Moon: Remix RPG Adventure - It's bringing Love, don't let it get away!

[MetManMas]

I'm at Love Level 10 or 11, after the game opened up a bit. I like that when you sleep at your house, it only lasts for about half a day, and takes into account when you fall asleep, not just always waking you up when the sun comes up. Once I get a bit more Levels I'll abuse that to try to go on the bird's travel reservation.

Yeah, both houses are useful. Gramby's for getting to a specific day quickly (and free cookies), yours for a better control over time (and fast travel).

I'm tapping out at like Love Level 24. I don't know how to progress, and I get the feeling that I'll just need to walkthrough the rest at this point. It's a fun, wonderful game, but still too obtuse for its own good.

There's no shame in using a walkthrough, but I totally understand if you wanna quit now. The puzzles can get quite obtuse and difficult.

Me, I'm gonna see this through to the end.

 

[MetManMas]

It took a lot of patience and a good amount of FAQ diving, but...

Spoiler: Saved Animal Spoilers

Seeing that Moon Screen filled to the brim with all the animals I saved feels pretty dang good.

 

[MetManMas]

Finally beat the game; glad I decided to FAQ dive to see this through to its conclusion. Still got a few loose ends I could clean up (moreso to see the associated events than for those final bits of Love), but I'm in no rush.

All said and done, it's a game that was ahead of but also very much a product of its time. And I'm glad I was able to finally play it.

Anyway, I gots a few things I'd like to talk about so I'm putting up a spoilerpop with other spoilerpops inside it listed by character/s. Not gonna do everybody, though.

Spoiler: Moon Spoilers (You Have Been Warned)

Spoiler: The King

This guy's basically the King Of Town right down to the voice and I love that. He likes bad guys, he draws his plan to get to the moon in crayon, and he's willing to trade his superior gold Hager badge for an inferior black one 'cuz he likes the color more.

Also he's friends with the local vagrant and even pulls a Prince & Pauper switcheroo you got to help undo 'cuz both he and Shambles are miserable in their new positions.

Spoiler: Bilby

He's divorced, sees Noge as a surrogate son, and he's working on a special paper airplane for his own son he hopes to see again someday. One of my favorite moments was when he succeeded at having the plane stay airborne with Noge's advice.

Also if you want to learn more about the game's backstory, be sure to catch him on drinkin' day.

Spoiler: Yoshida

Has a surprising amount of plot agency for a walking tutorial/item describer. He takes you to a place where you acquire one of the five items needed for the rocket, you can go to classes with him that serve as some exposition, and he stows away on your trip to the moon in the final act.

Spoiler: Baker

He's Bilby's ex drinking buddy, he used to see Gramby in the shop regularly, and he doesn't like people going in his personal space.

If you go to his house on the one night a week he goes out drinkin' you learn that he's a living Anpanman reference, i.e. actually made of bread. This is both amazing and horrifying.

Spoiler: Tao

Is a good doggo who later showed up in Chibi-Robo! the first. He is instrumental to saving a number of animal spirits as well as leading you to a couple of items that give you insight into the backstory and help with a later puzzle.

The Hero chasing the "crazy" dog serves as an early gate to ferry you to Gramby's too.

Spoiler: The American Family

The character designs in Moon are very Gumball-esque in terms of mashing different art styles together. The castle town's caricature-ish style and the Moon's claymation are the closest to standard styles for the game, but there's also stuff like the old school manga-ish fireworks family, the robotically animated lanky humans in Technopolis, and the Tim Burtonesque various stages of Whisper's life in the mansion.

Anyway, these folks really stand out by being very toyetic CGI. You have:

1) The mother. She's making a doll for her daughter's birthday and she doesn't like people going in the fridge because that's where she hides her dark secret: A Hager badge she spent way too much money on that only gave her basic privileges at Hager labs.

2) The father, a cartoonist. Dude's having writer's block but gets over it after tragedy nearly strikes the family. Can't help but wonder if he holds some resentment towards the family pet considering that his big breakthrough comic has a monster based on Perogon getting maimed and slaughtered, though.

