· 

Rhapsody III: Memories of Marl Kingdom

NOTE: All screenshots are currently from the game's official website. I will update them with my own once my PS5's technical difficulties are fixed. 

Tidbits:

Release date: August 29, 2023 (as part of Marl Kingdom Chronicles)
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS5, Windows (via Steam)
Version tested: PS5
Audio languages: English, Japanese
Demo available: No
Paid DLC: No 

Before finding their rather comfortable niche with their flagship Disgaea series, Nippon Ichi was an even more obscure developer than they already are, having been around since 1993, but mostly coasting along with small puzzle releases. Their first RPG, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure received mixed reviews due to its simplistic gameplay, copy & paste dungeons and general easiness. This, sadly, also meant that the two sequels the company made afterwards would not receive international releases for a very long time. Enter 2023, and the impossible somehow happened: we got a compilation release of both games in English, proving that miracles do happen on occasion.

The story structure of this third entry in the series is quite different, being divided into different chapters which all take place at various points in time of the series' general lore, and each featuring its own cast of playable characters. The first chapter is about Cornet, protagonist of the first game, in the middle of her mission to rescue the prince, while getting stuck in a forest, covering things that otherwise weren't shown in said first entry. The second chapter is about her daughter trying to win her parents' blessing for marriage, the third and fourth are about different parts of the villains, while the fifth chapter is more or less an origin story of much of the series' lore. Does this mean you need to have played the first and second game? Kinda yes, kinda no. The backstories of all chapters are adequately explained by a quick exposition dump at the beginning, but the character dynamics can be somewhat hard to understand if you haven't played any of the other games, especially chapter two is critical, as it more or less serves as an epilogue to the second game, meaning it spoils the ending quite thoroughly. Thankfully, the second game is included by default, so do play that first if you don't want to get spoiled. Otherwise, it can be played as a standalone title.

 

The story beats and stakes all vary greatly from chapter to chapter, although the game is generally on the light-hearted side, with a few sad moments strewn about, but overall, it is a tale of optimism and hope, which can be enjoyable, if a bit cliché at times - it does poke fun at that stuff too, including a particularly poignant moment at the end of one chapter, which is invalidated almost immediately through the power of situational comedy. Chapter two, once again, is hit especially hard by this, being almost more of a slapstick comedy, which makes sense, as that game's plot had already been well-wrapped up by that point. The writing is fairly good overall, if not outstanding, much like Nippon Ichi's other output, they love to put jokes everywhere, including in item and spell descriptions, and spicing up the dialogue as well, which is alright for what it is. Everybody has a defined personality, and the interactions between characters are genuinely enjoyable to watch. There are characters who can get annoying, the third chapter being an especially big contender, considering it deals almost exclusively with the cute cat sidekicks, who only had small parts previously, which worked out fine, but simply do not work well in a starring role, especially given how often they say "meow".

Gameplay-wise, we're dealing with an RPG with several unique mechanics, many of which would be adapted into NIS's later titles, especially La Pucelle and Disgaea. One interesting aspect is the equipment system - eschewing the typical sword, shield, armor and weapon gear slots, every character instead has three slots available, and everyone can equip everything. This means you could, in theory, equip a character with three weapon items and have them dish out huge damage, but be unable to tank many hits in return. It's important to keep equipment balanced, not just because of the stats, but also because of the potential to learn new spells. Basically, while every character has their own set of personal skills, they can also learn additional ones by equipping certain combinations of equipment, typically in the form of elemental crystals, but other items also factor into this. These skills start at level zero, but if they're used often enough, they will eventually level up and no longer need the equipment, freeing up that character. 

 

The party setup - and the resulting battle flow - are also unique for the genre. You can have a whopping twelve party members in battle at once - but only four of them can take direct orders, acting as the leaders of one of three rows, with three more party members positioned behind them. These members will be AI-controlled in battle (and usually spam their strongest skills), but will take over leading position if the current leader is knocked out. This comes with various synergies of its own, for example Cornet and any other puppeteer characters get stat boosts from having puppets assigned to them, while monsters do better amongst their own species. The not-so-great combinations can result in rather hefty stat penalties, and playing around with the setup and figuring out the best combination is important - because, much like the party itself, enemies can also come in huge numbers and will obliterate you if you play carelessly, especially the boss fights, which tend to be quite difficult. The puppeteer characters can also use various super moves, which require the rewards gauge to be filled to a certain point, which itself fills up as they attack and use skills. These super moves consist of stuff like hurling candies at enemies or dumping giant pancakes on them, which deals massive damage and is useful for crowd control.

 

Human and puppet characters will join you through story events in each chapter. Monsters instead have a random chance of joining you after being defeated in battle. While they are generally weaker, monsters do carry some significance: as mentioned before, your characters change in every chapter, meaning you more or less start from zero. Monsters can, however, be summoned at any goddess statue, which also serves as a save and healing point, regardless of where they were recruited. The only requirement is for you to be at least the same level as them. Unwanted monsters can also be released, which rewards you with items, money or experience, whatever you prefer, meaning it's always worth it to recruit and build them up, regardless of whether you plan to use them long-term or not. And in case you couldn't tell, this is a far, faaar cry from how simplistic things were in the first game. Rhapsody III is when NIS first started approaching the eventual nadir of complexity and intricate mechanics they would with their later titles, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with all the possible combinations to find the best solution.

