[Finished this up on Friday, 8.1.2025]
First played a chunk of this in like...2009 via the CycloDS, because my then-boyfriend had one. I had never heard of it, but a musical RPG sounded like fun. I thought it was cute, but never got a chance to finish it. Picked up the Steam version recently so that I could play it on my Deck.
There are some good elements to the game--namely the character and monster designs, the music, and overall appearance. It's also quite short. I finished the game at around 16 hours but some of that was idle time and some of it was just me derping around in the beginning.
At the moment, I can't think of a game with worse dungeon designs. There's no mini map, and there are maybe five different screen types just repeated 500 times over in every single dungeon. If it's a cave, you have an intersection, a straight path, a curved corner, a dead end (many, many of these for no reason but to waste more of your time), or a set of stairs. For towers/non-cave dungeons, you have four-way intersections with doors, too many dead ends, rooms with just a staircase, or some other number of doorways. They're all mazes, absolutely nonsensical, horrifically repetitive and I hated every second I had to be in any of these areas. Unfortunately, you have to go back to several of them multiple times because of shitty writing. The only thing that didn't make it the most insufferable gaming experience of my life is the fact that the encounter rate isn't insanely high, so you can flounder your way through like ten rooms before a battle initiates.
The game explains absolutely nothing to you about the mechanics. I don't know if they expected you to read the manual with the original game or what. The main character, Cornet, is a human girl who befriends puppets by playing her horn. She can also sometimes befriend monsters after a fight. I didn't know that ahead of time, so I looked it up when one joined early on, and found several things that the game did not bother to explain: monsters have a chance to join ONLY IF Cornet is the one who landed the final blow; monsters are PERMADEAD if they fall in battle, like they're legit just gone if they get KO'd; and there are a handful of monsters that will never join, namely bosses and any toad enemies, likely because Cornet hates toads. At the time, I had a little dragon monster on my team, and I swapped him out for all puppets as soon as I could because the permadeath thing is stupid. (You CAN get the same type of monster again, but you'd be starting over at level 1 and it wouldn't be your beloved friend who died.)
Cornet always starts in the back behind whatever puppets/monsters are on your team and there's no changing position of any kind. The "Order" tab on the menu is just for changing party members, not actual position. This was really annoying because the combat is on a grid so you essentially can never get a first turn hit in with her because she's too far back and can only use her horn. The horn is also never explained, but it basically just gives all of the puppets (not monsters) in range of it Power Up, and adds some notes to this (musical) staff at the top of the screen. You can fill up to five of these to use Cornet's specials, which are all food/dessert-based and have various effects. I honestly rarely used this because battles were incredibly easy and I wanted to get in hits on specific monsters to try to get them to join most of the time. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to recruit monsters, though, because you can only have so many on your bench, and then the old man who stores monsters has pretty limited capacity. You can also sell monsters to a kid in the second town, but overall you definitely wouldn't have room for one of everything. I was close to capacity at the end of the game but not because I did any grinding. (Note: Your puppets also take up these slots.) It just kind of sucks because there were some monsters I would have loved to use, like a siren and this cool bee lady, but they seemed to be overall weaker than the puppets when I did use monsters in the very beginning, and I didn't want to risk them getting KO'd.
Another thing that was never explained was "skill level." A handful of times, I'd finish a battle and someone's skill level had gone up. No one's was above like 2 or 3 when I looked over it at endgame. I went through the entire game having no idea what this was. I looked it up later, and apparently characters get skill level experience when they deal the finishing blow in combat. This level increases their critical chance. Okayyy then.
Leveling is really quick. Basically every battle, almost the whole party would level up. I'm assuming this is because the game is so short, but also because you have are constantly able to get new monster party members, so it makes sense for them to level quickly. Regardless, combat is super easy and even every boss fight was done in like two turns.
The story is bare bones, boring, and poorly written. After some early events, Cornet and co. go on a quest to collect five stones to break a curse. These are predominantly found in the aforementioned shitty dungeons, but then you'll often have to backtrack into the same dungeons for some other dumb reason. Other than having this general idea of what you need to do, you just kind of have to fumble around to figure out where you need to go. For example, some of these stones can be found in whatever order, but at one point, you have to go three towns back and talk to some rando in a pub for it to trigger your ability to take a ship to the place with the water stone. Why would I ever think to do that?
I had the game's audio set to Japanese, so the musical performances in the game were in Japanese. I still need to look up the English versions just to hear them.
I did collect all of the puppets, and I did most of their "quests" just as I went through the game. I collected all of the illustrations and netted a few other Steam achievements, but the ones for beating the game on Hard mode and whatever else are being left alone because I never want to play through this again.
I probably had some other thoughts but this was most of it. Didn't really feel anything for any of the characters, but the first puppet that you get is named Sharte, which was about the only thing I found funny in this game. She was also a permanent party member for me because she was solid, so there's that.