3) The daughter. She really likes her pet Perogon a lot. She doesn't like the doll her mom made her, though.

4) Perogon, the family pet. He is basically like a mix of Cagnazzo from FF4 and a hedgehog and he squawks like a chicken when he's afraid. If you remember the fight from Fake Moon, you know how to save his life when the Hero stops by.

They don't have much to do with the overall story other than briefly being featured in Fake Moon, but they're a source of some easy love and the first step towards saving a lot of Yenom you would need to get into an area essential to completing the game.

Spoiler: Team Eco

Basically a parody of the ecologically themed superheroes of the 90s, they mostly just laze about in their home base when not lecturing people.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1302031737707356160

Even so, Femi is the heroine we need and you had no business being in Flora's room while she was asleep.

After being lectured by all three you can steal a moon tear they hid for easy Yenom.

Spoiler: The Hero (HUGE SPOILERS)

For a guy who never says a word there is a lot to say about this guy.

In Fake Moon, the Hero is basically the star of an extremely generic Japanese RPG doing generic jRPG things like killing monsters for XP and looting dressers. Typical RPG stuff players have done for years.

In the context of Real Moon, the hero is a sociopath and a monster who mercilessly slaughters dozens of helpless animals for experience points.

There are various callbacks to Fake Moon within Real Moon. The character portraits that looked nothing like the in-game sprites correspond to the more unique actual characters in the game proper. The random bird you can talk to in town is at the spot where Yoshida lives. The Hero chases the Crazy Dog (Tao) in early conversations and as gating. The invisible force that inexplicably bumped the Hero backwards is you crashing into the Hero when he left Bar Wanda after taking (stealing) her legendary armor (underwear). You make the rainbow that suddenly appeared; you're the Perogon duplicate that burst into flames.

And then there's the Penultimizer and the Dragon. I won't spoil the ending, but...I was seriously dreading that part.

But there's more to the Hero besides being death incarnate. If you'll recall, early on in the game Gramby mistakes you for her departed grandson. Most people believe he's dead, but a few imply something else happened.

In the Minister's room, you can read about something called the White Arrow Ritual the Minister used to decide who will go slay the dragon. If you follow Tao, you'll find a white arrow that he buried in his stash. If you find Team Eco's home base, they will give you a tablet they stole from the Minister that can't be decrypted but shows a picture of a house and an arrow and a boy and the Hero.

If you show Bilby the white arrow or Hero bromide while he's plastered, he'll straight up spell it out for you: The Hero is Gramby's grandson shoved into a suit of cursed armor that turns its wearer into a killing machine. The White Arrow Ritual chose him as the one to do the whole dragon-slaying thing.

Of course, you might've already known that given that you named and played as him in Fake Moon, but it's still neat there's some in-game context for it.

What an amazing game.

 

[conchobhar]

I'd been playing this for the last couple weeks, and I just finished it last night. It's a wonderful and inventive game, and I had a great time with it.

Like everyone else, I had a difficult time getting started and getting into the groove of things— I think I got a game over two or three times before even learning about the monster catching mechanic, because I kept trying to explore the town and wasn't managing my time properly. Even so, sussing out how the game worked was intriguing and I quickly made to call to avoid using a guide and instead just feel my way through the game. While intending no shade to those who did use a guide, I found it to be incredibly engaging this way. moon can be opaque, to be sure, but there's so much going on in its world— so many events to see, animals to catch, clues to find, leads to follow— that I never didn't have something to do or check out (so much that I actually started jotting down notes). Granted, it did feel aimless at times— it took me a long time to reach Dr Hager, so I had no real sense of progression— but the upside is that it's a game that really rewards curiosity. For instance, Curio's shop has an animal corpse, Mackarther, that has no immediately clear way to catch its soul; not even the monster book gives much of a clue. Yet it was clear that the solution would be here, so I decided to simply wait around and see if something happened— an event that happens at a certain time, say. Lo and behold, not only does Mackarther appear at night, but it also revealed to me that Curio runs a different shop at night, with different items, which in turn gave me new things to follow up on. And this is just one example: following the clues, or just a hunch, is almost guaranteed to lead to something (and with that, some love points).