Battles themselves occur randomly as you explore the overworld. The encounter rate is mercifully low, although there is an item you obtain early in each chapter that increases it for grinding purposes. Outside of chapter three, more on that later, I rarely found myself having to grind, though. Not only are the battles fair enough, but experience and money payouts are fairly low, while item prices are high - as such, it's more important to gather monsters and periodically release them to gather more money, which is a lot more efficient. Otherwise, whenever I hit a roadblock (typically in the form of particularly tough bosses) I usually just had to reevaluate my party and equipment choices, which often did the trick just fine, but grinding is, of course, an option for those who desire it.

 

When you're not battling, you're running around on large maps and getting to the next point the story wants you to be at, the game being fairly linear in general and making it very clear were you need to go. There are occasional rewards for going off the beaten path, usually in the form of unique or rare accessories. There are also some very light puzzles - and I do mean very light, such as having to find hidden switches or finding the right path in a dungeon, but nothing on the same level as Zelda, but it does serve to break up the monotony a tiny bit at least. In the designated towns, of which there is typically only one per chapter, you can buy healing items or upgrade your equipment. Items aren't particularly important, or at least they haven't been to me, as healing magic is fairly common, and all status effects, including KO, are healed at the end of battle, meaning items that cure those are very situational and thus rather useless - not to mention there is no way to revive characters in battle anyway.

 

Despite the moment-to-moment gameplay being very enjoyable, it does suffer from several flaws. For example, defeated enemies sometimes drop treasure chests in battle, which you need to attack to open. Should any treasure chests still be unopened by the end of the battle, they will go to waste. While the AI will prioritize these, it is still possible for the last enemy to drop a chest, which you can logically never open. Exploration is also simply not very exciting - despite there being a few light puzzles, it becomes tedious and repetitive quickly, especially since basically every chapter plays the same, and despite the huge environments themselves, the chapters are rather short.

 

And then there is also the entirety of chapter three, which stars the servant cats. This is, by far and large, the worst chapter of the game and more or less exists solely for filler. The entire idea is to gather stuff for a party, which is scattered around the large castle the chapter takes place in. Except said castle is incredibly labyrinthine with no map to consult, and your starting party is absolutely pathetic, with it being entirely possibly to get killed by the first random encounter you get into, and it will take several battles to grind yourself to the point that you can actually survive. And even then, the characters are weak and it's just not enjoyable.  

Graphics-wise, the game's origins as a low-budget 2000 PS2 title really show. The game uses very basic polygonal environments with fixed camera angles and the characters are represented by bitmap sprites. The environments and backgrounds are expectedly simplistic - there are some small details, and they get the job done of conveying where you are, but are otherwise rather featureless and also very large - sometimes unnecessarily so. The sprites are fairly well-animated and expressive, however, and they are used well enough, and are underscored by large and very pretty character portraits that accompany the dialogue, which harmonizes well, but it's still hardly a looker overall. Also, the movement on the overworld feels a bit odd - it looks fine in screenshots, but it is rather floaty in practice, with the characters never quite feeling like they're actually touching the ground.

 

There's also the fact that the remastering part of this remaster hasn't been a particularly great one. Sure, you can now fast-forward cutscenes, which is nice, but in terms of graphics, they simply upscaled them, while still leaving in image artifacts, which is especially evident when looking at the character portraits up close. It also wasn't remastered to widescreen, despite featuring mostly 3D environments, so there are ugly black bars on the sides of the screen (so no, that wasn't me being unable to crop screenshots correctly, this is how the game actually looks!). One advantage these simple graphics had, and still do, was that due to the low specs, the game runs at an unbroken 60fps and the loading times are almost nonexistent, with everything loading in instantaneously, which definitely works to the game's advantage.

 

The soundtrack is enjoyable, and perhaps the game's other big strength. Not only are the regular tracks very pleasant and atmospheric, courtesy of NIS veteran Tenpei Sato, but the game also contains several musical numbers performed by the characters, which is where a lot of the budget probably went. These come with elaborate, sprite-based choreographies and rather catchy melodies, and they're always a joy whenever they pop up. Sadly, there aren't too many of them, and unlike the rest of the voice acting are only available in Japanese, although they have been subtitled at the very least, and fairly accurately so. Outside of the impressive musical numbers, voice acting is only sparsely used, generally reserved for key scenes. Voices are available in both English and Japanese. While I usually prefer to go with the Japanese option, I did use the English ones for my livestream not long ago, and I was pleasantly surprised that they were actually pretty good. It's not Academy Award material, and people who listen to dub tracks frequently will probably recognize a lot of the voices (because, for some reason, the English voice acting pool is super small), but it was enjoyable nonetheless - a lot more than I can say about other recent productions.

 

Sound effects will be familiar to those who've played any of NIS's other games, as this is where all the menu beeps and other effects had their origin - and they do their job just fine, although at this point I gotta say that I feel like I've been (retroactively, ironically enough) oversaturated in that regard, but they're absolutely fine on their own.

 

And, since this is a multiplatform release, the question will inevitably come up: what are the differences? Truthfully, almost none. The Switch version runs at a slightly lower resolution, while the PC version obviously has more display options. Other than that, they're all identical - right down to the console ports still having (now useless) keyboard settings.

 

So despite enjoying my time with the game, and having a blast with the battle system especially, I still have to look at critically, and given the aforementioned flaws and the fact that, despite being much more substantial than its predecessors, it still being a fairly barebones RPG, my final verdict is...

 

 65% - a step in the right direction

 

Pros:

  • Well-crafted battle system
  • Varied soundtrack with musical numbers
  • Enjoyable voice acting...

Cons:

  • ...of which there is preciously little
  • Chapter three in its entirety
  • Exploration is still too simple

Write a comment

Comments: 0