Rakuen

Laura Shigihara is probably not a name you know. While she was the composer of the original Plants vs Zombies and contributed tracks to Super Meat Boy, she’s probably best known for her work on To The Moon, most notably her vocals on the main track, Everything’s Alright. This is where I first discovered her. Hearing that song at the end of To The Moon was a huge emotional moment and cemented it as one of my favorite game songs ever. After that, I started to follow Shigihara more, particularly her personal Youtube where she often put out new songs or covers she had done. When I learned she wanted to put out a game of her own, Rakuen, I knew immediately that I needed to play it. I waited eagerly for its release in 2017, but I didn’t have any spare money at that time. After that, it was one of those games that lived on my wishlist but was constantly forgotten and overlooked in favor of newer releases. It took me years to finally purchase Rakuen--and even longer to actually play it--and I wish I had gotten to it much sooner.

In Rakuen, you play as a young, unnamed boy who is stuck in a hospital for an undisclosed reason. He is lonely as he is mostly confined to his room but does eventually get to explore and meet the other patients, both kids like him and adults. His favorite days are when his mother comes to visit and reads him his favorite storybook, Rakuen. This book is a special heirloom that has been in the family for years, and one day, the mother reveals that the key to open it is special too. The two items together can make doors appear to the fantasy world in the book, Morizora’s Forest. After being given the key, the boy and the mother manage to travel to the fantasy world through one of these doors and find the sleeping guardian of the forest, Morizora. By collecting pieces of a special song scattered throughout the world, they can wake the great spirit and request a wish from him.

Rakuen is basically an adventure game, albeit in an isometric style akin to old-school SNES JRPGs. There are NPCs to talk to, items to find, obstacles to circumvent, and puzzles to solve in order to progress both through the main storyline and a handful of side objectives. After a small intro period, you have the ability to jump between the fantasy world and the real world through special doorways. Each of these doorways links to a different specific place, which means traversing unique doorways is often necessary to reach new areas and items. Things in one world can also have an effect on the other, requiring you to hop back and forth to clear an impediment before being able to progress. All in all, it’s a pretty simple, straightforward game that does a good job of pointing you where to go and preventing you from ever getting too stuck while being compelling enough to keep you moving forward.

Rakuen is an incredibly charming game in so many ways. There’s a variety of environments with bright, colorful art and creatively designed characters. The writing for NPCs is filled with flavor and memorable lines that endeared many of them to me, and it can be surprisingly funny at times too. I love how your mother tags along with you for most of the journey, a constant friendly presence who you can talk to at any time to ask how she’s doing or to get a hint of where to go next. It adds to the feeling that you’re going on this adventure together and is very sweet. Best of all, unsurprisingly, is the soundtrack. There are so many fantastic tracks in the game that had me humming along with them every time I heard them, some of which are still popping into my head even a week or two later. It all comes together to make for a warm, pleasant experience. Except when it isn’t…

When the game reaches its emotional moments, typically as you are closing in on one of the pieces of the song to awaken the slumbering guardian, it goes for the throat in a way that I wasn’t expecting. Each piece is possessed by an individual who is represented by an NPC both in the fantasy world and the real world, and as you acquire the piece, you learn about that individual’s backstory. These stories, such as a woman trying to stand by a loved one during the onset of Alzheimer’s, are all dark and depressing to a degree that feels almost directly inverse to the feel-good portions of the game in their harshness. The emotional conclusion to most of these backstories brought tears to my eyes, particularly a late game moment when a character’s vocals during a song break due to overwhelming emotion. While many of the stories end on a happier note overall, all of them are still tinged with lingering regrets or an eventual hopelessness for the future.

On one hand, I think these hard swings between happy-go-lucky exploration and all-too-real tragedies is much too harsh. On the other hand, I think it is this back-and-forth that makes Rakuen such a unique and memorable game. Every aspect of its design, even down to the dreary color palette used for the real world versus the brighter tones of Morizora’s Forest, was designed to reflect the duality of the two realities and the power of escapism, utilizing a fantasy world in an attempt to soften the horrors of reality but eventually having to also come to terms with them in the end. The game manages to toe the line between the happy and the sad with surprising finesse, evoking feelings for me all across the spectrum of emotions.

Rakuen is an exceptional game to me because it manages to be equally memorable as a charming adventure game about a boy and his mother and as a game with painful stories about damaged people. I cannot think of many other games that manage to stir both pleasant and unpleasant emotions in me with such skill and precision. In particular, the game’s soundtrack, which I bought soon after finishing it, will make this game live on in my memories for a long time. Every song feels so tightly bound with places and characters and moments that hearing any of them brings back those feelings I had again. Rakuen is a singular experience that I think may be too incongruous for some, but I truly believe it’s one of the most well-crafted, succinct balances of the range of human emotion I’ve seen in a video game.