Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles

released on Aug 29, 2023

Enjoy the next verse of Marl Kingdom adventures with Rhapsody II: Ballad of the Little Princess and Rhapsody III: Memories of Marl Kingdom! Join Kururu, the daughter of Cornet and Ferdinand, as she pursues her dreams of true love, and experience these classic RPGs in full forte as they take center stage! With improved visuals, a heart-warming story, a charming soundtrack, and an emotional conclusion, Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles comes ready to win your heart as it makes its welcome western debut!


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Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles, like Rhapsody: A musical Adventure, is not a game that I can recommend to anyone. Rhapsody II was okay, but I found the story to be some what similar to the first one. Rhapsody III, is just little self contained stories. I found the final story/ dungeon to be frustrating. It was very grindy and the pay off felt lack luster. I did enjoy seeing again some of the characters from the prior games. I do add, it's a guilty pleasure of mine this game because I find the story cozy, basic and very happy.

Its always tough rating something that is a package deal.

Rhapsody 2 is a good game, I have little nothing bad to say about it. It going to a more standard turn based system from the grid based of the original was something I was all for. Kururu, Crea and Cello were great and I generally enjoy seeing progression in their characters. I also like seeing timeline progression ins media such as here where it follows the children of the previous entries characters. Despite having a similar goal to the first, Kururu want to find her "prince", it didn't feel like a retread or rehash in the slightest. I think what threw me off the most was the songs weren't in english unlike in the first despite this coming over to the west 20 years later. Either they didn't have the resources/want to translate or the songs were only translated in 1 cuz we couldn't have our kids in the 90's listening to Japanese songs cuz its bad or something.

Rhapsody 3 on the otherhand... What were they thinking?

The story is presented in 6 separate stories with a connection as thin as a piece of fishing line. In general I just prefer a single hallway of a narrative for lack of vocabulary. The only ones I gave a rat's ass about were stories 2 and 5 and 5 even had the internal chapter titlecards which makes me think this game was initially just going to be this story but they couldn't make it a "real game" length. 6 itself is bonus or so the game told me but I did it anyway cuz I might as well (I regretted that decision). Because of this structure, you won't be doing much exploring and you'll be seeing the same few places throughout most of the stories and the game very much felt more like it was a dungeon crawler than what came before. At least the dungeons were more like Rhapsody 2 instead of 1's barely distinct box room labyrinths.

The combat has changed once again. It is still turn based but now theres this 4 row system that at max is 16 characters on the battle at once. Thats now potentially 16 characters you need to keep geared and skilled up, and you will be spending majority of your time in this game grinding to do so cuz both exp and payouts were laughably low imo. The characters not in the front now also cannot be controlled so don't rely on them to come in clutch, or do anything really. The only way to control them is if they are a puppet and that in turn requires you to give up the front member's turn to issue commands to them. Doesn't help that for most of the chapters you're starting out at level 1 and naked. Its not like the game is difficult, the previous tow weren't either but bosses have, and like to spam, massive aoe attacks and enemy hp values felt VERY bloated to compensate for your potentially massive in battle party. If the difficulty of bosses in any given chapter has a graph it would similar to a wooden roller coaster where its a bunch of peaks and valleys. That final story is the worst of it in terms of grinding as its just the dungeon and final boss, even if it does scale to your strongest member it still takes way longer than it should to level a mid 30's character to even 50 when fighting enemies in the 150's. Even with auto battle I could feel my eyes glazing over more half of each chapter and when I got to bosses I just let jesus take the wheel for some of them and hoped rng would be on my side to beat the bosses and end my purgatory of grinding.

I honestly believe only story 2 and 5 are worth your time, but you gotta do all that came before to get to 5 anyway so my condolences. 3 will be used as an example in my future discussions with people for "if it aint broke, don't fix it" cuz this change was not needed in the slightest and feels like they just wanted to flex how many things they can have in battle at one time.

TLDR: Rhapsody 2 is good and should be played if you liked 1 but if you do want to play 3, I hope you like a lot of grinding


Rhapsody II is good but Rhapsody III Sucks