Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3 review

Volume 3 reaches all the way to the back of Nippon Ichi Software’s catalog with Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. Luckily, the newly localized re-release La Pucelle: Ragnarok helps sweeten the deal. 

The release of Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3 permits players to revisit the era when Sōhei Niikawa’s mind was a wellspring of role-playing creativity. For many, Niikawa’s magnum opus might be 2003’s Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Blending a wonderfully eccentric, character-driven storyline with an engaging grid-based strategy, the title would grow into the publisher’s most prominent franchise. Of course, Disgaea’s endearing Prinny would go on to serve as the company mascot.

NIS Classics Volume 3 bundles two titles that Niikawa helped develop before the release of the first Disgaea. Likely, you’ll witness some peculiarities across both games that might remind you of Laharl, Etna, and Flonne’s inaugural adventure. La Pucelle: Ragnarok, a Japan-only PSP title that debuted in 2011, is an expanded release of La Pucelle: Tactics, a strategy-driven title that pre-dates Hour of Darkness by a year.

Even older is Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, a whimsical role-playing musical adventure that was written and designed by Niikawa. The 1998 release was the N1’s first grid-based role-playing game. While returning to the PlayStation One title offers its own melodic rewards, it’s also gratifying to see concepts that would be iterated on across future titles. If you haven’t played either of these games, NIS Classics Volume 3 can feel like discovering a musician’s prodigious work, created before fame would flourish. Niikawa‘s imagination is running wild and quintessential mechanics are being formed. Let’s take a look at each title:

La Pucelle: Ragnarok

Recalling Nippon Ichi’s now-familiar narrative structure, La Pucelle’s plotline is broken into twelve chapters, each episode bookended by conversations that shift between the comedic and the poignant. During an introductory segment, players are introduced to three main characters. Prier (pronounced “pree-yay”) is the requisite hot-headed protagonist, whose impulsive words are often at odds with the patience and objectivity exhibited by Sister Alouette, a young tutor. Rounding out the game’s central cast is Prier’s younger brother Cullotte, whose age and fondness for Alouette place him in the role of the party’s resident pack mule. Titles such as Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger VS Darkdeath Evilman have demonstrated that Nippon Ichi are adept at crafting comical storylines with just a hint of tragic tension. Pleasingly, La Pucelle was no different, flaunting both laugh-inducing dialog and moments apt to pull at players’ heartstrings.

La Pucelle: Ragnarok is the definitive version of La Pucelle: Tactics, offering supplements such as guest appearances by several prominent Disgaea characters, a New Game+ component, as well as additional voicework, art, and endings. When La Pucelle: Tactics came stateside, Mastiff was forced to remove any religious symbolism. Pleasingly, the crosses are present in Ragnarok, preserving a game where character names reference Christian rituals (Prier is French for “to pray, while Croix literally means a “cross”).

While the title’s storyline is undeniably compelling, battles are where Ragnarok truly shines. Each turn-based phase tasks players with strategic movement, since adjacent allies provide supplementary attacks, while assaults from the side or rear also elevate the severity of your strikes. Complementing these basic mechanics is the ability to purify. Cast against an adversary, this ability reduces the opponent’s resistance, increasing the likelihood of the creature joining your party when it is surmounted. When applied to one of the trails of dark energy which adorn each map, the entire stream ignites, damaging any foes unfortunate to be on its path. Cleverly, the title even allows players to alter the flow of those energy streams, and if they can build a circuit- any opponents caught within its outline will be overwhelmed.

Unlike many role-playing games that force players to follow a linear trajectory, allowing only a modicum of customization, La Pucelle grants players a refreshing amount of freedom. The physically adept and magically oriented might have a slight advantage when taking up weaponry or spell casting. But a character’s trajectory is refreshingly open-ended, shirking typical archetypes. Solutions to halting throngs are enemies are easily cultivated, whether players need a healer or just some extra muscle.

Like the Disgaea series, savvy strategy isn’t always enough. Sporadically, gamers will encounter bosses or even groups of adversaries with a serious statistical advantage. As such, returning to previously conquered stages to improve the power of your purifying party is mandatory.  While the game’s skirmishes are certainly stimulating, some players may bemoan the requirement to level grind.

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

With 1998’s Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, NIS America reaches toward the back of its software catalog. Sure, it was the publisher’s eleventh title, but only their second role-playing game, following 1997’s Angel Blade: Neo Tokyo Guardians. As such, Rhapsody is a moderately antiquated PlayStation One title. There’s plenty of quaint charm, and with eleven vocalized songs (sung in either Japanese or English), the concept of a role-playing game with musical interludes was undoubtedly ambitious. But woefully, the game has several tedious traits that will test the patience of many modern players.

Rhapsody’s original release was often unfairly criticized, with critics of the era stating that the storyline was insufferable for male players. I’d like to hope that we’ve moved past that kind of narrow mindset now. Yes, protagonist Cornet is a young orphan, who has the power to communicate and control puppets by playing her trumpet. But the premise is rooted in the Disney-esque, as evidenced by Cornet’s longing to be swept off her feet by a handsome prince. This twist is that Cornet and her marionette militia must save the royal figure, who has been turned into stone by the self-described, “most beautiful witch in the world”. It’s all quite cute but never excessively childish, communicating an innocence that’s largely absent from most modern RPGs.

Here, the link to Disgaea is rather subtle, with combat putting player and enemy units on opposite sides of a gridded battlefield. Like most strategy RPGs, each party member can move and attack on their turn. The game’s three difficulty settings lean toward leniency, and players can even let the CPU take control, so combat is rarely frustrating. Mostly success comes by mastering the ranges of your normal and magical attacks. Arguably, the best quality of combat is the speed of fights. Frequently, your characters can reach and start hitting foes on their first turn given the size of most maps.

In Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, your entire party receives experience from fights. As such, leveling up and the accompanying restoration of health and magic point occurs frequently. For Cornet, that means learning new Rewards, where she can use food as power attacks. Using normal attacks can randomly lead to recruiting new monsters, so there’s even some additional incentive to not spam your magical abilities. It’s a straightforward fighting model that’s just speedy enough to avoid tedium.

But monotony will emerge in the game’s dungeons. Here, Rhapsody’s single-screen chambers will require players to use a pen and paper to map their layouts. Without any kind of cartography, you’ll likely get lost in their multi-level areas that use just a few variations of pre-rendered environments.

While A Musical Adventure’s sprite and locales all look nice, the music is the real star of the show. The game’s soundtrack was written and performed by Tenpei Sato, who would go on to compose the music for the Disgaea series. While there’s no standout showstopper, Rhapsody offers a dependable number of enchanting tracks that showed off the capabilities of the PlayStation’s optical media drive. Today, when almost every RPG has a requisite opening number sung by professionals, it’s easy to forget how memorable musical numbers were.

Conclusion

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure can feel dated, making NIS Classics Volume 3 not quite as compelling as the previous Prinny Presents collections. But the anthology does offer a glimpse at the developer/publisher’s early offering, which laid down the foundations for future success.

Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3 was played on PC
and Switch with review code provided by the publisher