Released in 1997 on the PS1 only in Japan, moon: Remix RPG Adventure was one of the few cult classics released by the tiny company of ex-Square employees known as Love De Lic. Veterans of that company would go many directions, but some of the creative heads went on to form Skip Ltd. (makers of games like Chibi-Robo) or to make games like Rule of Rose and Chulip. A close friend of mine played through Chulip last year and loved it, and when I saw that this new, weird Switch game simply called "moon" had ties to it, I had to see what the fuss was about. This month's Together Retro theme offered the perfect opportunity to finally sit down and play it, and I'm really glad that I finally did. Many reviews describe moon as some "anti-RPG", which I get, in a sense, but it's really just an adventure game, and a damn good one. It took me around 15-ish hours to complete the game in English.
moon tells the story of a little boy up late at night playing his new video game, "moon". He's a valiant knight going through a Dragon Quest-style RPG, and you get a few perspectives from various "save points" of the Hero's journey through this land to slay the Dragon and rescue the moonlight. Then, just as you slay the Dragon, your mother tells you to turn the game off and go to bed, which you do. However, the TV suddenly turns back on, and when you go to inspect it, you're sucked into the television and dropped into a world that looks uncannily familiar. You're invisible at first, and can only hear conversations, but eventually an elderly woman who has recently lost her grandchild mistakes you for him and gives you his set of clothes to wear (hence the little invisible fellow on the front of the game's cover).
From the way the townspeople speak, it seems that you're at the start of the game, and the Hero hasn't even set out on his quest yet. However, once you set out around town, you realize that not everything was as it seemed when you were originally playing it. The wild, stray dog you fought at the start of the game is revealed to have been a totally ordinary dog the Hero just thought was some sort of monster to chase. This begins your introduction to the game's main premise, which is following along after the Hero to try and clean up the messes he makes and also to save the world in your own way through love.
Upon your first night sleeping, you're visited in your dream by the God of Love, who informs you that the only way to combat the Hero's misguided quest is to gather enough love. The gathering of love is the main core of the game, and it takes various forms. It takes place both in the form of helping people with their problems, and also bringing back to life all of the animals (monsters really, but the game quite purposefully calls them animals) that the Hero has slayed in his quest to level up and get stronger. There's the wider quest of saving the world, and then these smaller puzzles to save animals (hints to them are given when you inspect their corpses), and it all flows together to make a really solid adventure game with barely any (excuse the pun) moon logic.
Most importantly, however, collecting love upgrades your love level, and your love level extends the time you can stay awake. Several puzzles, particularly the penultimate one, weigh on your ability to stay awake for a very long time, so getting to love level 22 or so is effectively the end goal of your quest from a purely mechanical standpoint. Eating food extends the time you're awake a bit, but money is a resource you'll either need to grind for with fishing (which can't be done immediately, at least) or is quite limited with the rewards you get for saving animals. If you don't sleep before you run out your action limit, you're dead and you have to go back to the last time you slept.
Once you're able to stay awake for days at a time, forgetting to sleep could end up meaning you've lost a lot of progress, so it's good to keep an eye on the clock in the upper left of the screen. You get used to this mechanic quite quickly, although compared to games like Chibi-Robo and other offshoots of this dev team, an outright game over is a pretty brutal punishment for staying out too late, and it's something to be aware of going in. There's no larger time limit to complete the game within (and your ending doesn't weigh on how much time you take either), but it takes a little getting used to.
moon's writing is definitely its highlight, as one would expect for an adventure game. It's setting is certainly unconventional, being a strange mix of Western fantasy and modern technology, but the relatively small game world is one you'll grow intimate with fairly quickly. The characters are all unique and quirky in their own ways, and have their own schedules they follow on each of the seven days of the week. The localization is honestly amazing, and I'm kinda glad it took 20 years to get this game localized because it probably would've been much worse had it come out in English back in the 90's.
moon's ultimate message can definitely come off as one that is a bit disparaging of video games and the time spent playing them, but I don't really see it that way. I see moon much more as a message not to the people who play games so much as to the people who make them. That games don't need to be all about violence and killing to be satisfying, and games can (and perhaps should, depending on how far you wanna take the conclusion) be about more than that. moon is an "anti-RPG" in how it decides to pose this question to the player through the lens of a typical RPG turned on its head, and it's a really cleverly put together bit of commentary.
The writing of the game is bolstered by its presentation. There isn't a ton of music in moon, but that's because the game actually has its own in-built music player for MD (mini-discs, I assume?) you can buy starting fairly early in the game. What music is there, however, is quite good. The graphical style is a mixture of detailed 2D models for the human characters (usually) and claymation-style digitized sprites for basically all of the "animals", walking around pre-rendered 2D locations. It makes for a very varied but still cohesive style that will likely be at least somewhat familiar to those familiar with something like Chibi-Robo (a game I use as an example so often since it's the product of Love De Lic's alumni that would be most familiar to Westerners ^^;).