In a way, I think it was to everyone's benefit that moon took so long to reach our shores. Because for a game that's over two decades old, it feels shockingly contemporary— not simply in terms of its mechanics and expected play, but its themes and even its visual style. It is really difficult for me to imagine this game finding much of an audience circa 1997, but it fits in perfectly in our post-Undertale, post-Hylics world.

Though, it's kind of hilarious that this game is a stated influence on Undertale, because despite the similarities, they have massively different themes. They both work from the same premise of "deconstructing" the standard RPG narrative, by showing how behaving like the RPG Hero would actually be sociopathic: ignoring everyone's pleas, stealing their stuff, killing the wildlife, and otherwise leaving destruction in their wake. But they go in wildly different directions. In Undertale, the message— or at least what a lot of people take from the Genocide Route— seems to be that these characters are as real as us, and you should feel bad about killing them. Meanwhile, moon ends by saying that none of the good you did in the world actually matters, because this is a video game; it's all programmed and pre-determined scenarios and outcomes, and you can't find any meaningful love within— only from outside the game, in the real world. It has a point, but it's still a shockingly, remarkably cynical ending for a game of its ilk, and I love it for that.

 

[spines]

what i've heard is that toby had not only not played this game, but wasn't especially familiar with it beyond hearing the premise and maybe seeing a bit, and that the localization was heavily driven by him saying that he wanted to play it in english, hahaha. he has so much power...

anyway i think undertale's fine but i was more interested in this as a weird ps1 game, and picking my file back up after six months or so (i got and played up to level 13 or so when it was new after seeing some tips in this thread, but after getting the house i encountered a bit of...decision paralysis around the record shop and some of the minigame-type quests that were obviously available. so i put it down and kept not coming back) it definitely really delivers. i've been enjoying it a lot more now that i'm more on the wavelength, and my progress over the weekend has been pretty solid again. i feel like i haven't played many adventure games and haven't ever had a ton of interest in them, but the presentation and mostly nonlinear design here really helps the style go down; anytime i feel really stuck it's time to just see some other things, since there's so often little hints or other ways to make progress. like any good nonlinear game as soon as you stop being way too stubborn you'll find something you needed to know or be reminded of. obviously it also helps that i can stay awake for like three days now, and the last time i died was because i just forgot there was a time limit at all, basically. it seemed forever away, until it didn't.

anyway, i'm now at level 22, and have made what feels like quite a fair amount of progress in terms of the overall game state, although it's a little hard to tell since it seems like most of the cycles just keep going and going without a whole lot of change. but i do have about 2/3 of the monsters, which is about the clearest and most unambiguous progress marker that exists, lol. there's a couple areas i know there must be a lot i haven't solved yet (although really staking out the castle town is going to be a lot easier now than it was earlier), and a few where i'm not sure there's as much but i haven't quite put together yet, so i'm really looking forward to it. especially with how good the music is for just chilling and wandering around, i figure i'll be happy to hang out in the game for quite a while longer, although if i get more obviously close to the end and things start to seem to slow up a lot i might make a more concerted effort to head for it.

best disc i've purchased:

 

[spines]

level 27 now. i encountered a couple things last night that i could've probably found a while ago and maybe were supposed to be obvious. although still i'm feeling really aimless at this point, but almost never have to sleep, so it seems like there's two ways to finish the game

1) put on a playlist of chill/jazz cds in the game, get high, and prepare to stalk every character i think is a lead or i'm just interested in for an entire week at a time
2) look that stuff up instead

not sure which is better

 

[MetManMas]

level 27 now. i encountered a couple things last night that i could've probably found a while ago and maybe were supposed to be obvious. although still i'm feeling really aimless at this point, but almost never have to sleep, so it seems like there's two ways to finish the game

1) put on a playlist of chill/jazz cds in the game, get high, and prepare to stalk every character i think is a lead or i'm just interested in for an entire week at a time
2) look that stuff up instead

not sure which is better

I went with #2 personally. Finding stuff yourself is cool and all, but there are some things that are really obtuse and a guide helps.

