Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

"Great game with a few flaws"

''Rhapsody'' is about a girl named Cornet who is the only one in Marl's Kingdom who can hear puppets and bring them to life. Dozens of puppets/ recruited enemy monsters join her in a quest to save the prince she loves from the witch Marjoly and her followers. The dialog is well- written and in many cases funny, intentionally, unlike in Grandia or FFVII. I'm almost finished with the game and have yet to find one spelling error, obvious grammar mistake or awkward phrase.

My opinion on aspects of the game:

STORY/DIALOG- A (well-written and light-hearted but VERY short)

MUSIC/ SOUND- A (the songs are nice but would appeal more to young children)

GRAPHICS- A (graphics in the game are 2-D sprites on 2-D backgrounds, no impressive FMV or special effects. I love the character designs of the puppets especially. Each is unique and individual in both appearance and special skills/ magic. When a charcter talks their portrait with a different emotion is shown. The portraits and artwork that is not actually part of the game is excellent and very cute. When you collect illustration pages (1-13) from treasure chests throughout the game, you can access them from the main menu (the one when you start the game), as well as the songs with scenes playing in the background and lyrics below. There are 78 illustrations in all.)

GAMEPLAY- C (this is much too easy, even on the ''difficult'' setting. There are grids characters stand on and fight like in Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre, but now the maps are so small and the enemies so weak that no strategy is required at all. The encounter rate is so low that sometimes I wondered if something was wrong. The random battles are more fun than in most RPG's like the recent FF's, so you shouldn't let this bother you too much.

Nippon Ichi probably spent about 2 hours designing all the dungeons in the game. There are two basic types: a castle-like dungeon made up completely of square units that are exactly the same except where the doors are. They can be in any combination of the four directions. Occaisionally a room will have some columns/ stairs/ teleport/ treasure in it. The other dungeon type is caves or underground passages with a greater variety or rooms, but not much. To create new dungeons they just rearrange the parts of the two basics and give it a red, blue, yellow, or other color tint. But the dungeons are short and not the emphasis of the game, so you should let this go, too.)

CONCLUSION
''Rhapsody'' is a lot of fun: the art is great, the music is pretty good, the characters are likable, and the story is humorous and FUN. Little girls aren't the only ones who will enjoy this game. But the major flaws are that it is too easy and SHORT, about 13 hours long. Buy it, or rent if you don't think 13 hours is worth $50. I took off a point because it was so short.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/00, Updated 03/06/01