* This review focuses on Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure which is one half of the Prinny Presents NIS Classics Vol. 3. A separate review of La Pucelle: Ragnarok will follow shortly. *
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure Review
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is another older game that NIS has pulled from their back catalogue for us to enjoy and was originally released as The Puppet Princess of the Marl Kingdom in Japan for the PlayStation 1 where it went on to spawn a few sequels. The game is described as a Musical RPG and I think that is a very fitting title, it’s a light-hearted love story, with tactical RPG elements thrown in for good measure.
Story
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure focuses on a girl named Cornet who has the unusual ability to talk to puppets. She has a magical horn that is said to grant wishes and she it to make her puppets come to life.
Cornet has a puppet called Kururu who has always looked out for her for as long as she can remember and together, they busk to make a living. Cornet has the hots for Prince Ferdinand and eventually learns of a contest at the palace to help the prince find a bride.
With the help of Kururu, Cornet makes it through to the final round of the competition only for it to be gatecrashed by the saucy witch Majorly. The prince is turned to stone by Majorly and Cornet learns she needs to find five stones across the Marl Kingdom to break the spell.
During the adventure, Cornet and Kururu will travel across various themed lands including a volcano, a snow-steeped village, a kingdom ruled by frogs and, on one occasion, the inside of a giant sandworm. I won’t spoil much more, but it’s safe to say the story Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is a good one.
Gameplay
As with most traditional RPGs, Cornet’s adventure is made up of two main modes. An exploration mode where you wander around towns, talk to townsfolk, discover new puppets and story beats and combat mode. Combat is trigged mainly via random encounters with the battles taking place on an isometric grid. Battles are turn-based with one ‘team’ moving their characters into place and attacking before the opposition does the same in the enemy phase. You can think of this as a proto-Disgaea in a way, except massively toned down in its mechanics.
Cornet acts as a kind of cheerleader and can use her horn to buff allies, most of which will be puppets you can find around the various maps or as rewards for completing side quests. Occasionally, a defeated monster will offer to join your party after the battle which adds a little more variety to your team, however, if they are defeated, they will not be able to be resurrected, unlike the puppets which you can take back to your home to be repaired.
This leads to my main gripe with the game, its difficulty. Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is an easy game. Most enemies in the game will be defeated with one hit. During my playthrough for this review, I lost one monster unit and saw exactly one Game Over screen and this only happened on the last boss. If you want a challenge, I highly recommend selecting the Hard difficulty option from the game’s settings menu.
The easy difficulty and the frequency of random battles felt like a bit of a slog at times, especially as you have to move your unit into place, and then choose an attack that targets all enemies on the screen just to have them die in one hit, however often you would find one enemy would be just slightly out of range, which means you have to wait for a whole turn just to one hit kill it when in range.
The Dungeons can be quite large and most of them look nearly identical, apart from the last dungeon which takes a complete change in direction. There’s no map to help you out either, you’ll have to rely on memorization to help you get through. Heading in one direction for five near-identical screens to reach a dead end is not fun, especially when you have frequent interruptions from random encounters.
Apart from some repetitive designs in dungeons, I must say the art direction is fantastic, I really enjoy everything from the character designs to the settings, there’s enough detail in each area to make it stand apart. Maps are colourful and the towns all have their own unique charm to them. As expected, the music in Rhapsode is stellar and matched the settings and themes of the game well.
This release came with a few options for screen filtering including a soft filter that makes the image a little blurry to blend sprites together a little better and an additional CRT filter. I usually don’t bother with these options as I prefer to see the raw pixels and they tend to be poorly implemented but to my surprise, I found myself quite taken with the CRT effect, I played through the whole game with it on. While docked, the filter was a very close approximation to a traditional CRT television and when in handheld mode the game almost looked like it had an LCD pixel grid-like image which looks nice.
A nice touch in the options is the ability to switch between the original Japanese voices and English for the vocal musical sections which there are quite a few off during the game. I mainly opted for English, as I have a limited understanding of Japanese and, although the musical sections do have subtitles, they will be in their native Japanese if you choose this as an option.
Technically speaking, I did run into a few issues during my playthrough, one of which could have been potentially game-breaking if I didn’t make a backup save. After one of the game’s earlier musical numbers, the screen stayed black after the transition. Character dialogue boxes appeared, and I assumed it was part of the story, once the dialogue had finished, I entered the menu as I assumed the game had frozen, I saved my game to a secondary slot and reloaded, and I was greeted with an empty room, with no sprites on the screen and no way to progress.
This was the only technical issue I experienced in my playthrough, but it was a major one and should be noted.
Conclusion
In conclusion Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is a charming and whimsical adventure game that you should try out. The game has its flaws, but the story is great, with good writing and several amusing scenarios you can almost overlook some of its shortcomings.
This breezy RPG only took me slightly over 8 hours to complete from start to finish so if you’re looking for a deep, challenging strategy RPG where every move matters and lasts 80 hours, then this won’t be for you.
7
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by NIS America
You can pick up a copy of Prinny Presents NIS Classics Vol. 3 from Amazon