The exact moment I knew that I had to play Viola: The Heroine’s Melody was when I noticed that it lists Lufia first among a number of jRPG inspirations. That’s unusual given its lesser name recognition, but I love me some Lufia (even if playing through the original sometimes feels like taking a power drill to the head—definitely stick with Lufia 2). As it turns out, that inspiration is mainly constrained to the background music of a single area, but you’ll pick out a handful of other inspirations that weren’t even listed long before reaching that point. Viola: The Heroine’s Melody draws inspiration from Chrono Trigger, Mario 64, and Cowboy Bebop, meshing all of that together into a lighthearted, uplifting game with a story about music and self-acceptance. All of these disparate elements somehow work when paired together, and while Viola doesn’t have the combat depth or staying power of the games it borrows from, its gameplay is clearly designed to play second fiddle to its memorable cast of characters.

Viola: The Heroine’s Melody is an LGBTQ+-positive solo indie dev game with heart

I would be genuinely surprised if any single game reviewer had more experience with games like this than I do; right off the bat the dithered sprite art and centrality of talking to party members at campfires reminded me of Towards The Pantheon, while eponymous main character Viola is irrationally unpleasant enough at the start of the game that it reminded me of some of the less-raw portions of Lucah: Born of a Dream. Viola: The Heroine’s Melody is uplifting as a whole, but a couple of its endings (and some moments toward the end) take a slight turn into uncomfortable, Yume Nikki-esque surrealism. These are one-offs and not full changes to the game’s underlying tone, but it’s intriguing to see the ways similar games overlap; games with LGBTQ+ themes—which are very nuanced and rarely even brought up in Viola, unlike games such as Ikenfell that hammered on those notes to the point of tokenism—tend to focus on characters who lash out easily and slowly learn to accept themselves, but also have a tendency to include vaguely nightmarish apparitions that seek to undermine that growth by putting negative words in dopplegangers’ mouths.

But again, Viola: The Heroine’s Melody is primarily an uplifting, warm-and-fuzzy kind of game, and its characters do the heavy lifting here. Viola begins the game angry and hurt, weighed down by her mother’s recent death and a sense that she doesn’t belong anywhere, but each character who joins the party serves to teach her about resilience or positivity in some way. Some, such as mage Sybil, relate to her loss and likewise struggle. Others, like armored knight Soleil, are so infectiously upbeat about everything that there’s no room for moping about. There’s not an extraordinary amount of depth (Viola: The Heroine’s Melody is on the shorter side, and the cast is quite large), but almost every character was given enough time to grow on me anyway.

The way characters are presented (as well as the presence of a quirky robot party member) is very reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, while the Cowboy Bebop influences I mentioned earlier come in the way of messages that appear during area transitions and when you close the game. Toward the end, one of these messages is even the anime’s famous “you’re going to carry that weight” line, and there are others that are very similar. I can’t recall another game that’s tried this, and it really does add an extra je ne sais quoi to come out and declare the tone of the next scene in advance.

As you fight alongside the game’s cast of characters, Viola’s bonds with them can be increased through campfire conversations, unlocking new attacks and personal quests that allow you to learn more about a character or try to help them in some way. These factor into whether you obtain one of Viola: The Heroine’s Melody‘s two “bad” endings or the “good” true ending, and one thing that I very much appreciated was the way the developer (in a Lucah-style message from the dev at the end) tells you exactly what to do to get the good ending. You don’t have to start the game over or anything like that, either, which is very player-friendly. It’s also hugely important because Viola uses an autosave-only save system.

QTE attack inputs and a platforming triple jump make this jRPG play especially uniquely

Viola: The Heroine’s Melody‘s gameplay can be separated into thirds. The first third consists of platforming in the overworld, either touching monsters to initiate combat or jumping over them using Viola’s Mario-esque triple jump that allows her second and third leaps to be higher than the first when performed in quick succession. You also have the ability to wall jump, and areas tend to be filled with cannons (both moving, adjustable, and still) and springs to add a little oomph to the movement. The platforming is rarely difficult, but going out of your way in search of the chests that give you health/AP/status-restoring potions and equippable stat-boosting gems helps to spice things up a bit. It’s also during the platforming that you can pull out your instrument and play an Ocarina of Time-style song. These tend to be limited to opening passages and lighting campfires, but there’s also one that allows you to travel back to the overworld map quickly that comes in handy when you’re trying to quickly knock out companion quests.

