Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream

This has a distinct Quintet-esque flair to it: a solemn world-restoration myth communicated through gameplay that shallowly evokes its contemporaries, although here it’s 2.5D platforming instead of hack-and-slash. Protagonist Porch Arsia’s soul is mistakenly reaped by bumbling spirit guide and dessert auteur Straynap, and the duo must retrieve the “petals” of her soul from around the purgatorial plane of Napple Town. An assemblage of both humans and surreal creatures¹ live in Napple Town day-to-day, and some of them have inadvertently imbued themselves with Porch’s petals. Merely visiting them throughout Napple Town yields little, however, as each denizen of the town simultaneously exists in another form located within one of four seasonal wildernesses outside the city gates. To restore herself, Porch must meet both the town and seasonal variations of each community member and reconcile their respective problems.

The solemnity of Quintet’s oeuvre is the one facet that doesn’t quite translate over: the stories of Napple Town hew silly as often as tragic, and Porch is far from a laconic avatar. Her traits – strong-headed, simple-minded, and occasionally prone to childish insults – repeatedly deflate tragic or mystic situations. In some cases this comes across sweetly, such as in Cecile’s memory loop, where Porch yanks her back to reality by engaging with her on her positive memories instead of rudely snapping her out of it (if the player tries to do the latter, the loop continues). At the end of the game, however, when Straynap and the antagonist war over the fate of Napple Town and the potential for Porch to return, she ignores the stakes and cannot seem to grasp the emotional suppression and subsequent turmoil of the antagonist, as she already openly expresses herself without hesitation and cannot conceive of the opposite. What should be a triumphant moment of joy towards the imperfect² comes across as flippant on Porch’s part; it’s hard to triumph in a “life is worth living” ending when the protagonist never even considered the alternative. It’s a shame considering that the opening cutscene portrays Porch as overwhelmed and socially strung-out navigating a real world festival, and although she manages to overcome this and enjoy herself when she returns at the end, it never seems like she bridges this gap during the actual events of the game.

Porch can occasionally be witty or charming, but the majority of her behavior gives the impression that she cannot emotionally connect to the world around her. [src]

The rest of the cast sees some necessary growth thanks to the intervention of Porch in their lives, but they rarely dig deep within themselves; it’s a missed opportunity for characters who all float in the afterlife. For every touching story such as Cecile’s aforementioned nostalgia pit or moral fable such as Mr. Littlemoney’s wealth hoarding, there’s plodding time spent accidentally rescuing Mele from the Winter Corps in their namesake season or restoring a piano for the school. Part of this results from the cycle of play that the devs impose: the player talks to a person in the town, finds their seasonal counterpart in a platforming level, beats a boss to solve the person’s problem, and moves on. Some of this may have been more appropriate had they stuck to the concept of restoring seasonal effects to their respective streets in the town, but this falls away by the middle of the game, by which point the narrative seems to be ignoring the afterlife setting entirely, among other threads. The effect instead suggests that the conversational, explorative town segments merely wrap around the weak gameplay core rather than the gameplay supplementing the stronger narrative beats. Perhaps the more interesting threads could have been expanded upon had the whole game pushed an open-ended puzzle-solving structure that let the player organically determine a problem-solving sequence rather than stapling each of these to the completion of levels with only vague thematic relations.

You get more of the impression that Napple Tale wants to push the adventure game concept once you begin tinkering with the side content, but these post-critical path questlines often reduce to fetch quests on top of the game’s crafting system. Porch can break down objects collected through gameplay into various materials used to “remix” living creatures known as “Paffets,” some of whom are also furniture pieces that can help various townsfolk. Ethics of this aside, the minigame that facilitates this consists of menially scraping the outside of each object for certain runes that are invisible until highlighted, which can require between one to three passes with various filters, although thankfully the game allows you to skip the process for repeat objects that you collect. As these objects drop from enemies in the seasons, the side quests end up pushing the player to repeatedly trudge through old levels to accrue materials. This tactic joins others that beg the player to give the platforming an honest shot: treasure chests that require returning with platform-assist Paffets in tow, awards for collecting every coin in a stage, which requires returning with Paffets that open challenge stages, and time attack high scores pushed through the VMU screen. The critical path doesn’t quite avoid this either, although thankfully seasonal versions of the townspeople often appear early in their designated level and thus the backtracking is minimal, assuming you know what you’re supposed to be doing.

In between levels, Porch can explore Napple Town in full 3D and talk to the residents at her leisure. Doing so both is necessary for opening up or progressing the stages, and characters who you have already helped often have further requests for items they would like crafted. [src]

In a platforming model as bare as this, however, any backtracking can feel like time wasted. Porch’s only distinguishing feature is her wand, which bats enemies away as energy balls that flip switches and open treasure chests. This occasionally gives the game a Klonoa-esque edge, where the enemy interactions dictate puzzle solutions, but said interaction is detached from Porch herself and thus isn’t able to bolster her weak toolkit. The first half of the game never tries to push it either, focusing mainly on linear left-to-right design with lots of cycle-based platform movement and simple enemy designs. The later stages each take different approaches to mixing this up, such as internal backtracking with gate manipulation or rollercoaster sequences, but some slightly tougher challenges aren’t quite enough to turn the rudimentary handling into anything more than extremely obvious timing challenges.

Napple Tale succeeds primarily when it can let its imagery and spacey conception of time and emotion take center stage, most prominently through its FMVs upon collecting a new petal. Each petal has a humanoid form that arises out of spiritual towers with a dazzling flourish, often melting into and out of the characters that held onto them. Each one also has an vocal track that describes the onset of their associated season or time in personal terms, and I would’ve loved to see Porch reflect more of these sentiments upon reabsorbing them, given that they constitute her soul. Unfortunately, the regular cutscenes opt for flat framings of the characters and artificially smooth camera panning. In these moments, the tone is salvaged by Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack. Her pieces flitter between yawning classical strings and more upbeat numbers that pull from the waltzy bounce of musette or the jangly clamor of flamenco, each punctuated by strong use of woodwind and wordless vocals. Her ornate arrangements lend an upscale air to the otherwise budget visual look and feel of the game, and in the process they provide a channel for the player to tap into when the rest of the aesthetic and mechanical package is limp.