Rhapsody

[Dracos]

Well, given the recent swarm of Nippon ichi over the US with Disgaea, I figured I'd go ahead and give their previous game a try.  Rhapsody: A musical adventure was published by Atlus around the middle of the playstation era and generally was viewed as a mediocre showing at the time.  Playing it, it fully deserves most criticism leveled at it.  The game was often riddled with poor load handling (musical tracks were apparently loaded realtime rather than prior to the play given the constant bumping effect) and generally weak aspects of game design.  It's difficulty was handled by an xp and gold gain rate modifier which left the game's sadly undifficult and uncreative battle structure completely too easy no matter what difficulty level it was set on.  The characters were largely interchangable and overpowered showing little balance between being able to do no damage and suddenly taking out the enemies in a single swipe.  A few things though deserve special attention...

The dungeon design deserves...special attention.  To clarify, there is an award the dungeon designer deserves.  He should be kidnapped by four large men, knocked unconscious, and taken to a small building.  This building would have one room in it.  One room with four doors.  Behind each door would stand one of the aforementioned large men.  The designer would be left in the center of the room.  When he awakes, he would find each of the doors unlocked, but when he opened them and tried to exit, the large man behind it would beat him across the side of his face, hit him over the head, send him spinning back into the room, and shut the door again, leaving him to repeat the process while being repeatedly disoriented.

This award would likely not be as painful as the actual ridiculous dungeon design.  It's been years since I've seen such uncreative work.  About seventy percent of the dungeon rooms in the entire game are the exact same 'room with four pillars and four doors.', usually not even recolored!  It was absolutely pathetic.

Game balance was also a winner.  My most powerful character I picked up... from a mailbox.  From the bloody mailbox right outside the starting house.  A character who had all the best dark magics, matched the physical fighters pretty much blow for blow, and had more hp and mp than pretty much anyone alongside a high agility and greater move range.  This is what we like to refer to as a brokenly good character in game design...  and sometimes they are fine to put in... but not in the bloody mailbox where you can pick it up and have an uberpowerful character just because.  Of course, this character being overpowered wasn't terribly important.  Why?  Because most of the characters were pretty darn nutsy compared to the enemies they fought.  I could almost solidly choose any mage character (all 85 percent of the cast) and trust that they'd not only be blastingly powerful physically but could cast huge group hit spells that'd take everything out...and manage to gain a level (restoring all hp and mp) before they'd run out of mp.  This held true all the way into the sixties with characters (didn't really test further as I'd crushed the game by that point).

So, basically, long story short, the gameplay of the game is a joke.  It's a living mockery of all things good with tactical strategy games.

So, what WAS good about this game?

The answer is not much.  Not nearly enough to justify the average price tag it carries these days.  It's clear to see why this game quickly disappeared and didn't get much of a printing in the US.  It just doesn't have a lot going for it.  The concept is incredibly cute, and at some parts even well executed, but it can't make up for the fact that the gameplay in general stinks, the story writing was often vacuous, and the graphics are at best average for the time.  It's good for a cute laugh if you have the 8-15 hours it takes to beat the game and some of the musical numbers are worthy of a smile, but overall the game as a whole is pathetic.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

Heh.

While I haven't gotten around to really playing Rhapsody myself, it's a big favorite at another forum I go to. They'd have a conniption fit if that review was posted there.

EDIT - I hate typos.

[Olvelsper]

Well, I liked the game too, but I agree with Drac's review. Despite it being cute and pretty great at spoofing Disney style movies, technically it was...bad.

Especially for its time. ^^;