Rhapsody II: Ballad of the Little Princess Reviews

An improvement on its already charming predecessor. The hand-drawn backgrounds return, and are much more detailed this time. The battle system has been completely retooled, but still boils down to little more than spamming strong AOEs and healing occasionally, as the grid-based movement has been removed it is at least a little faster than before. The dungeons this time around are mediocre, but in this case that's actually a huge improvement. It's a shame that they couldn't make English versions of the songs to go along with the English dub, but I understand this series is incredibly niche, and there likely just wasn't the budget for it as this was never going to sell a lot of copies.

This is a really solid remaster/port of a 1999 Playstation 1 title. Like the first Rhapsody title, the original was fairly low budget and it shows, but it's still enjoyable if easy to play. Art is a mix of 2D sprites, 2D side scrolling areas, and a few 3D areas. The 2D sprites and areas look pretty good, lots of parallax scrolling, and decent detail. The 3D areas are a bit more pixelated, due to the limitations of the Playstation 1. There aren't a huge amount of graphical updates to modern systems. Music's great, and just like with the first game, the characters will break into musical numbers. It's one of the charms of the series, and the songs themselves are pretty catchy. Story is fine, it's aimed toward teen girls, and I'm by no means a teen girl anymore so I'm way outside the demographics. It's still fun to play. Combat is different from the first Rhapsody title, it's a more traditional turn based title than the tactical RPG style of the first. This is not an ATB based turn based system either, you input commands for the whole party and they do their attacks based on their speed (and the enemies do the same). Puppets also work differently from the first game, they're no longer separate units, they're a type of equipment that grows in levels as you do. The puppets give you stats, and have a collection of spells they can cast. Spells also work differently in this title, there is no MP so casting spells costs your MONEY. There are accessories you can get later on to help offset some of this cost, but you're not going to be using spells too often as it can cost you more than you earn. Each character also has some special attacks, these attacks cost HP to use, which then you have to use items or spells to heal up. This is a very different resource management system than is typical. Combat in general is more difficult than Rhapsody 1, but you're still not going to hit any game-overs as long as you have some jRPG experience. There's some humor, but a lot of it is the insulting and derogatory humor directed toward girls in a lot of Japanese media. Level design is better than Rhapsody 1, but it's still fairly plain and uninspired. You'll see a lot of long repeating corridors. Some areas are far too long. Overall, it's a fun adventure, pretty easy (turn it up if you want even a bit of challenge). It's an old game, and while it plays pretty well, there are a few QoL areas that could be improved on. The most frustrating is that every time your party reforms, anyone who is re-added has their equipment and sometimes puppets removed. In some chapters, this can happen 5 or 6 times in short order.

great addition to the marl series Love it a bunch actually.

How do you follow-up a really unique and interesting JRPG that blends traditional menu-based combat with elements of a strategy RPG and the ability to summon puppet allies as units to fight alongside you? If your answer is to make a generic menu-based RPG without any of the SRPG elements or having the puppets fight with you any longer, you must have worked for Nippon Ichi Software. The original Rhapsody was one of the coolest games we'd ever experienced. A cute little adventure that was innovative. So why then was its sequel stripped of all that charm? They neutered the game to something that's barely more original than your run-of-the-mill JRPG. There's no positioning strategy. You just line up on opposite sides as your enemy and select commands from a menu to be fired off. The puppets are just used to cast spells like some sort of budget Persona. And for that matter, your MP is also your currency? It really discouraged me from buying anything since I didn't know if I'd need to save my money to do attacks. Maybe the worst part of the game is that it screws with your party worse than Final Fantasy 4. Every 5 minutes, a character gets added or taken away. While the devs at least don't make them steal equipment when they leave, this does mean that you're constantly having to equip your party members due to the frequency of the changes. It slows down gameplay of an already slow game. The battles are kind of an insult, too. They lack any sort of challenge. If you want to enjoy this a little, put it on the highest difficulty. I almost fell asleep on Normal. It does have some good characters (except Randy. Randy is useless), so that's one thing going for it. It still is a cute game, but not one worth its full price tag by any means. The plot is… mostly contrived as an excuse to move itself along, but this isn't really anything new for a NIS title. They tend to have writing that doesn't take itself seriously. That's not a point against it, that's just the style. There are some good bits to the story that can get you invested at times, and some of the characters are charming, or at least hilarious.