Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3: La Pucelle: Ragnarok / Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure

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The world of remakes and remasters grows ever larger by the day! Soon we’re going to start remastering remastered games and remaking remakes. It’s enough to boggle the mind. Naturally, we can expect varying degrees of quality when old games become new again, but we can be thankful that Nippon Ichi Software has been doing a pretty good job on this front when it comes to bringing back their older classics.

Case in point: Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3: La Pucelle: Ragnarok and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, a pair of mostly forgotten titles from NIS’ PS1/PS2 era that have been lovingly resurrected to make them shiny and new once more.

via YouTube

La Pucelle: Ragnarok is the predecessor to the long-running Disgaea series of strategy-RPGs and it certainly shows. Released back in 2022, Disgaea fans are bound to notice similarities, such as bands of dark energy that need to be purified in a manner much like Disgaea’s Geo Panels, and even straight-up references like the Rosen Queen shop that also appears in Rhapsody. This is a great way to get a look at the origins of one of the biggest JRPG series around, particularly given the new-to-the-West content found in this Ragnarok version.

Our heroine Prier and the rest of La Pucelle, a team of church-aligned exorcists, fight monsters and work to keep the land safe from darkness. If you’re familiar with Prier and her appearance in the Disgaea games, well…uh, it might be a little bit of a spoiler to talk about that, so just ignore it for now!

As one might expect, La Pucelle also plays quite a bit like the Disgaea series. It’s a strategy-RPG that’s all about building up levels, digging up the best gear and arranging your characters to unleash powerful team attacks. The unique selling point here is your characters’ ability to purify evil. This is useful for dealing with that dark energy as mentioned above, allowing you to smack enemies with extensive chains of exploding tiles.

That’s not all purification can do, though – it’s also handy as a means of recruiting monsters. By getting up in your foes’ grills and applying liberal amounts of purification, you can get them to join you after defeat, so if a monster seems particularly powerful you just might want to sign them up yourself. There’s plenty of other things going on here as well, including the extensive and complex Dark World, so if you want an RPG you can sink some hours into then La Pucelle: Ragnarok is ready to make that happen.

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, originally released back in 1998, takes a unique approach to JRPGs. When it says it’s “A Musical Adventure,” Rhapsody really does mean it in the sense that it’s a classic stage musical as characters will periodically launch into choreographed song-and-dance numbers as a part of the plot. It’s just as surreal as it sounds, though admittedly plenty of the tunes are toe-tappingly good. It’s charming in a 90’s anime sort of way. We follow heroine Cornet on a saccharine-sweet adventure to find her prince, fall in love and maybe save the kingdom while she’s at it.

When you’re not getting your theater kid on, you’ll be engaging in simple turn-based battles where Cornet and her army of magically animated puppets beat the stuffing out of baddies. You’ll collect new puppets through a variety of means as you progress through the game. Each possesses its own array of skills and abilities. Meanwhile, Cornet herself can buff her puppets, use powerful attacks to support the team and even capture enemies if you need just a bit more help. While Rhapsody’s a fairly simple game and you won’t necessarily need too much puppeteering prowess to get through it, the level of depth on offer is appreciated.

As is the norm for these collections, both La Pucelle: Ragnarok and Rhapsody run like a charm on basically any platform you’d like to stick them on. Both games benefit greatly from their move to modern platforms, with lovely graphics and a completely passable set of translations. There’s even nice touches like the restoration of the notoriously-censored La Pucelle, which was one of the last games in recent memory to suffer from the removal of religious iconography.

Fans of the original releases of both these games will be pleased to find they’ve made the transition to the modern age in fine form indeed. It’s great to finally see these turn of the century classics show up in a readily-available format, especially given the vast improvements to La Pucelle: Ragnarok. Whether you want to grind for days in La Pucelle: Ragnarok or sing along with the goofy tunes in Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3 makes for a solid collection.