Nostalgia (DS)

In most role-playing games the player is transported to a fantasy world, the land entirely the creation of the developer’s imagination and thus unique to that specific experience. Nostalgia for the DS goes for a different approach though, because the moment you see it’s world map you might realize it looks just like the very same we use in our day to day life. Here the cities you visit consist of places like London, Rio de Janeiro, and New York City, the dungeons are made out of places like Mt. Fuji or an Egyptian pyramid, and when you encounter a group of hooded men who serve a mysterious cabal, they whip out machine guns to fight you with rather than dark sorcery. Sure there are still fantasy elements, you will end up using magic spells to fight monsters, but seeing how real world locations are twisted into hosts for this adventure makes exploring its world a bit more interesting.

Figuring out the exact mix of what is newly added to our world and what remains the same is an interesting process. While walking the streets of London you’ll see early 20th century automobiles at rest and one member of your adventuring party relies on firearms for combat, but the sky above is also filled with flying warships. In some dungeons you’ll face robotic foes, but then over in the Americas you can run into appropriate choices for fictional monsters like Bigfoot. The fantasy rooting gives the game room to bring in mythical places from real world legends as well but you’ll still spend more time dropping by places like Tokyo and the Easter Islands than places with no basis in reality. However, sometimes these areas can be a bit leaner than you expect. Since there is a sort of turn-of-the-century look to the world you won’t have the extravagance of the modern New York City but you aren’t given much to do in the city itself and some places just feel like a snow or desert village is having a real city’s name placed on it to make it more notable. It doesn’t truly dampen the interest in seeing where the adventure might take you next, but it does mean the discovery of such a location is more interesting than its substance much of the time. Dungeons at least try to have some special navigational challenge attached to them to make getting around them more than just walking around, things like avoiding barely visible pitfalls and moving platforms asking you to think a bit about how to reach a treasure or pave the way forward. The simpler moments of discovery can expand to things like the World Treasures though which you find by flying above areas on the map you were told about until you get a notification some historical location was found, the bit of history you’re told about the find interesting but the search not really that involved or rewarding.

The story of Nostalgia begins when famed explorer Gilbert Brown foils the plans of the Ancient Father’s Cabal, the group trying to get the priestess Fiona to grab hold of a mysterious tablet piece until she’s ferried away by the adventurer. The two end up split apart during the escape though, Fiona left adrift on Gilbert’s airship until it is recovered by the Royal Exploration Agency in London. When Gilbert’s son Eddie is informed of his father’s disappearance though, he immediately steps forward and decides to be an adventurer himself, eventually teaming up with Fiona, a street tough named Pad, and an air-headed witch named Melody to fly his father’s airship to learn more about the tablets, find Gilbert, and uncover more of the amnesiac Fiona’s past. The core four band of heroes in Nostalgia aren’t complex characters nor are their interactions prone to deepening their bonds too much, but they do have some sweet interactions at points and moments where they can bounce off each other fairly well. Eddie is a bit basic though, an earnest sort who presses forward without an ounce of trepidation or deeper consideration no matter the circumstances, but Pad balances things out better by being a bit rougher and more likely to get angry or sassy with other characters and villains. Melody perhaps has the most pronounced personality though, the immature and sometimes oblivious witch providing some comedic balance compared to a character like Fiona who is mostly serious and often easily disheartened, although Fiona can at least be doggedly insistent when she knows something matters so she isn’t just a demure distressed damsel.

Despite clear personalities you won’t really see them personally tested too often and if you do it is hastily resolved, although all four characters do have associated quests that are meant to plumb into some of their personal histories a bit more. With Pad being an orphan in search of his parents and Fiona having deeper ties to the strange magics that exist in this warped version of our world there is an obvious angle for their side stories but Melody’s has her oddly resistant to participating despite its ties to her village’s history and the deaths of people she cared for. Eddie’s almost doesn’t even register as one tied to him since it doesn’t really culminate in anything too unique compared to the things he learns elsewhere or how he behaves. These are definitely a step up from most of the quests the game throws at you through the Adventurer’s Association though where it tries to weakly justify returns to previously finished dungeons by throwing in a new boss monster that is usually a lightly upgraded regular foe. The lack of story and flagrant repetition in most of these quests makes such side content hard to get excited for, but at least they split the character-focused ones with some real narratives away from the association ones and you instead discover them by speaking to the right characters. Some side characters get a bit more to work with and some interesting enough supporters and adversaries like the sky pirate Scarlett and the major players in the Royal Exploration Agency like the surprisingly young but gifted Magi, and while the core four have few struggles or flaws to overcome, you can find it a bit more with the side characters. The story still chains enough little twists and new locations together too that it can rely mostly on its sense of expanding adventure despite its fairly static leads.

Combat in Nostalgia has a few bells and whistles on it but is mostly rather straightforward. In dangerous areas the player will occasionally run into random battles with monsters, and since the equipment upgrade path is primarily about buying new stuff in the latest town and replacing things with any treasures found in the current dungeon, you’ll usually be tough enough to take down most foes with the party taking turns attacking with their basic weapons. Gadgets can give you a bit more room to truly choose what a character has equipped, these limited items granting things like status immunities and the ability to counterattack or get situational buffs that would benefit some party members more than others. If the foe is a bit tougher or has a dangerous attack like one that might inflict status effects or even instantly kill you it might be wiser to whip out the magic spells Melody and Fiona wield or the special abilities Pad and Eddie can use to attack in different ways, but even though the mages deal less damage when smacking something than the boys do it’s not such a wide difference that you can’t get away with easily clearing most battles without much thought besides maybe an occasional heal. These are the basic battles meant to keep your team up to speed for the more dangerous fights with bosses or the occasional formidable foe though, and with the dungeons not being too long even if you poke around for treasure their simplicity doesn’t get too repetitive. Picking which foe in a pack of monsters to kill first or even whipping out an ability to speed things along makes them easier to accept, but quite a few bosses don’t feel like the biggest evolution in how strategic you’ll need to be.

