Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see….
Athenian Rhapsody is a fresh comedic RPG game in which you’ll explore the World of Athens! Your goal is to build your very own Rhapsody, the story of you (the player) and your epic tale in this world. Your story will unfold based on your decisions, to the degree of which cannot be replicated by any other player. Athenian Rhapsody is a turn based RPG which includes intense and fast paced real-time-dodging. You’ll be faced with many challenges, and you’ll have to fight your way through the world by either fighting, or awkwardly trying to make friends with your opponents through pick-up-lines, mean jokes, memory games, and other strange and funny interactions.
One glimpse of Athenian Rhapsody and the comparisons to Undertale seem inevitable. It’s a humorous RPG where you can kill or befriend enemies in combat that seems very like Toby Fox’s game. But is there more to it than that? There seem to be a good WarioWare influence with the battle system, so not all the fights are quite like Undertale in this regard. There are 16 potential party members to recruit, but you can also kill them in true Undertale fashion.
There’s a chilled mode that makes combat a LOT easier and you can also trade Rhapsodies with other players online and then you’ll see that there are quite a few variables in your playthroughs. No two are the same, so expect a lot of differences if you go through the game more than once.
The humour is top notch, I actually found it more amusing than Undertale, which I was not expecting. The characters have some great dialogue throughout, it’s just a bizarre, yet brilliant experience. The art style is more reminiscent of a Pokémon game with your character looking more like the original Game Boy version and the soundtrack is also impressive.
The Verdict
Athenian Rhapsody took me by surprise. It’s a nice homage to Undertale, but it does a lot of things better including its humour. It mixes combat so that one fight might be traditionally dodging items on-screen, while the next might be a DDR rip-off. You never know what you’re going to get with this game from start to finish, and you won’t for multiple Rhapsodies either. Seriously, if you are a fan of Toby Fox’s work then you need to try this.