A look back at: Moon: Remix RPG Adventure

Thank you Toby Fox.

Okay, he's not the guy who made this, but whatever, a lot of his inspirations for Undertale basically came from this Japan-only release. He saw the stuff about this, an unnamed boy falling into a strange new world (though this one is the video game he was playing), the coming into contact with the strange and idiosyncratic  characters, and saving the monsters, the strange and cliche damage numbers during the beginning and ending. It seems like Undertale took it all and then some. Of course, other games Toby has experienced also helped in his craftsmanship, namely one song from Live-A-Live is the inspiration behind Megalovania.

So this is ultimately a pacifist RPG. You don't kill anything as the invisible boy at all. The hero does, and you get to experience the hero at first, but then you as the bystander boy end up catching their souls, sending them to the Moon for safety, and all sorts of things. The game essentially parodies all the conventions that fantasy RPGs have. Hero on a quest by a king and minister? Yeah, that's here, and the minister deemed him a "chosen one" and looks eerie enough to have sinister intentions. A "rabid dog" that attacks the hero? Turns out it's your Gramby's dog. And thankfully doesn't die from this. Legendary armor? It's hilariously some girl's bikini that the hero steals for some reason. The Perogon monster? An actual American family's pet which you don a suit and SET YOURSELF ON FIRE to trick the hero and save. The airship? A rocket you actually craft with the weird doctor Stein Hager. There's a weird oracle, a weird fisherman, weird Kukunte tribes, everything is weird but still manages to be interesting. Oh and the Penultimizer opponent that the hero fights near the end is really just all the monsters who die to protect the queen Aphrodite, who's you're guide fused with a dragon.

Weird, but can be frustrating early on. It's really bad that I've been working my ass off so much that I have only time on weekends and late nights to pick up this game again, luckily with summer on the horizon I'm looking at a decent enough break period to play more RPGs. But the frustration comes with not being able to do much action early on due to your action limit being small. The game actually gets easier the more you play it, you get more maximum action limits to avoid dying of fatigue or so, and doing things right also increases the love level. That's right, a game about making lots of love so you don't die. That's what this game is!