The Ancient Father’s Cabal does have a wide range of boss characters and some large monsters may stand in your path, but it’s usually the optional fights and late game battles that really ask for you to pay a good deal of attention to how you act. Acquiring techniques like the Combo Attacks can push you towards one incredibly effective battle style, but there is room for things like applying buffs, planning your healing well, and managing the team’s speed. The battles are turn-based in Nostalgia and certain abilities can delay your turn for longer periods, meaning that when you face those tougher foes you’ll need to carefully plan for the possibility someone might take major damage and require healing or have their buff expire and lose out on major damaging opportunities. If you can learn a foe’s elemental weakness it can be exploited as well, but such a thing requires pure experimentation so leaning into the raw effectiveness of more universal strategies is more likely the way to win.

One interesting element of the battle format though is how you develop your abilities. While unlocking powers mostly comes from leveling up characters with battle experience, you’ll also earn Skill Points that can increase the power of abilities and in turn unlock new ones. Not only will leveling up a skill increase its potency be it healing, damage-focused, or stat boosting, it can also reduce its cost, meaning that you’ll be able to use it more often. This does lead to the centralization of your tactics again though as you funnel the SP into the most reliable abilities and the less useful ones aren’t as well fed when the moment comes that they could be useful. Doing well in a battle will earn you more rewards based on a post-battle ranking if you do want to hasten things with ability use though, but the motivation isn’t strong enough for the player to overcomplicate their participation in the random battles that ask little of them.

While many battles, even important ones, can feel rather basic, the game throws in another form of combat that can end up a bit more tense. While flying your airship around the globe you can be attacked, the battle system changing into something with more considerations and much more danger. While each character now mans a weapon on the airship, health is now one large pool representing the airship’s health meaning that there isn’t room for things like revivals. Enemies can appear in front of your ship or to the sides and even move positions during a fight, your weapons having different degrees of effectiveness based on where the foe they’re firing at is. The difference in damage isn’t so great it really feels impactful though and you have no control over enemy placement so you can’t even strategically position your ship to exploit the minor advantages, battles still more about picking your targets based on the danger they present. Using abilities is likely more common in the sky though since many enemies are incredibly resilient and can deal major damage to your ship, and with them sometimes able to disable weapons, start your ship on fire, or stun it, you will find yourself in peril more often then when fighting with weapons and spells down on the ground. Flying higher in the sky will have you face different foes and boss battles while piloting the airship can often test your risk-taking more than than standard fights on foot, but since the rewards aren’t often proportional to the danger it can feel like aerial battles are better avoided and some foes like the pterosaurs draw out their battles with high evasion and low chances of being able to just run away if you don’t wish to fight the long battle.

THE VERDICT: There’s a layer of simplicity that hangs over many of Nostalgia’s ideas and elements, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most of your battles will be pretty basic in how you approach them but there are ones that ask you to whip out all those abilities you’ve cultivated with the SP level up system, and while airship fights are sometimes best avoided, they do provide more danger because of the increased vulnerability they come with. The main four characters have pretty straightforward personalities but they can have some fun and fluffy interactions or reactions, and exploring a world based on ours but with magic and fanciful technology makes finding new places a bit more interesting. It doesn’t do anything exceptionally well though and sometimes the basic realization of its concepts may take the wind out of your sails when a big fight or new location turns up simpler than expected, but it’s still a fine RPG for those nostalgic for the classic genre format while still wanting something a little different.

And so, I give Nostalgia for Nintendo DS…

An OKAY rating. Nostalgia has a lot of intriguing ideas that sustain the adventure to its end but its realization of them could have been improved upon. The skill leveling system is a great way for a player to better support powers they enjoy using or often rely on but it also leads to others withering away in their usefulness, so while Melody can learn a host of elemental spells, keeping them all up to speed isn’t worth the expenditure since they’re all dependent on situational effectiveness. Still, there are bosses and optional dungeons where you will need to pull your best abilities out and manage the team’s output a bit more than the basic battles where you just keep relying on your straightforward attack. Dungeons are better able to avoid becoming bland because the navigation requires you to learn the current gimmick amidst the short battles and the dungeons being rather compact keeps such frequent fighting from growing bothersome. Airship battles certainly needed more room for the different weapon advantages to take root and being able to better control where enemies are placed would allow that, but they do at least come with a greater threat than the random enemies down on the ground usually provide. Leaning more into the real world locations could have given the game a bit more life too, quests of substance that tie to a culture or specific World Treasure probably a wiser means of extending the game’s life than the shallow offerings the Adventurer’s Association provides. Eddie’s absolute commitment to his heroic ways also likely trims out some room for more interesting explorations of plot revelations but also trims some potential fat as some moments of doubt don’t meander despite their obvious end point, but again the side quests could have plunged more into the cast of characters to better understand their motivations, test their resolve, or even strengthen their bonds with each other or other characters.

Nostalgia isn’t too ambitious in its design, be it the RPG combat or the straightforward nature of much of its character, but it isn’t totally locked into those boxes either and uses its world, characters, and little combat shake-ups to keep its adventure moving forward into interesting new territory often enough. It can sometimes feel like you’re too rapidly leaving behind a new city or dungeon but they don’t outstay their welcome either, and that constant feed of novel content helps patch over the fact that it’s not often too involved or deep when experienced. The existence of its ideas is what makes them interesting rather than the realization being truly captivating, and so Nostalgia can still be a decent adventure that one will likely reflect warmly on despite its overall simplicity.