
was quite tolerable.) Even sweeter, your numerous extra party members who are
left on the sidelines level up as well (though a bit slower than your active
party members), which allows you to change the composition of your party on the
fly and indulge into delightful experiments.
The Crappy
Of course,
if Rhapsody did everything right, it
would be a lot more famous than it actually is. This is a relatively unknown
game, and there is a good reason for that. There are a couple of them, in fact,
all answering to the big boss that rules them all, which is none other than the
mighty and ubiquitous Laziness. This is not its first foray into gaming, and it
certainly won’t be its last, sadly.
First, Rhapsody doesn’t shine when it comes to
graphics.There is nothing inherently wrong with them and they don’t
hinder the gameplay in any way; they are just extremely dull and unremarkable. They don’t even have some kind of retro, 16-bit era flavour that could appeal
to the soft hearts of older gamers by triggering nostalgia. (Think Children of Mana or From the Abyss for good examples of such a graphic choice on the
DS.) On top of that, the perspectives chosen by the developers are often
frankly weird and rather uncomfortable to look at; they also tend to change
from one screen to the next, which is confusing and gives an untidy, messy
feeling to the game. (The royal castle is a particularly serious offender.)
There is
also a slight problem with repetitiveness. No, a rather huge one, in fact. This
game recycles itself shamelessly, serving you the same environments ad nauseam. To put it bluntly, there is
one single design for all the stony dungeons, one for all the caves, and one
for all the forests. It would already be rather boring if the graphics were
top-notch; but as I’ve mentioned before, they are not, which transforms the
experience of crawling through dungeons into a massive snooze fest faster than
you can say “this decor again?” The
only environments that were granted a bit of variety in terms of design are the
towns; this makes very little sense since in classic RPG fashion, you spend
most of your playing time trudging through dungeons. Oh, well. To add insult to
injury, the developers, in their folly, seemingly tried to compensate for the
repetitiveness of dungeon layouts by transforming the said dungeons into
labyrinths of sorts. Imagine having to find your way and backtrack into strings
of similar-looking rooms crisscrossing through multiple floors and you’ll have
a good idea of how unpractical this turns out to be. The map displayed on the
top screen fortunately helps a little, but you’d better have excellent visual
memory and be extremely methodical if you want to progress swiftly through the
dungeons without getting lost. And even if you manage to navigate through
dungeons without a hitch, there is still the small issue of how utterly boring
it can be to plod through identical screens over the course of your entire
playthrough. Good thing that the game turned out to be so short, with credits rolling after roughly ten hours of gameplay, or it would have been unbearable. As
you may expect from a game that is so decidedly old-fashioned, Rhapsody also features this good ol’
staple of reusing the same sprites for enemies and lazily swapping colours to
mark differences in terms of level and strength; but this is such a classic
fixture in old-school RPGs that it has become nearly endearing over the years,
and thus I won’t chastise the game for that. Let’s just say that these
shameless colour palette swaps fit into the general repetitiveness of Rhapsody pretty well.
There seems
to be another issue related to the Playstation version of the game. As I
mentioned earlier, this DS version of Rhapsody
is supposed to be a remake of the Playstation version; and it is indeed a
remake, only a somewhat downgraded one. The main reason for this lies in the drastic
alterations made to the battle system, which was transformed into something much
more basic. The Playstation original featured a grid-based battle system à la Disgaea, which in the DS version
was replaced by this old-fashioned FFI-like
battle system I’ve exposed earlier. Now, I’ve not played the original, so I had
no expectations about what the DS version of Rhapsody should play like and I approached it as a standalone game;
but I can understand the disappointment of gamers who played the original
version and were served this dusty and archaic battle system instead of the
grid-based one they may have expected. This feels pretty much like a lack of
commitment and dedication on NIS’ part, especially since the DS could perfectly have handled grid-based battles, and adds to the general laziness
permeating this whole game.
As a whole,
it’s fair to say that Rhapsody
suffers from a general lack of greatness, and feels more like a work of sloth
than a work of love. It’s not broken at all, that much is sure, but it’s
absolutely and completely unremarkable in every single field. Even the musical
theme, the humorous tone or the treat-based attacks are basically nothing more
than gimmicks: granted, they are unusual and rather unexpected in a RPG, and they
may be cute and enjoyable when playing the game, but they certainly won’t remain
engraved in your memory nor make Rhapsody
more memorable as a whole.
And yet,
not every game needs to be a paragon of awesomeness. As I said, it is fine to
relax and play a laid-back and unpretentious game once in a while, and Rhapsody is the perfect candidate for
this kind of soothing experience. Its curious blend of old-school RPG
mechanics, original gimmicks and mellow pace may not remain embedded in your
soul until your dying day, but it may well offer you a couple of hours of
light-hearted fun. As for me, after this sweet palate cleanser, I will turn my
attention to something a tad grander in scope. (Or will I? You never know where
my gaming instinct may lead me.) Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!
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