replayed this a while ago but w/e, here's some scattered notes from then:

- don't mind the simple combat system so much (I'm a ys-enjoyer) and I def appreciate the modifiable combos. i like the systems too! think the synergy btwn mp / drive forms / limits and how it restricts your ability to heal is neat

- don't like how much of the combat boils down to abusing limits / summons / reaction commands to deal damage while invulnerable. the former two are particularly egregious thanks to the amount of (nearly) free damage they put out, and when you throw magnet in the mix, most of its encounters become basically nothing. sticks out enough that it's hard for me to understand the appeal when some fans list this as their favorite action game. genuinely curious to know if there's aspects that I'm missing or not considering here

- reactions and limits can be fun tho.. rly love the bit of spectacle at the end w the lasers that I won't describe since this isn't spoiler tagged, but its length is so amazing

- locking movement options behind drive forms was a silly decision and I'd maybe encourage PC playerz to download the mod that unlocks them all from the start, albeit it can supposedly softlock you so be careful... a better mod would unlock each option when you receive its corresponding form. frankly tho, if you're capable of making a simple web search they do not take nearly as much time to grind out as some suggest

- a take on the command menu I saw is that it's basically "realtime atb" and that skillful play is about being able to quickly navigate the menus. for what though, idk. didn't find enough of the magic useful to have to go into them ever, beyond the four slots you can allocate to in the shortcut menu. i'm probably wrong here

- it takes a while for the 1-on-1 fights to get going. have to assume it's for kids first, but I wasn't vibing with the combat until demyx (pt 2), who's about maybe halfway through @ ~20 hours. the few absent silhouettes placed before him seemed to be too early relative to my level at the time of finding each

- boss highlights were: twilight thorn, shadow stalker (& dark thorn), oogie boogie, demyx, xaldin, the experiment, roxas, saix, the blue haired guy

- the intro really is the single narrative highlight. features a better cast than dorky sora and his dorky friends (except for donald and goofy, because they are my friends). funny that the bits immediately after address sora not knowing what an education is as well as him having hit puberty

- fuck port royal

- why is that mickey mouse bullshit in critical mode. kept triggering it on accident. "sora, my turn!" die

- also, since I'm not going to put down anything for kh1, the simple and clean cue when sora breaks off from kairi at the end kicks so much ass. could not stop laughing

- soz to the gummi-heads but PC playerz can also skip the gummi segments (change offset to 0x56454E): https://github.com/S0nzero/KHPCSpeedrunTools/blob/main/2FMMods/scripts/2fmNoGummi.lua

Please use this elevator. Hold up, push this slow ass cart to vacuum up all the mako before you can access it. Exit this cave. Hold up, move this slow ass cart that's blocking the exit. Reach this ledge. Hold up, the ladder is broken, so you'll have to push this slow ass cart all the way there to use as a platform. Hold up, the path is blocked, so have Barret shoot at this boulder for several seconds so that you can continue pushing your slow ass cart. Great job, now it's time run across an empty field to go activate your 6th Ubisoft tower.

Functionally, this is a failure of a video game; all the ways a player interfaces with the game are either sloppily opaque, mind-numbingly dull, or both. Mandatory character interactions are frequently tucked away in completely innocuous NPC dialogue, with no indication that any new part of the game has become accessible after talking with them. Combat encounters borrow the positional grid-based systems of LIVE A LIVE or Popolocrois Monogatari, yet any instances of this feature affecting battle strategies are both exceedingly rare and exceedingly shallow. It understands that Pokémon is the hot new exciting game everyone wants to be, but it doesn’t realize we’re well past the inconsequential random monster recruitment of Dragon Quest V. Every dungeon in the game is built using exactly two visual backdrops that get lazily color-swapped with no other visual or thematic variations, and the dungeon designs are never any deeper than a single intended progression path with frivolous branching dead-ends. Strikingly few sections of this game can be intuitively navigated without the guiding hand of a walkthrough. None of the issues in this game ever amount to any kind of mechanical payoff or purpose; the game is simply not constructed well. Though with all this being the case, anybody who critically engages with art has to reconcile with one question sooner or later: at what point does heart surmount technical ineptitude?
The truth is that despite all its damning flaws, I came away from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure absolutely enamored with it. This game ascends far beyond the threshold where passion overtakes convention, proving that even a blatantly terrible video game can still claw its way into being a masterpiece when it’s so overflowing with love. The sporadic musical numbers sung by noticeably non-professional singers constantly put a huge smile on my face – and not an ironic, sneering smile either, a genuine one! The earnestness of untrained singing voices lent the songs a sincerity that only further drew out the beauty of the music. Similarly, the simplicity and innocence of Rhapsody’s narrative is exactly what allows it to be so effective. The central themes of the story are a little loose and tend to get confused with each other, but there were still several story beats that managed to pool emotions in my eyes – when other story beats didn’t have me audibly laughing out loud, of course. This game’s got a magical tone that knows exactly what it wants to be exactly when it wants to be them, and it pulls them off excellently. Wrap it all up with some of the softest, cutest, warmest character designs and environments the Playstation can render and the result is a game that begs to be loved with just as much love as it has to give… And I do! I love this game. How could I not?
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is constructed horribly but crafted magnificently, and in the end that heart is what matters most above anything else. How beautiful for a game like this to exist.

