moon (Switch) – The Lovely Anti-RPG – Review

Thank you to Onion Games for sending us a review code for this game!

Moon is an old game! It came out on the Playstation in Japan during October 1997. So, why am I writing this review almost 23 years later about an English version? You can thank the kind words of UNDERTALE creator Toby Fox told to the game’s writer, Yoshiro Kimura, for that! After the success of UNDERTALE and Fox’s kind words noted, Onion Games finally went through with translating and releasing the game on Switch. Does it still hold up after all this time, though? I think moon is a very distinct game that has interesting things to say about gaming as a medium, even more than what it inspired in UNDERTALE, but it definitely shows its age with gameplay that feels even older than the Playstation era. 

STORY

The story of moon is where it shines the most! You play as a boy playing an RPG called “MOON.” In this game within the game, you defeat enemies and make your way to the end quickly, but then your mother tells you its time for bed just as you start fighting the final boss. The boy heads to bed, but soon finds himself stuck in the world of that RPG, this time as someone outside of the Hero. The Hero has been slaying all of the animals around the world, and it’s your job to find their souls and catch them so they can be brought to the moon, earning you love in return. You have to get as much love as you can from NPCs, animal souls, and other events, then you have to get to the moon somehow and open something called the Door of Light. This story is a great deconstruction of RPG foundations and, by the end, it manages to say some very profound things about games that I wish more games would think about.

As for its character development, it really doesn’t have as much of that as much as it has suspense for revealing mysterious character details. Revealing these mysteries throughout the game gives some interactions more meaning, but that isn’t development. Characters are very flat and don’t have any changes throughout the story, but since the game isn’t very long, there isn’t as much time spent with all the characters anyways, so this didn’t bother me.

GRADE: A
The story reinvents the RPG perspective. Though the characters don’t have depth, there are meaningful interactions with them.

PRESENTATION

The graphics of moon are so inventive. The 3D-modeled backgrounds definitely have aged and remind me of a couple games I’ve played from that time: Harvester and Final Fantasy VII. But, moon’s backgrounds don’t feel as aged as they do in those games. The character sprites and animals all feel like they belong in this kind of world. They have distinct colors and designs, including the especially colorful and lively protagonist. The animal designs are all clay models that were photographed and made into sprites, and it really shows! They each stand out so well from the standard characters and have their own cute clay style.

As for the music, most of it is in the tracks you can buy and play during the game, but they never appealed to me. The first time I could buy them, I bought two and really didn’t like either of them very much, so I never bothered to buy more because they felt like a waste of money. Aside from those buyable tracks, the few area songs that the game does have sound very nice, and its ending song is one of the most memorable video game songs I’ve heard in a while. There’s a reason many games don’t leave all their music behind a shop, though. I think the game would have benefitted from having theme music in each area instead of nothing at all.

GRADE: A-
The environmental graphics have aged, but it doesn’t feel like it. The characters and animals feel like they belong in a world like this. The soundtrack didn’t astound me overall, but it has a few standouts.

GAMEPLAY

When it comes to gameplay, moon is much less modern than its other aspects. Mostly, you find an animal’s body, you figure out how to find that animal’s soul, then you catch the soul. But, you also have a time limit each day, so you can only do so much before tiring yourself out and needing to sleep. Catching souls and doing favors for people you meet can get you more Love though, which boosts your Love Level and gives you more strength to do things, which allows you to get more love… and so on! This gameplay loop is satisfying and incentivizes exploration very well, but many of the things inbetween are cryptic and not very interactive.

First, the walk speed is slow and has the same repeated stepping sound effect, and in a game that is based on travel, this makes everything very tedious very quickly. For some reason, run buttons were a rarity in games at this time, and despite being forward-thinking in other ways, this game is no exception. This is just where things begin to get tedious, though. Some tasks and souls require you to wait for certain times of day. These days aren’t real time, though; the game has its own days that happen pretty quickly. Every NPC and animal soul in the game operates on a schedule that influences where they are at each time on each day. When a task only happens at a certain time of day or day of the week and you don’t have anything else to do for that open time, you have to sit and wait for these things to happen, sleep over and over until it’s the right day, or, when you’re a lower level, you need to plan your entire day around traveling to and from that task. This makes the game very hands-off at times when you’re waiting for something to happen, and it gets boring.

The walk speed and wait times aren’t great, but what I really disliked most were the extremely specific puzzles. The crypticism of this game seems so dated that it feels like it was designed in the Famicom era. It felt like Takeshi’s Challenge levels of absurd. For example, one puzzle requires you to learn a language’s words, write them down, translate the messages of villagers that speak that language, find the items that they need, then use the items specifically how they told you to in a quick enough time… then you have to find all of those items and do that again later. Other moments like this ruined my time with the game, so if you’re not patient, this might turn you away from it very quickly. To be fair, the game does give you clues about how you should do these things, but it takes a long time to figure that out, and it takes an even longer time to actually do them.

VERDICT

Moon isn’t for the faint of heart or of mind. This game’s going to need you to love it for you to make it all the way through some of its old-fashioned parts that try your patience, but it’s in return for a world that is filled with love to find and a story that ponders the foundations which RPGs and games in general were built on. I think whether someone finishes this game or not will depend on how much love they’re willing to give it, and, for me, I felt plenty to spare.

I loved experiencing the world and story of moon despite my gameplay issues with it. I’d rate moon as an A-

Thanks again to Onion Games for the review copy of moon!
You can find the purchase page for the game here.