Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure - Part 01 - Prince Ferdinand
2Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure follows Cornet, a girl with a magical Trumpet and has the ability to talk to Puppets, who can join her and fight alongside her throughout the story.
The story is essentially a love story involving a Prince told from a "normal" girl's perspective.
The "Musical Adventure" aspect becomes apparent very quickly. From 11:20 you'll hear the first song in game. Characters break out at various points in the story into song, which gives it a very 90s Disney feeling. Pretty unique, and most of it sounds at least OK so it adds to the game (I enjoyed most of it to be honest).
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The story starts with Cornet, accompanied by Sharte heading into the nearby forest to obtain some Red Inotium. She gets ambushed by Miss Myao (one of the minions of the primary antagonist) and is saved from a Dragon by Prince Ferdinand.
From this point on Cornet makes it her quest to find him, and thank him.
In Mothergreen there's a fan club to sing up to, which is necessary to carry on with the story. You'll also find Etoile here, Cornet's rival who initially irritates her, but you'll see this relationship grow throughout the course of the game.
You can also go in to the Castle and loot it, and learn about Prince Ferdinand's favourite dish, which Cornet uses as a plan to woo him over.
The fish that makes up the dish is found in the nearby Woods where you'll be ambushed by more of Miss Myao's minions.
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Gameplay wise it's pretty simple to be honest. I pick Hard mode just to give some semblance of a challenge. The difficulty settings just change received Imotium and XP. I didn't really grind at any spot, but I don't skip many battles.
The first couple of parts have ridiculously easy battles still, and only a few parts in do I notice any change in dificulty.
Only a few fights were anything close to challenging, but none required restarts. I also don't have the need to grind in any area, but similar to my Lunar: The Silver Star playthrough, going for all treasures and fighting most fights on the way proves to be enough.
I do get all Puppets in this playthrough (I do go back towards the end for the two I missed in this part), but I don't complete the Puppet side quests requiring level 30, because I'm barely above that with my main party that I use almost all the way throughout the game.
On Easy difficulty this would be much quicker to do.
The battles themselves are VERY simple. Elemental strengths/weaknesses are there, but I never even bothered to learn them to be honest. Even those elements they weren't weak to did enough damage. Cornet I use mainly for her buff throughout the game, and Sharte's healing does most of the work, although items help later too.
You can pick whichever party you please for most of the game and you'll be fine. Items in shops, and some in dungeons are useful for buffing stats, so characters can be played with in multiple ways. You could play the same character as a physical damaging machine, a mage which will (eventually) get multi target spells, or make them tanky and send them into sponge hits. A good few characters have the freedom for this.
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Another thing to note is the sound effects in battle. It REALLY sounds like some sounds are missing, but trust me they're not. Surprising they got this aspect so wrong when the singing, and other music is so good in this game.