moon: Remix RPG Adventure

I just finished playing a very unusual game called "moon: Remix RPG Adventure". Also known as simply "moon" in lowercase.

Originally moon was released in Japan only, for PlayStation in 1997.

In 2020, moon was released on Nintendo Switch, with a brand new English translation. This is the version I played.

This game likes to describe itself as an "anti-RPG", which is a peculiar thing to claim. What does it even mean?

Well, after having played the entire game.... I'm still not entirely sure. 

moon isn't really an RPG, despite having "RPG" in its title. moon is more of an adventure puzzle-solving game.

But it is a story about an RPG, sort of.

The beginning of the game shows a young boy playing an RPG on his game console.

The RPG is about a Hero knight on a quest to slay the evil dragon who has eaten the moonlight from the sky. On his quest, the Hero needs to travel across the land, defeating monsters in order to gain experience.

It's as typical an RPG as you can imagine.

This opening prologue sequence shows snippets of the boy's RPG adventure across multiple play sessions: The boy skips past the long exposition text at the beginning of the game, the Hero explores the castle town and acquires legendary armor from the innkeeper, the Hero defeats a slime monster outside the town with powerful magic, the Hero destroys boulders blocking the path forward, the Hero protects a family terrorised by a monster... and eventually, the Hero slays the Dragon in a climactic finale.

After defeating the Dragon, the boy's mother tells him to turn the game off and go to bed. ...

However... the console mysteriously turns itself back on, with a television screen full of static. The boy approaches, and he is drawn into the screen... The boy wakes up in "Moon World". From here, he can see the world from a very different perspective.

In this world, the boy is not the Hero. The boy is completely invisible, almost as if he doesn't quite fit in this world.

Soon after arriving in Moon World, he meets a kindly old Gramby who seems to recognise him somehow. She gives the invisible boy a set of clothes, including a big pair of gloves and shoes, and a sleeping cap for good measure. These clothes give the invisible boy a physical form within Moon World. 

For the rest of the game, we play as this walking set of clothing.

...during the character naming screen, there are no capital letters available. only lowercase. The default name for the invisible boy is "popepe". This is what I decided to name him. Interestingly, Gramby calls him "POPEPE" with capital letters. Is this just a strange quirk, or is something else going on?

In the Moon World, popepe can see the Hero's actions in a very different light. On his quest to gain experience, the Hero has been slaying all of the creatures of the Moon World. Leaving a trail of carcasses in his wake, their lingering spirits still haunting the land. 

And it's up to popepe to find out what's going on.

...

The overall presentation and style of this game is very surreal, and I very much like it a lot.

The game combines pixel art for the characters, pre-rendered CG for the backgrounds, and clay sculpture models for the various critters. It's a visually interesting combination of styles.

The game world is very absurdist, but it remains grounded too. This is a world where all sorts of unusual things can happen, yet everything is taken seriously and treated as normal by the people who live there.

The first area of the game is Castle Town - in stark contrast to the generic RPG town we see in the opening, the people who live in Castle Town have a lot of interesting unique things going on if you care to pay attention to them. They aren't just static generic NPCs, each one is an individual with their own daily schedule.

Later areas of the game stray further and further away from the realm of "generic RPG" to the point where that's not even in consideration any more. There's a record store guy practicing his electric guitar in a cave. There's a classic "all-American" family home, complete with white picket fence and mowed lawn. And toward the end of the game, we see a techno society full of robot businessmen who go to the nightclub every night to pretend to dance. ........this is just the kind of bizarro world I'm a big fan of. Especially with how it's never drawn attention to how "weird" it is. It just exists the way it exists, without the need to make sense, without the need to point out how it doesn't make sense. I love a game that is confident in itself to this extent.

The game is also full of metaphysical and metaphorical imagery too. Moon World feels like a dream world. Every time you go to sleep, the background changes to show a blurry image of an indistinct location. the fisherman says that the fishing bait likes to "eat moonlight". the waitress mentions how the cactus salad tastes more like cactus than mushroom, right? and their special wine lets you hear the ingredients.