I don't regret it.

 

[spines]

went through the ending last night after picking up a few hints on things, although a couple of them i would've likely remembered if i hadn't played the first third of the game six months earlier. (the eco club entrance, though, which i guess isn't necessary anyway, i don't think i would've ever figured out. almost every step of that was probably not happening. (it does not help that my brain was strongly inclined to associate "frid" and "dre" as like, the numbers four and three.)) but i wanna hang out and do some more stuff, especially listening to all the mds with demi, because i know most of this music would be totally her shit. there's definitely plenty to criticize and not like about it, but i loved it, cool game which i agree managed to come out in english at just about the right time. in terms of its design, influences, references, and aesthetic...it would've totally flopped in the 90s, and in a lot of ways feels a lot easier to understand and enjoy now than i think it would have then. there's some gorgeously trippy, funny, and weird parts, and once i got on the wavelength it just felt really satisfying to hang around and try to find stuff, which really says a lot about how well-thought-out and executed the concepts are.

Even so, Femi is the heroine we need and you had no business being in Flora's room while she was asleep.

honestly, even though it's played off as a joke on multiple levels and the character's obviously not meant to be taken seriously to an extent that feels somewhat mean-spirited in the end...that was a kind of endearing moment in the game for me, since it's a little bit weird that it goes out of its way to parody tropes like rifling through every object in sight when that's still an important mechanic in this one, and also that your other primary way of interacting with the world (especially at the start) does amount to stalking people on some level. which kind of leads to my reaction to the ending...

because this is a video game; it's all programmed and pre-determined scenarios and outcomes, and you can't find any meaningful love within— only from outside the game, in the real world. It has a point, but it's still a shockingly, remarkably cynical ending for a game of its ilk, and I love it for that.

i think i get what you mean by this, although i'm not quite sure i'd agree with the exact word choice-the developers definitely have a lot of affection for games, both in general and other particular titles, and it's not as if the game is trying to make the player feel negative in some way for playing and enjoying the game. after all, what the mechanics do is give the player the ability to explore further and for longer by caring about the game's characters and world, and you can't beat the game without doing quite a lot of it! i think especially with the chips piled around the door, reciting simple facts about the characters and their role in the world and mechanics, to me the ending feels like a statement about the limitations of art and games. which is a pretty reasonable one to make! and even as the game works to enrich and invert the common standards of the genre and medium it acknowledges its own simplifications and flaws. which i think is really endearing! i think there's a lot of disdain for metanarratives and also heavily referential ones since it's so easily conflated with smugness and self-satisfaction in the creators' own cleverness, so i think it's disarming and kind of sweet for the game to ultimately acknowledge itself as squarely with the same bounds as anything else it might be seen as making commentary on.

but yes it's also rather blunt about the idea that someday you'll have to put down the game and reach out into the world beyond for its own fulfillment and adventure rather than clinging to a simple world where the outcome is predetermined. even if that outcome is your "failure" to overcome an unstoppable obstacle.

 

[Ludendorkk]

In the last Japanese Nintendo Direct Onion games revealed their new title Stray Children, which is a pretty obvious spiritual successor to Moon:

Onion Games has also confirmed a localization is coming soon:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1702359206068965470

Just in case it wasn't crystal clear: yes, #StrayChildren will be localized and released outside Japan! Our release date is still TBD, but please don't worry! We will be announcing all new details first in our newsletter, so don't forget to subscribe! https://oniongames.jp/cellar

 

[Felicia]

I'm thinking about playing moon, but first I want to ask: Does anyone here know if there are any notable differences in gameplay, graphics, sound or story, between the modern localization and the original PlayStation version?

 

[MetManMas]

Having a localization and the player's mom's spoken audio being in English aside, I'm pretty sure it's a straight unmodified port of the original PlayStation game.