Rakuen: Deluxe Edition

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Rakuen is a Graphic Adventure released on PC in 2017 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023 in a Deluxe Edition that also contains the game’s smaller spin-off/sequel, Mr. Saitou, and some animated shorts. The main game has players taking the role of an unnamed boy in a hospital whose mother reads him stories from a fantasy book about a magical land. One day during a visit, the boy’s mother surprises him by revealing that the fantasy world in the book is true, and the two can use the book to reach that world, where the boy hopes to beseech a powerful figure in the book to grant him a magical wish.

Rakuen is very clearly a work that was created within RPG Maker, with the pixel art world you move through being rigidly tile-based. However, this game isn’t without its impressive elements, with some very nice character art, and some really lovely synthesized music that reminds me of some of Squaresoft’s better works from the 16-bit era. For good examples, check out Welcome to the Forest, The Spirit Envoy, The Midnight Tea Shop, and Welcome to the Skylands.

The game’s story involves the player helping various characters in the fantasy world of his book, which correspond to characters who live in the hospital. And since we are talking about characters who all live in a hospital, that probably gives you some idea how much of this story is going to go. Still, the characters are likable and the story is mostly well-told. Well… when you can get to it.

The problem with Rakuen is that this game has some absolutely terrible pacing, with these problems being caused by multiple issues. Your walking speed in the game is far too slow, especially when you have to retread the same areas repeatedly. Additionally, players will be forced to “solve” numerous inane puzzles throughout the course of the game, including a lot of fetch quests. As much as I may want to see more of this game’s story, I don’t feel like that story is worth pushing through these terrible tedious puzzles.

To give you an idea, at one point early on, you need to get into a locked room to find a thief. To do so, you need to search every cabinet in the area for loose change (with the game forcing you through extra text screens as it asks you whether you want to look at the stuff hidden within these cabinets, as if you’d say “no”), then take the change to a vending machine to buy a candy bar, then take the candy bar to an unnamed hospital staffer, then sneak into the cabinet behind her to get the passcode for the door. Then, you need to find a missing marble for one of the patients by pressing A to search every object on-screen in one of the rooms. Then you need to return it to her. Then you need to search her toilet being clogged by a key (with no explanation how it got there). Then use the key to access the bathroom of another patient, then use an electrical panel in that patient’s room to power the door the passcode belongs to (no idea why the panel would be there of all places). Head to the door and use the passcode, and you’ll have… another locked door to open, which requires searching the room for a key, then using that key to unlock a drawer with the passcode to the second door.

And then there are three more rooms after that before you see anything plot-relevant.

No. Just no. Not only do these puzzles not make any sort of real-world sense. Not only are they tedious, boring, frustrating, and repetitive. Not only is the overwhelming majority of this busywork doing nothing to advance the plot or tell you anything interesting about the characters (during this whole chain, the only actual character moment happens when you return the marble to the girl). And at no point during all of this did the game present the player with anything even remotely resembling engaging gameplay. It’s tedium for the sake of tedium, perhaps to stretch out the game’s length.

As much as I want to like Rakuen, as much as I think the plot has potential and the presentation is engaging, the terrible pacing and needlessly tedious puzzles padding out the game absolutely kill this experience for me. Let this be a lesson to game designers – if you put something in your game, there had better be a reason that it’s there, and that reason should not be “to give players something, anything, to do” or “to make the game last longer”. If you’re wasting my time doing boring tedious stuff, I’m not going to have the patience to bear with your game to get to the good stuff. And for those considering Rakuen, know that there is good stuff here, but you have to tolerate a lot of your time being wasted before you can get to it.

tl;dr – Rakuen is a Graphic Adventure about a kid in a hospital who discovers his childhood storybook lets him travel to a fantasy world. The story and presentation here is good, and the music is wonderful, but the gameplay is so needlessly tedious and poorly-paced that it really makes it difficult to enjoy the game. Unless you have the patience to get through a lot of pointless busywork, skip this one.

Grade: C

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Winner:

Most Overrated (86) – While I think all of the games in this list are overrated, Rakuen is the only one I think is actually a bad game, and one that somehow tricked people into thinking it’s good. What did people like about this game? The inane fetch quests? The nonsensical puzzles? The agonizingly slow walking speed? The rooms that serve no purpose other than to make the game drag on longer? The fact that it was all clearly made in RPG Maker and is being sold for $25? Looking back at my review, I’m actually wondering if I was too kind in my assessment of this game, giving it a grade as high as a C. But it absolutely doesn’t deserve a Metacritic score as high as 86. That puts it ahead of countless other games that are cheaper, more expertly crafted, and just plain better.

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