Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

"An Unremarkable RPG that Fails to Live Up to its Gimmick"

Rhapsody is an RPG with an interesting gimmick: It's a musical. It's also from Nippon Ichi, the same team that made Disgaea, a series famous for its insane sense of humor. (To give you an idea, you can fill your party with demonic penguins that explode when thrown.) What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, nearly everything.

Story:

You play as Cornet Espoire, a teenage girl with the bizarre ability to talk to puppets. Cornet dreams of meeting and falling in love with a handsome prince. Cornet eventually manages to charm the handsome prince Ferdinand, but Ferdy is kidnapped by the evil witch Marjoly. Now it's up to Cornet and her favorite puppet pal Kururu to save her one true love.

You can tell that they made an effort to spurn cliches with the plot, what with having the brave young woman save the prince from certain doom, but they failed. A major plot point involves the collection of several magic "heartstones", and the first mission of the game involves going into the forest to find kindling for your grandfather.

The main characters are all forgettable, with the possible exception of the villainous Marjoly. Cornet's defining characteristic is that she dislikes toads, and Ferdinand is your textbook prince charming.

One thing that's generally listed as a high point of the game is its humor. While it's true that the game is full of jokes, most of the humor falls flat on its face. There were only a few moments that made me even crack a smile.

It's hard to tell just how much the localization team cared about this game. They bothered to insert several western pop culture references into the dialog, yet one of Cornet's puppets is referred to by two different names throughout the game.

Gameplay:

Moving around the maps is fairly easy, no complaints there. There's even a button that allows you to move more quickly, which is something I always like to see in RPGs. My only major gripe with the controls is the use of the circle button to access the menu. It just doesn't feel natural after playing so many RPGs that assign that function to triangle.

The party consists of Cornet and three helpers: either monsters that randomly join after a battle or puppets that are gained from events. For some reason, gaining a new party member feels rewarding, and there's quite a bit of variation between them. Most of the non-boss monsters in the game can be obtained, while the puppets range from dark nurses to giant teddy bears.

The game employs random battles, a system that lasted about a decade longer than it should have. Still, they're not terribly frequent, so I can't complain too much.

Combat plays like a bite sized strategy game. The fighters appear on a very small grid like map, and are allowed to move a few squares in addition to attacking or using an item on their turn. This system actually works fairly well, and combat has the potential to be fun. Unfortunately, a few other things ruin it: the difficulty, and the graphics.

This game is extremely easy. You're given three difficulty options: Easy, Normal and Hard, at the start of the game. Normal mode is only challenging if you're missing a few fingers, but even then you could probably compensate by using your chin and still blow through the game without taking much damage. In easy mode, almost everything dies in one hit, and anything that doesn't will probably commit hara-kiri before you can hit it again. I never tried hard mode, since there's no way to change the difficulty after starting the game, but I've heard it's also quite easy.

While the difficulty kills a lot of enjoyment that you may had been able to have, what really ruins the game is its general progression. There are a lot of fetch quests and dungeon crawls. The fetch quests often involve running from point A to point B multiple times. Buying a few teleports, items that allow you to instantly go back to the world map, makes these a bit more bearable, but there's still no excuse.

The dungeons are designed in the poorest fashion imaginable. When you enter, you're presented with a room with four exits, including the one you just entered. Pick the right entrance and you'll walk down a long series of empty hallways before coming to another four entrance room, until you reach the end of the dungeon. Pick the wrong entrance, and you'll walk down a long series of hallways before coming to a dead end. You must then walk all the way back and choose another exit. Talk about tedious!

As for replay value, there's nothing outside of collecting party members. No real sidequests, no New Game +, no hidden equipment.

Graphics:

And here's where it all falls apart. The game is all sprites, with no FMVs to speak of. Now, I love to see a modern game use sprites well, but the sad truth is that Rhapsody uses them very poorly. The sprites are blurry and barely resemble the characters as seen in the concept art and facial graphics. It's often difficult to distinguish gender in the NPCs.

Most of the environments are just ugly. There are only two different styles for dungeons, and since you'll be spending a lot of time in dungeons, you're bound to get sick of the alternating cave and stone temple designs very quickly.

Battle graphics aren't much better. Spell graphics are all extremely basic: they range from rainbow beams to pixelated stars, all of which look like they were whipped up in MS Paint right before a deadline.

The only redeeming graphical qualities are the hand drawn face graphics that appear when a major character speaks (they even change to fit the mood of the speaker) and the concept art that can be viewed as you play through the game.

Sound:

The sound. Oh yes, the sound. You would expect that in a "Musical Adventure", they would focus on the sound, and that I would label this the best part of the game. Well, true believers, I wish I could say that.

There are seemingly about two songs in the game that don't have vocals: an overworld theme and a battle theme. They're completely unexceptional. They're not annoying, which is good since you'll be listening to them quite a bit, but nor are they especially pleasant to listen to. The same goes for sound effects. I hardly even noticed them.

Outside of the vocalized songs, the game has next to no voice acting. It's all text. Not that I especially mind reading, but they obviously could've acted the whole thing out if they wanted to. What was stopping them?

And now, the vocalized songs. The things that make this a musical adventure. They were apparently so confident about their appeal that they included the soundtrack with the game. I came in expecting humor. I wanted to hear midbosses rock out loud about how awesome they were. I desired a song about pancake attacks. What did I get? Way too many songs about how our hearts are filled with hope and joy, and how love will raise us to the stars. I wasn't sure if I wanted to break my speakers or poke my eardrums out. The songs basically all sound the same, and sound bad. A few songs break the template, but they're not especially good either.

For a musical, you really don't spend a lot of time listening to music. There's a lot of gameplay in between each song. Considering how bad the music is, this is merciful, but it does hurt the "musical" feel to have an hour of dungeon crawling before each number.

You have the option of listening to the songs with the original Japanese lyrics, but that didn't make me hate them less.

As far as the singers go, only Cornet's voice is passable, as she's played by Sara Thomas, an established musician. The other singers all sound like they signed up to do voiceovers and were told to sing without knowing how.

Pros:

+ Lots of party members that are legitimately fun to obtain.
+ The hand drawn concept art and facial graphics are very nice.
+ Basic battle system is halfway decent.
+ It comes with the soundtrack, which you could use as a coaster. Or play it to get everyone to leave when the party's over.
+ Well, it was a good concept, anyway.

Cons:

- Dull, cliche ridden plot with few interesting characters.
- Extremely easy. A flesh eating zombie could beat this game with one decayed hand tied behind his back.
- Full of poorly designed fetch quests and dungeons.
- Abysmal in-game graphics.
- No voice acting outside of songs.
- The vocalized songs, the game's main attraction, are terrible.
- Few extras and very little replay value.

Overall:

I had very high expectations for this game, and, believe it or not, I wanted to like it. Unfortunately, it just wasn't meant to be. When you get right down to it, if you remove the songs (which would be a tremendous improvement), this game could've easily been done on the SNES. And it would've been a bad game on the SNES. Don't go near it.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/18/07