Rhapsody:
A Musical Adventure

Review by Chi Phan

STORY

The story starts off with the main character, Cornet, going off into the woods to gather some things for her grandpa. Cornet is a special girl as she has the ability to play a horn and make puppets come to life. The world of Rhapsody is filled with puppets but only certain special people like Cornet can talk to them. Getting back on track, Cornet and her puppet friend, Kururu, were in the midst of getting the stuff that Cornet granpa needed when suddenly they are attack by Myao, a servant of the evil witch Marjoly. Fortunately, before Myao can trash the two girls butts, Prince Ferdinand came to their rescue. Like with any girl's romance fantasy story, Cornet quickly falls in love with the prince at first sight. After the initial meeting with the Prince, Cornet sets about the task of trying to meet with him again at the Prince's birthday party. So fast forwarding to the birthday party, Marjoly decided to crash the party and get revenge on the person who defeated her servant, Myao, a few days earlier in the woods. After finding out it was the Prince who beat up Myao, Marjoly quickly falls in love with the Prince at first sight too. She then accidentally turn the Prince to stone and ran off with him. Boy, if only this happens to me in real life when it comes to girls. Needless to say, you now have a purpose for your storyquest. If you didn't know what that is then I'll just say it, go and find the Prince and rescue him.
Now Rhapsody story is nothing more than light hearted fun. It is a musical story as there are quite a few musical numbers introduce throughout the game. In terms of giving us a light hearted fun storyline, the game does give us that but overrall I found the story lacking with a lasting impression. I guess the reason for that is that all the characters are a bunch of goofballs including the villians. When you play the game, the story will be on your mind but after finishing it, you're probably forget about it in a couple of days. It could use a little more meat too as the story is pretty short.

Score: 7/10

CHARACTERS

With most strategy rpgs, you have lots of characters but little in-depth character developement. Here you don't have many characters at all. Most of the characters comes from the dark side while on the good side, you basically have three characters being focused on. They are Cornet and her two friends, Kururu and Etoile. Now the character developement among the three are done very nicely. You really get a good sense about them. Unfortunately for the bad guys, you don't know anything about them or why they're so bad. The puppets feature in this game is a let down too. They talk but really have no personalities at all. When you play Vandal Hearts, you care about all the pary members. Here you really don't give a damn whether one or more of your puppets die at all. It just shows you that you can't replace human characters with puppets.

Score: 7/10

GRAPHICS

Graphics is a let down. It's unimaginative and quite boring to boot. This is more of a 16 bit graphic than a 32 bit one. Basically you have a 2-D world with small little sprites. Now I have nothing against these kinds of graphics as long as they show something that scream 32 bit. Anything. The colors are boring and dull as are the magic spells. In fact this game use of magic spells and special attacks is a major let down. They're plain and very unimaginative. With most rpg games, gamemakers tend to put some sort of effort to dazzle us with great spells animation and stuff like that but here they can't even bother to do that. Every single caves/dungeons looks exactly the same with one another with the exception of the colors. Basically they design one cave/dungeon and said," let's just use this and put different colors to make many different cave/dungeons out of it." Clearly no effort was made in terms of graphics here.

Score:5/10

MUSIC

Well, if they didn't put any effort into the graphics then where did they put it into. Answer: music. Oh yeah baby. I love the music in this game. While the background and fighting musical scores doesn't really do much for you, it's the mp3 sung musical scores that gives this game the fun elements. There are over 10 beautifully sung songs in this game. All are done excellently in english with the exception of maybe the guy who's doing the prince singing part as I personnally don't think he can sing. Not only is listening to the songs fun but it reminds you of your days in elementry school from your music teachers. In fact it's almost as if Atlus went out and hire a bunch of pre-school music teachers for the job here. I like it. Makes me want to be 8 again.

Score:10/10

GAMEPLAY

The game comes in three settings. Easy, normal, and hard. I played the normal setting and I have to say this is by far the easiest rpg game that I have ever played. I didn't even break a sweat or nail with this game. Now this game is a strategy rpg game but more of a traditional rpg game that uses a strategy battle system. With most strategy rpg games, you have a cut scene and a battlefield map fight scene. Here, everything is like with a traditional rpg game. You go to different towns and interact with people, explore dungeons/caves, and find information to your next destination. While exploring in dungeons, you get into random encounters. This will bring up the battle system. Basically it's a small battlefield map with the monsters on one side and you on the other side. There's Cornet and then you can have a total of 3 puppets to support her. A total of 4 party members like with FF Tactics. Like with any strategy rpg game, it's turn base moving each of your party member one by one on each square. The command menu is pretty much like any other command menu with attack, magic, ect. At the end of each fight, there's a possibility of a monster that Cornet had killed off wanting to join your pary. You can select yes or no. Pretty basic stuff here. Puppets are scattered throughout the world of Rhapsody, just have Cornet talk to them to recruit them. The game itself is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. You shouldn't have too much trouble with the gameplay. If you need help fighting a boss in the normal mode then I suggest you return the game and ask for a refund. Nothing cutting edge or anything that will knock your socks off. Just basic rpg stuff.

Score: 5/10

EXTRA/REPLAY

There's not really anything extra in this game. No mini games or any real side quest that's worth a mention. One of the game option is a gallery section where throughout the world of Rhapsody, you can find illustrations of Rhapsody pictures from Atlus that you can find in treasure chests during your explorations in dungeons. You can look at them in the gallery option. You can also find some musically tunes in treasure chests too. That's about it.
Replay?? Well I guess you can play the game at a different difficulty mode once you finish the first one. But really, I'll probably won't replay this game in a long time.

Score: 3/10

If you're looking for some light hearted fun rpg that doesn't take much of your time then you may want to pick this game up. But for the true hard core rpgers that want to go on a major quest to save the world, then just leave it alone. The game isn't bad but it needs more meat to it other than musical tunes attach to it.

Final Score: 6/10

Hottest Rhapsody girl: Marjoly

Funniest girl: Myao

Best spell: holy

Best puppet: Sharte

What's next: Threads of Fate