Sing through this family saga in the musical Marl Kingdom. Was Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles Worth It?
Full disclosure: We received a review code for the Nintendo Switch version of this game. Rest assured that this will not affect the quality or candor of our review.
Table of Contents
We covered the first Rhapsody as part of the NIS Classics Vol. 3 collection. It’s a short, cutesy game plagued by mediocre ports. At the time, I was aware of the sequels but had no idea that they were coming to the West. Never one to sleep on their back catalogue, NIS has brought these games stateside.
The music is cute, and the voice acting was surprisingly well done. Strangely, the songs aren’t dubbed, which isn’t a deal breaker, but seems half-assed. The puppet mechanic returns, and you can even call a horde of them in as reinforcements in Rhapsody 3.
Given that these games are a bundle, there’s no real reason to judge them separately. With that in mind, these two titles are all over the place. Rhapsody 2 is fine, but 3 varies wildly in terms of story quality. Difficulty is also a bit uneven: Rhapsody 2 is too easy, but 3 borders on frustrating.
They aren’t bad but it’s pretty dependent on where exactly you are in the two games. Rhapsody 2 is fun, but if it has the peaks, then 3 has the valleys.
We’re looking at $50 for ports of two older games that are very inconsistent when it comes to the player experience. Hypothetically, would they be worth $25 separately? Not really.
The diehard NIS fans (you know who you are) had this preordered, but otherwise it’s hard to really nail down an audience for a pair of twenty year old sequels.
We really have no shortage of retro JRPGs to play these days. I don’t have any particular enmity for these titles, but I could go through hundreds of retro JRPGs before ever thinking “I need to check out the Rhapsody series. If you’re a huge NIS fan, then this is probably on your shelf next to the rest of their recent retro ports. If you’re not, then there are quite a few other retro RPGs at the same or more competitive price points to check out.
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