Overlong and borderline tedious in places and still with a lot of scruffy errors (poor voice direction on some lines, spoken dialogue that doesn't match subtitles, wrong audio lines playing, broken sequences) and some puzzles that are just obtuse but still quite funny and with a nice art style. The blueprint system is a nice idea, but doesn't work in practice because it's too hard to work out what some of the elements even are (the different liquids in the cocktail) and it doesn't give you any useful feedback on what you've got wrong. Probably not as good as the previous game overall.

Rhapsody:
You can see the roots of Disgaea in here. The bare bones of the combat, the art style and the sharply scripted, funny (and occasionally bleak) story. Unfortunately, this is all married to a rather tedious JRPG.

There's only really three dungeons, made up of about six screens each repeated ad nauseam with minor palette changes. The main challenge to the game is just navigating these mazes, which is not fun.

Combat is technically fine, but tediously easy and repetitive, especially once you run into some Metal Jellies, which allow you to very quickly power level (without even really trying) to the point that even the final boss is trivial. You could maybe complicate things for yourself if you ever decide to change up your party but there's really no incentive to do so - all the elemental stuff is fairly irrelevant - especially as every new character you get is at level 1.

Also, for a game that calls itself a musical, it doesn't really have many songs (which is of course a limitation of this being a PS1 game with limited storage, but still, it feels light on songs).

This is a pretty fun game that manages to capture the feel of the N64 originals, for better and worse, translating the mini-sandboxes of the 3D games into 2d. And that mostly works, some issues with unclear relative height of platforms aside. The graphics are nice, the script is sharp, it manages to recreate loads more of Banjo and Kazooie's moves than I expected and it's all pretty fun.

The biggest problem though is that cluserfck of a final bos. First, it's locked behind a time trial platforming task, but one that requires consumables to activate. Then you're presented with a three stage boss fight, with no chance to save between them and the only opportunity to heal coming from defeating minions in the middle one (which requires those same consumables as before). These three fights are interspersed with quiz sections that can absolutely get fcked. Loads of audio questions, so sod you if you've been playing with the sound off (or are deaf) and reprises of the mini-games, some of which you can lose more health in, due to random chance. Just an absolute toilet of anti-player choices that ruin the ending of an otherwise solid game, and why I've got this as "abandoned" rather than "completed".