Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

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High fantasy musical romcom Japanese role-playing game. If you need to hear anything more, read on.

I love this game. It was one of the few PlayStation RPGs I never played originally, but once it came to Steam, I played it and was immediately invested. It's an adorable, fun and an entertaining, if simple (nothin' wrong with that, especially with what they're clearly going for here) story and the music and comedy are great. Now I've just gotta finish the sequels...

I really wanted to like this game. It's a musical, the characters' designs are cute (except for the main villainnes, what even is this, why), the main rival/friend Etoile is fun, the game in general is quite cute, but...

Everything below is written mainly from language lerning perspective:
- The main appeal to me was that it's a musical. The songs aren't too frequent, which is fine and understandable. But there is no text when the song is sung!!! Come on! The songs aren't too difficult but it's still would be easier to understand if I could see the lyrics. And I could mine vocabulary from these songs too!
- Half of the game time you spend in labyrinths, trying to figure out the right way, while being stopped every two seconds (literally) for a useless battle, that you win just by pressing X a few times. No language, no thinking, no fun. Tepetitive and dull both from gameplay perspective and from language leraning perspective
- There are a lot of NPCs that have unique lines of dialogue, which is cool! But most of the environment is not interactable. Come on, give me "it's a table" when I try to interact with the table or something. Would be cool for language learning, especially for beginners. And in general because of it the game world feels empty. Like the objects aren't really there, these are just walls painted like something.
- The story isn't very engaging, the characters and their problems don't seem to deep. Which wouldn't be such a big deal if not all of the above, making it completely not worth it
- For beginners some of the vocabulary would be difficult. For me it was fine, but just in case you are a beginner, it's won't be particularly easy for you.

When I was browsing games by NIS, I accidentally found this. I watched the trailer and was instantly hooked on, especially the music used in the trailer. First time I've ever seen a musical strategy RPG. I was like, "I need that!"

After playing through the story, I fell in love with the characters and the world they inhabit. Cornet is so cool. I got to see that she was someone who is kind, caring, but also determined and steadfast. But the story would be nothing with the musicals. OMG, I love the songs here, they're very nice to listen to. My two favorites are called "Our World" and "Thank You".

One of the main villain, Marjorly, was really funny. I mean, she was evil for kidnapping the prince, but she just gets no respect from the three people that's under her command (Myao, Gao, and Crowdia).

Now, the combat is I think one of its biggest weakness. If you have played any Disgaea, then this is pretty similar. There are many different puppets and monsters that you can acquire and many of them can use magic that costs mana to cast. The trouble is that the enemies are way too easy. I mean, not all games have to be difficult, but there's almost no challenge when dealing with any enemy. I got genuinely got bored so much from the battles that I just used auto attack for all my characters. The only tough fight is the final boss, but that's because 1 hit from him could halve you or your puppets health.

Then there are the dungeons. Now, when I read a few of the reviews for Rhapsody, many of them point out that you can easily get lost in the dungeons. I thought, "how bad can it be?" The first dungeon wasn't too bad, but then I tried to go to the Ancient Forest and got completely lost. All of its rooms look exactly the same, not to mention the many diverging paths that it has (this isn't just limited to the Ancient Forest, but to many other Dungeons like Salsa Volcano, Ice Temple, and especially Marjorly's Castle)

Overall, this game is pretty good. I love the story, I love the characters, I love the music, but the monster battles and dungeon designs are kind of bad. But I'd still recommend it.

Loved this RPG since the PS1 and so happy it got remastered!