A look back at: Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

So I have just recently reviewed this super easy game, so this will be a weird one to look back on considering how quickly I reviewed it.

It's short, easy, girlish, and somewhat forgettable. Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is basically what you would expect if you take a Disney film and turn it into a JRPG. This was surprisingly one of Nippon Ichi's first games, and also partnered with Atlus USA. Odd, considering just how hard Atlus makes some of its games. For a game considered to be the second easiest RPG on the Playstation, I at least got to see what else it could offer.

And I wasn't entirely happy of course. The fights last less than a minute, naturally excluding bosses (but sometimes including them). There are two boss fights, back-to-back which you have to lose, along with another one that ends after a few rounds. The navigation seems alright, until you get to the dungeons at least. This is what I forgot to mention in my main review. The dungeons? They are awful. Seriously, there's the cave layout and the castle layout, but you will quickly notice that there wasn't much effort made into making dungeons interesting. There's the usual passageways, the forks that may lead to treasure rooms, even the dead-end rooms are bland. There's another mechanic I didn't mention, involving Monster Masters, since Cornet can apparently recruit monsters in the same manner the Legend of Legaia characters can learn Seru Magic. I never really bothered with it much, instead focusing on balancing my own party even if this means having a horrifically unbalanced Cornet sitting at level 84 at the end of the game.*

Well what they failed in dungeon design, they do okay everywhere else. NPC dialogue is alright, though some make odd references and such. The side stories involving the puppets you find often fall by the wayside, only to crop up when you don't expect them to, which is interesting in itself. The fact the puppets remain in the party after they say goodbye is good too. The quest for the stones has some interesting morals going for it. You can choose to kill the guardian for the Thunderstone, or don't kill it, fight Gao, and get the Holystone instead. The Waterstone is a trip through a sunken ship, the Firestone through a volcano, and the Earthstone through...a giant worm apparently. They tried to make the boss interesting enough too. Parts of the story are pretty much in light heart, except in a few cases, like with the people inside the worm liking the way they live there or Michael's idiotic death scene. And of course, the music tracks basically add more flavor to this game. It's basically nothing but a quick and super easy game that doesn't really take itself too seriously. But don't expect the absolute best of things with this game.

*I kid of course. You can steamroll practically everything in this game since the level curve is very generous, even if you pick the Hard difficulty. Cornet doesn't even have any main skills apart from playing her horn or utilizing rewards, I just level up my puppets in Pokemon style for this game, pretty much.