Do I desperately miss the stories and the business management elements? Yes.

Is the handling of gender and bodies cowardly and prejudiced? Yes.

Is there a BAFFLING lack of a neckware category? Yes

Do I get a bigger rush than anything else in my entire life when someone deems my avatar worth making a thoughtful outfit for, or when they like an outfit that I made for them? Yeah man. Yeah. Sorry. Can't help it. Nothing like it.

The bottom line is that Sea of Stars is an ultimately mediocre title that manages to cobble together its form by stealing things from a dozen other, older, better titles. Each thing it steals is implemented worse than the game it steals from, but still good enough to not be bad. The act of playing the game is fine. It's Fine. It is the ultimate definition of Mid. Mid of Stars.

To list all this game's faults on a lower level than "wow it looks pretty" would to be sit here all day, but I can't help but go over some of the biggest issues I had during my time with it.

The first and foremost is the writing and plot--the plot by itself is pretty standard, just your basic "go kill the demon king" storyline when you get down to it, but its building off lore from a game pretty notorious for having nonsense lore(The Messenger) so it ends up being nonsense here as well--none of the worldbuilding details or twists really ever land because you never get the sense that this world is anything more than levels in a video game. There's like maybe five actual towns in the game, for gods sake. This is compounded by the character writing that manages to be completely uninteresting at best, and positively dreadful at worst. The worst of it is a major side-character in act 1 that speaks exclusively in video game references, who basically ruins every scene she is in and kill what little pathos there can be in this game. Once she steps aside, it gets a little better and I'd even say act 2 cooks for a short time, but then they do the very bold decision to put the only two characters with any sort of internality on a bus until literally the final boss door. Its frustrating. That's not to speak of the other issue with the game not respecting itself, every scene that gets a little tropey immediately gets a Marvel quip to kill any tension and remind you you're seeing scenes played out in a dozen older games with way more self-respect. It sucks.

Then, there's the game pacing. As mentioned, the game has I think six actual "towns" in it, and you only visit each of them at a single point in your journey which means you consistently go 4+ dungeons at a time without any "downtime" where you can sidequest, play minigames, talk to npcs etc. They completely missed the memo on the "vibes" of a jrpg in spite of aping these games so hard--those points where you're just sort of idly walking around town are important and this game just doesn't have any of that. This is compounded by what I'd call location issues--backtracking even after you get to the end of the game with all movement options is painful, consistently involving traversing old dungeons or going through two-three extra screens to get to where you need to go, so the game actively disincentivizes you from trying to do anything besides progress the main quest.

The actual gameplay is split into two--puzzle dungeons generously described as "Crosscode but worse" and combat described as "Mario RPG but worse", double-hampered by piss-easy difficulty. Like, this game has 8 different accessibility options but I struggle to find how anyone would need them when the game difficulty is toggled so low.

Which sucks, because the one place the game excels in is the economy/item management, you have a very limited inventory that heavily incentivizes consumable usage, and also the gold is a really tight resource that you have to manage. In theory, this is great and adds an attrition factor the long dungeon dives mentioned earlier--in practice, the difficulty tuning being so low means you never interact with those systems because you can easily go through the game never using consumables which means you can sell all the crafting supplies for a surplus of money.