Even the sound design is fascinatingly unique in how it uses clips of actual language cut together to make the voices of its NPCs, with different NPCs often speaking in different languages from any other character (me and my friends were able to pick out English, Japanese, Arabic, Polish, French, and German, but there were plenty we couldn't identify), and makes even talking to NPCs feel like a memorable experience in how uncanny it can feel to hear your own language distorted in such an odd fashion while trying to read the subs that contain their actual dialogue.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an adventure game that is a must-play for any fans of the genre. I was surprised to see that this 2020 port is actually not available on anything but Switch, making it a pretty stellar cult classic of an exclusive for Nintendo. It's well worth the asking price of 20 bucks and is honestly one of my new favorite games. If you've played things like Chulip or Chibi-Robo and want more games with that sort of oddball style and unconventional approach to gameplay and storytelling, then you are likely going to adore moon, and should absolutely give it a look.
moon tells the story of a little boy up late at night playing his new video game, "moon". He's a valiant knight going through a Dragon Quest-style RPG, and you get a few perspectives from various "save points" of the Hero's journey through this land to slay the Dragon and rescue the moonlight. Then, just as you slay the Dragon, your mother tells you to turn the game off and go to bed, which you do. However, the TV suddenly turns back on, and when you go to inspect it, you're sucked into the television and dropped into a world that looks uncannily familiar. You're invisible at first, and can only hear conversations, but eventually an elderly woman who has recently lost her grandchild mistakes you for him and gives you his set of clothes to wear (hence the little invisible fellow on the front of the game's cover).
From the way the townspeople speak, it seems that you're at the start of the game, and the Hero hasn't even set out on his quest yet. However, once you set out around town, you realize that not everything was as it seemed when you were originally playing it. The wild, stray dog you fought at the start of the game is revealed to have been a totally ordinary dog the Hero just thought was some sort of monster to chase. This begins your introduction to the game's main premise, which is following along after the Hero to try and clean up the messes he makes and also to save the world in your own way through love.
Upon your first night sleeping, you're visited in your dream by the God of Love, who informs you that the only way to combat the Hero's misguided quest is to gather enough love. The gathering of love is the main core of the game, and it takes various forms. It takes place both in the form of helping people with their problems, and also bringing back to life all of the animals (monsters really, but the game quite purposefully calls them animals) that the Hero has slayed in his quest to level up and get stronger. There's the wider quest of saving the world, and then these smaller puzzles to save animals (hints to them are given when you inspect their corpses), and it all flows together to make a really solid adventure game with barely any (excuse the pun) moon logic.
Most importantly, however, collecting love upgrades your love level, and your love level extends the time you can stay awake. Several puzzles, particularly the penultimate one, weigh on your ability to stay awake for a very long time, so getting to love level 22 or so is effectively the end goal of your quest from a purely mechanical standpoint. Eating food extends the time you're awake a bit, but money is a resource you'll either need to grind for with fishing (which can't be done immediately, at least) or is quite limited with the rewards you get for saving animals. If you don't sleep before you run out your action limit, you're dead and you have to go back to the last time you slept.
Once you're able to stay awake for days at a time, forgetting to sleep could end up meaning you've lost a lot of progress, so it's good to keep an eye on the clock in the upper left of the screen. You get used to this mechanic quite quickly, although compared to games like Chibi-Robo and other offshoots of this dev team, an outright game over is a pretty brutal punishment for staying out too late, and it's something to be aware of going in. There's no larger time limit to complete the game within (and your ending doesn't weigh on how much time you take either), but it takes a little getting used to.
moon's writing is definitely its highlight, as one would expect for an adventure game. It's setting is certainly unconventional, being a strange mix of Western fantasy and modern technology, but the relatively small game world is one you'll grow intimate with fairly quickly. The characters are all unique and quirky in their own ways, and have their own schedules they follow on each of the seven days of the week. The localization is honestly amazing, and I'm kinda glad it took 20 years to get this game localized because it probably would've been much worse had it come out in English back in the 90's.
moon's ultimate message can definitely come off as one that is a bit disparaging of video games and the time spent playing them, but I don't really see it that way. I see moon much more as a message not to the people who play games so much as to the people who make them. That games don't need to be all about violence and killing to be satisfying, and games can (and perhaps should, depending on how far you wanna take the conclusion) be about more than that. moon is an "anti-RPG" in how it decides to pose this question to the player through the lens of a typical RPG turned on its head, and it's a really cleverly put together bit of commentary.
The writing of the game is bolstered by its presentation. There isn't a ton of music in moon, but that's because the game actually has its own in-built music player for MD (mini-discs, I assume?) you can buy starting fairly early in the game. What music is there, however, is quite good. The graphical style is a mixture of detailed 2D models for the human characters (usually) and claymation-style digitized sprites for basically all of the "animals", walking around pre-rendered 2D locations. It makes for a very varied but still cohesive style that will likely be at least somewhat familiar to those familiar with something like Chibi-Robo (a game I use as an example so often since it's the product of Love De Lic's alumni that would be most familiar to Westerners ^^;).
Even the sound design is fascinatingly unique in how it uses clips of actual language cut together to make the voices of its NPCs, with different NPCs often speaking in different languages from any other character (me and my friends were able to pick out English, Japanese, Arabic, Polish, French, and German, but there were plenty we couldn't identify), and makes even talking to NPCs feel like a memorable experience in how uncanny it can feel to hear your own language distorted in such an odd fashion while trying to read the subs that contain their actual dialogue.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an adventure game that is a must-play for any fans of the genre. I was surprised to see that this 2020 port is actually not available on anything but Switch, making it a pretty stellar cult classic of an exclusive for Nintendo. It's well worth the asking price of 20 bucks and is honestly one of my new favorite games. If you've played things like Chulip or Chibi-Robo and want more games with that sort of oddball style and unconventional approach to gameplay and storytelling, then you are likely going to adore moon, and should absolutely give it a look.