...It's very abstract, and you just have to let it all wash over you. Not everything you see in this game is there to be made sense of. Just vibe with it and you'll be fine.

A lot of care has been put into the character designs of this game  - everyone has a unique appearance that conveys their personality, with plenty of exaggeration and stereotype in their designs. When you speak to a character, their text appears with gibberish sound bites that seem to be chopped up remixed pieces of audio taken from who knows where. I think the sound bites used for the Baker character are from something spoken in English, because I can make out bits and pieces of English phrases whenever I talk to him. It actually gets a bit distracting. 

And I want to give my praises to this game's brand new English translation. I think it's absolutely wonderful. The dialogue is so off-kilter in a way that perfectly suits the subtle sense of humour the game has. Small things such as the old lady being "Gramby" instead of the more normal "Granny". There's a guy who says "Nice to konnichiwa you!" And all sorts of other not-quite-perfect phrases that gives every line of dialogue so much personality. I genuinely love the dialogue in this game.

...

The gameplay of moon is mainly exploration and puzzle-solving. Talking to NPCs and finding items. Like a classic point-and-click adventure game.

The game runs on a clock system, complete with seven days of the week. Time runs pretty quickly in this game - a full day is about ten minutes. And popepe's walking speed is quite leisurely, so it can feel like time is flying a bit too quickly as you explore.

You have an energy gauge - staying up for too long will cause popepe to collapse into a Game Over. You can extend your energy timer by eating food items, or recharge it fully by going home to sleep.

At first, popepe's energy is very limited - he can only stay up for half a day long. But you can extend it as you progress through the game by collecting "Love".

Love is the main collectible in moon. 

Love is the reward for helping the NPCs. Listening to their problems, learning their secrets, finding their missing items, inspiring their inventions, completing their little sidequests, winning in their minigames... all of these interactions will reward you with Love. 

The other main way to gain Love is to catch the spirits of the creatures killed by the Hero.

All across the world, you will find dead carcasses of critters, left behind by the so-called Hero. Examining their body will bring up information about the creature - its behaviour, its habits, its likes and dislikes, its role in life... 

This information is useful for tracking down where the creature's lingering spirit might be hiding. Some of them are in plain sight but are difficult to reach, while others require very specific circumstances before they show themselves.

Upon finding and catching the spirit, it will revive the creature back to life. It will then be taken away by an octopus UFO to safety, and you will earn some Love.

Essentially, popepe is cleaning up after the Hero, righting his wrongs.

...

There is no formal quest list in this game - in order to find the tasks and rewards to earn Love, you need to be very observant and have a good memory. You may need to be good at remembering small details mentioned offhand. 

The tavernkeeper lady mentions how sometimes the Baker returns home so drunk he forgets to lock his house. If you keep this small fact in mind, you might at some point try seeing if it leads to something - you can wait for a day Baker visits the tavern, wait for him to return home, and follow him inside his house. Once inside, popepe can discover Baker's secret, which leads to earning a point of Love. 

As you gain more Love, popepe's energy meter increases, which allows you to explore further and further.

At the beginning, your main concern will be to find as much Love as you can so you can venture further without collapsing.

But the energy system starts to lose its relevance in the second half of the game. Once you have enough Love to last a couple of days awake, there isn't anything that's truly closed off to you any more.

Reaching the ending of the game does require a large amount of Love, however, so even if you don't really need the extra energy, you still need to keep finding more Love to progress.

To be honest.... I am not a fan of the fact that running out of energy causes a Game Over - it makes you load a previous save, undoing everything you may have accomplished since your last save. This is a slow-paced game about observing the characters, and I feel like having such a harsh time limit hanging above your head the whole time clashes with this gameplay style horribly. I'm glad it gets better later on, but during earlygame, the timer really does feel unnecessarily oppressive in a way I think does not enhance the mood. I think they could have come up with a better way of doing things. 

