![]() The city is large and complicated, with sensibly laid out districts, and rather than the normal five-house RPG town, this city largely manages to come across as a real place. Just as the characters come across as real people, the island comes across as a very real place. The decision to keep Ephemeral Fantasia centered on a single location was an unusual one, but one which worked well within the context of the game and its character-driven story. The characters also manage to generally avoid falling into cliche and stereotypes, which was a real treat. Instead, each quest is plot-driven, and serves as a further window into the personality and motives of the character Mouse is trying to help. The quests seldom devolve into simple matters of item-fetching, like many other games with sizable casts. In order to gain their alliance, Mouse must engage in a particular quest to earn the trust and friendship of each of them. In particular, the game's villain stands out as extremely well done it would spoil the game's fun to say more about this villain except to note the incredible and twisted cruelty the character manages to present make him stand out in a refreshing way from the standard world-destroying antagonists.Įach character in the game is presented in a complex manner, with emotions, personalities, and even flaws. The story is certainly the game's greatest asset, conveying a powerful overall narrative while still offering richly textured characters that demonstrate human emotion and growth. ![]() In so doing, Ephemeral Fantasia brings the player a more narrowly-focused story that, by heavily emphasizing the distinctive characters on the island and their own individual troubles, also manages to succeed on a more personal level. The game avoids the world entirely, in fact, with its whole story confined to the large island, its city, and its outlying villages, such as a village of lumberjacks and a bandit hideout in the deepest forests. The setup for the game is a clever and fairly unique one, and Ephemeral Fantasia effectively avoids the cliched drive of nearly every RPG: the eventual goal of saving the world from imminent destruction. Despite his best efforts to remain aloof from the goings-on, the island's mysteries and the troubles of its townsfolk begin to suck him in.Įphemeral Fantasia, or Reiselied as it was known in Japan, is a traditional RPG from Konami for the Playstation 2, and it follows Mouse on his quest to figure out what's going on with the strange island on which he finds himself. But as the wedding nears, and Mouse meets more of the island's particular inhabitants, a sense of foreboding grows within him, made even stronger by peculiar accidents which keep happening all around him. He's got a good paying, easy job writing a song to celebrate the princess' beauty, and he plans on making out like a bandit with the castle's many treasures. Mouse thinks everything is going just perfectly. ![]() Lord Xelpherpolis is suitably impressed by Mouse's composition and playing the musician is hired and ordered to create a masterpiece of a song in five days to be played at the marriage ceremony. So enraptured is he with her shy beauty that he is struck by inspiration, and creates a song on the spot. When at last he arrives in the castle throne room, Xelpherpolis is delighted to meet him, but it's the demure princess that truly catches the bard's attention. Rummy has been assigned to serve as Mouse's guide during his stay on the island, and as they walk, she talks to him about its affairs and the wedding, eagerly awaited by everyone in the city, which is scheduled to occur in five short days. Mouse is soon greeted by a female soldier, Rummy, sent by the castle to escort him to the princess and her fiance, Xelpherpolis. But, the player quickly learns, Mouse has ulterior motives: in addition to being a highly qualified musician, the young man is also a thief, and in the festivities following the joyous nuptials, he plans to make off with the castle's loot. The boat's captain introduces viewers to the man, Mouse, a highly talented bard and composer that has come to write and perform a song for the upcoming wedding of the island's princess and her suitor. The man observes a spacious, bustling city and a towering castle, surrounded by thick masses of forests. A young man looks up from the boat he's riding to see a large island coming into view.
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