Even the OST manages to not really be striking, like its perfectly serviceable but I never really found myself humming a tune or getting hyped by a song. Its just, rpg music. You could replace it with the rpgmaker default soundpack and I think the experience would have been exactly the same.

And yet, in spite of all this, I still finished the game including the true ending that demands like 95% completion because it was juuuust that not bad enough that I could sunk cost fallacy my way through it.

The final thing I'd leave you with that speaks to the shoddy nature of the game is the opening--after the framing device, the game opens with our new heroes going off to their first mission. You fight exactly one tutorial battle vs a goblin, then it forces you into a flashback where you see their backstory. This last an hour and leads up to exactly the beginning of the game. Why did they have the flashback? Why would you not just start the game from the backstory sequence? Its the sort of thing literally any editor would notice and rectify immediately.

Truly, the Mid of Stars.

Replayed this after dropping it close to the end of the game several years ago. I'm rly surprised with how quickly I got really damn addicted to and marathoned it to completion in 2ish days.

This game is really not very mechanically sound and is kind of shallow through and through. Despite that, I seriously enjoyed just grinding and leveling my abilites and watching how they absolutely bust apart the game... Its very junkfood in that sense.

Something I did appreciate immensely is that while this is kind of a diablo clone, theres way more stuff happening beyond killing hordes of enemies all the time. Theres lots of silly quests where you talk to people, do miscellaneous shit and theres tons of areas to just explore and appreciate. The various towns and villages I found so so magical to explore and poke around, especially verdistis. Its realllyyyy nice to have the monotony of killing hordes of enemies broken up by these things so frequently.

The writing isn't particularly deep or anything like that either even though writing depth is what people really love out of old crpgs like baldur's gate, fallout, arcanum, etc, but its so so so full of personality and soul. The game gets (intentionally) really fucking silly a lot of the time and never takes itself terribly seriously. The title itself is a dumb gag in the game. Theres a surprising amount of NPCs that are just normal ass people who'll tell you a little about their lives. Lots of life breathed into the world.

Did I mention life? Something I don't see people talk about is how BREATHTAKINGLY lively the world is in a literal sense. The amount of fauna and flora around the place on top of the birds chirping, the ambience of the music, etc is SO BEAUTIFUL. There are so many fucking plant and tree props or just other props in general. So many different textured looks for the grass, dirt, water, puddles and all that shit. Butterflies and birds flying around, rabbits cats and mice running around, all that. It probably doesnt sound impressive describing it but I'm absolutely FLOORED by how lively the world and nature feel in this way especially for the time. So much fucking love and care put into that, I truly applaud it.

Kind of an aside but I feel like fantasy games are so obsessed with drawing inspiration from tolkien (fucking everything has elves, dwarves, orcs, etc) but they always forget how important the beauty and majesty of nature and the earth were to tolkien type fantasy. Idk how intentional that was with this game but its there. Love to death.

Also the final dungeon is fucking terrible.

Man I don't think this game is all that well made in a lot of ways but its just so magical feeling. Kind of special experience to me.

Some self-serious hacks with no apparent interest in making a video game at all try to do their own GONE HOME while cutting every corner imaginable.

Shoves the most tired, obvious, weak, and unearned sob-story shit down your throat without offering even the barest pretense of interactivity or exploration to justify itself. I'm definitely not one to rip walking simulators by default, but seriously, this IS JUST a movie where you hold W and do some incredibly shitty faux-motion control things to keep it from pausing itself. And I wish it had been a movie, because if it were, it would have been ignored in that universe rather than feted endlessly by the no-taste-having idiots who write about games professionally, prompting me to have to one day play it.

Best parts of this were all the leaden and self-conscious references to things like Grey Gardens and Blow Out and Halloween and SUPER MARIO BROS. because, to paraphrase the saying, they briefly reminded me of things I'd rather be doing.

I was going to give this like 1 1/2 stars for some of the cute visual stuff, but then I got to the part where you get to play as a baby in first-person as they drown to death, and yeah, the people who made this game can suck my dick from the back.