That being said, the timer system is used in interesting ways throughout the game that do force you to treat your energy like a resource. For example, there's a desert area with high ledges that normally cannot be reached. However, there are bizarre plants that are flat in the daytime and tall in the nighttime. If you stand on one of those plants when it transitions from day to night, the plant will extend upwards with you on top of it, allowing you access to the ledge. However, in order to get back down, you need to again wait for the night-to-day transition to occur. This means that you need to spend at least one full day of energy if you want to explore the ledge here. I do like the resource management aspect at play here.

Another example is with Yoshida, the little birdie who runs a travel agency from within his birdcage. He offers to take you to his hometown island, but the journey takes one-and-a-half days to complete. You need to have enough energy to last the whole trip if you want to go.

This also brings me to another big complaint I have with the game - the sheer amount of waiting you have to do! Because there are so many things dependent on time-of-day or day-of-the-week, you often have to do a LOT of waiting around in order to progress. And due to the cryptic nature of the puzzles, a lot of the time your only way of figuring out puzzle solutions is to wait around to see if it works. If you suspect a character will be someplace at a specific time, the only way to test this is to wait there to see if they show up. And if they don't... well, you've just waited around for nothing. 

While exploring, the timer feels like it goes so fast, but when waiting, there isn't any way to actually speed it up, so it feels like it takes forever. 

.......this game actually predates The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which has an ocarina that lets you control the time of day with a song. ... while playing moon, I was craving something like this... I wanted the ability to manually skip ahead to the next day-night transition without having to sit there doing nothing for ten minutes. But it doesn't exist, so we have no choice. ...

...

As a puzzle-focused adventure game, you accumulate an inventory of various items as you play.

You can show any item to an NPC in order to ask about it - normally the response is just "what is that?", but sometimes you might be able to gain some interesting hidden information by showing the right item to the right person.

For example, showing the Castle Town residents a picture of Gramby can lead to some interesting pieces of information regarding what happened before you arrived. 

One character, Yoshida the little birdie, will respond usefully to almost any item in the game, making him the go-to NPC for hints. 

Again, I have some complaints about this system. And this time, my complaint is simply... there just aren't enough lines of dialogue written for it. It seems like the only characters who even have anything to say about your inventory items are all in Castle Town - characters in later areas basically never have anything to say if you show them items, and for many of them, trying to show them items doesn't even work. It feels like they kind of gave up implementing this system half way through the game?

...If you show the King in Castle Town a dud firework, he becomes quite interested, and reveals he was planning on making a huge fireworks show, but the firework makers couldn't quite get it to work. He gives a hint as to how to find the firework maker.

Later in the game when you finally manage to acquire a working firework, if you show it to the King, he doesn't have anything to say about it at all. It's just the generic "I don't know" response ... ... and it just feels wrong. It kinda feels like a piece of the game is missing. And there's examples of this all throughout the game - there are so many items that I feel should absolutely have an interesting reaction, yet they only give the default nothing message. 

I feel like this inventory system is severely underbaked.

Regarding NPC text... A lot of the NPCs in this game like to revert back to their default text once you've completed their tasks. This feels especially wrong with characters you spend a lot of time with such as Yoshida the birdie - you travel with him to his hometown island, attend owl lectures with him, ask him for advice about countless items... but whenever you talk to him normally, it's still always his default text where he introduces himself and says "hey, aren't you popepe?" and all that.

I'm not a fan of this.

...

Figuring out how to actually progress the game is tricky - the critical path is not obvious at all. Once you reach the house in the centre of the map, you have three directions to go that all lead to dead-ends. It's not at all obvious which breadcrumb trails are optional and which ones are mandatory. You just get some vague hints about all sorts of different things, and you kind of just have to take it from there.

I don't mind this at all, actually. For the vast majority of the game, I was having a great time figuring things out by myself. I had enough leads to follow that I could decide what I wanted to focus on next, and with enough patience, I was able to solve the vast majority of the game.

However, this didn't last the whole game. There came a point where I was completely 100% stumped, and no matter what I tried, I just had no idea how to proceed.

I was stuck on a caviar quest for a while. I needed to feed caviar to a ghost inside a painting, but the only source of caviar was a restaurant that served it for popepe to eat right there, not as an obtainable item. I had no idea what to do from there. No matter how many times I ordered the caviar, the option to take it as an item never presented itself.

...As it turns out, I didn't even have the ability to find the real caviar without first solving an unrelated, almost impossibly-obtuse puzzle about eating five different mushrooms in the correct order.

I still have no idea how you're supposed to know the correct order. I managed to work out that I had to eat the five mushrooms, and I even figured out that it had to be done at night-time, but the hint for which order to eat them in... I just didn't see a way to get this information. It can be deduced, but it requires making huge assumptions about the meanings of nonsense words spoken by specific NPCs. You just have to assume that a specific NPC's five nonsense words correlates to the meanings of "first, second, third, fourth, fifth" without any indication that that's what they're talking about. I think this is a badly designed puzzle to be honest.

And when you do get the "caviar", it doesn't even have anything to do with the caviar from the restaurant whatsoever, and it's not even actually caviar at all...?? it is in fact a tadpole, and the only way to know that this tadpole is supposed to be the "caviar" the painting ghost wants is by asking Yoshida about it. He says it's sometimes nicknamed caviar for its great taste. or something. 

...There's non-obvious puzzles in adventure games, and then there's stuff like this. 

...

The caviar itself isn't a required item, but solving this horrible mushroom puzzle absolutely is required to beat the game.

It's not optional. Every player must suffer through this poorly designed hint, and then give up and look up the solution online. I can't imagine someone actually making the unprompted leap of logic the designers expect you to make to solve it without help. ...

...If you ever got stumped by an obtuse puzzle in a King's Quest or Broken Sword game, you'll feel right at home in moon. haha.

Anyway. moon has some other small things that really bugged me as I played. There's a character named Adder who gives you a series of obnoxious quizzes, which includes stuff like "what face did I just make?" after showing you a series of weird faces that only show up on screen for half a second. Thankfully the Nintendo Switch has a video capture button that records the previous 30 sec of gameplay, otherwise this guy's quizzes would have been significantly more annoying. 

Additionally, there's a horrible, absolutely abhorrent minigame called "XINGISKAN" that involves rhythmically tapping the A button with EXTREME precision in order to make a missile hit a sphere. It's one of the most infuriating things I've ever played. Thankfully this is optional, but I did strive to get every single Love in the whole game, so I had to suffer through it anyway.

The music in moon is also unusual. Some locations have background music as normal, but the majority of the game world is actually completely silent. Instead, popepe carries around with him a music player, and you can find music discs throughout the game to play whatever music you prefer.

...well, I say "throughout the game", but... there are 36 discs in the game, however only 4 of them are found in various places...the other 32 are just bought from the record shop guy in a cave. ... it could have been a fun extra collectible or bonus reward for sidequests, but they kind of didn't implement it that way. You just buy most of them.

The music discs have a wide variety of music on them - some of them are atmospheric, some experimental... I think the developers commissioned some indie bands to make songs for this game. It's quite unique. One of the songs even uses Pac-Man sound effects for its bassline, which..... I guess that's okay as long as Namco doesn't find out???

Overall, moon: Remix RPG Adventure is a game I like a lot. It is brilliant artistically, and I suppose it has something to say about the nature of regular RPGs by making the generic RPG Hero such a bad guy. I take a lot of issue with some of the gameplay design, but I enjoyed the game world enough to put aside my frustrations so I could enjoy the game for what it wants to be.

moon is a good game, but you need to have patience to put up with its shenanigans.