The second third would be companion stuff. I regularly detoured to campfires before pressing on so that I could talk to my party members, and you build up support levels quickly. Once you hit support level A, you unlock a personal quest that returns you to a previously visited area so that the companion in question can wrap up their unfinished business. Some of these companion quests require fighting large bosses, but others have little to no combat whatsoever.

Finally, there’s Viola‘s combat, which is best described as “adequate.” You eventually end up with a 5-character party (after which you have to start sidelining characters), and each character has a normal attack, some have magical attacks that cost AP, and all characters have “crescendo” attacks that cost CP (which only increases when they take damage). Then there’s guarding, which allows one character to defend others and take the damage in their stead. Combined with CP generation, this has all the makings of an interesting combat system, but there are only a few instances where blocking is required. On both the normal and casual difficulties, defeating enemies as you see them will cause you to significantly outlevel the rest of the game. At that point, you can steamroll through full enemy parties with one or two characters, finishing off your foes long before they can act. The main challenge of Viola: The Heroine’s Melody, then, is keeping everyone’s AP up in anticipation of boss battles.

Bugs and miscellaneous weirdness can lead to some unnecessary frustration near the end

Before I get into the bugs and such, I want to elaborate on that “anticipation of boss battles” comment a little. You never know when you’ll end up in a boss battle. You can kind of sense that one is coming once you’ve made it through one of the larger areas, but not every area has a boss battle, and using your consumables to restore your party’s HP and AP just in case, only to reach a campfire in the very next cutscene, can be a little deflating. There are more than enough potions to go around, and the lower difficulty means that getting caught off-guard isn’t a death sentence (in fact, I don’t even know what happens when you lose in combat because that never occurred), but I found the uncertainty a little grating. And at one point, you get into a boss battle right as you reach a campfire, which encourages you to avoid consumables and ends up being a mean, unnecessary misdirect.

The bugs were the main problem I had with Viola: The Heroine’s Melody, though. I encountered a softlock in a village when skipping through dialog too quickly, and the only reason I was skipping through dialog is that a party member named Emerald who joined my group failed to actually join. Since her presence was required to finish the game, I had to wipe out my save after seven hours of gameplay and restart from the very beginning. I started the game on the easier difficulty that automatically completes attack QTEs and made sure to recruit Emerald early that time since I’m pretty sure that the problem had something to do with waiting past a certain point to recruit her.

The weirdest part of this whole ordeal is that I didn’t just get stuck in the game. All of my Viola achievements on Steam also disappeared at the same time. It’s not the first time I’ve seen that happen, but the fact that it can never ceases to blow my mind. Of course, those aren’t the only bugs I encountered. Pulling out an instrument in a house (party member Niko’s house, as memory serves) causes the camera to zoom in way too far until the screen consists of just a couple of pixels. I also noticed that the audio lowered to make room for the short “item obtained from chest” fanfare, only to remain stuck at that lowered volume a couple of times. Viola isn’t even close to being the buggiest game I’ve played, but I was constantly worried about losing all of my progress. Autosaves and bugs don’t mix.

Viola: The Heroine’s Melody has good art, and a soundtrack with high and low points

I have to say, I’m a big fan of sprite art that uses dithering to create gradients. It makes scenes with a night sky look gorgeous. Viola: The Heroine’s Melody also has great character art, with each character looking very distinct and memorable, and it’s a very colorful game overall. The only downside to the art would be the look of some of the areas, which aren’t quite as visually interesting as everything else. Finally, there’s the music, which is a complicated topic. There are some truly great songs here. All of the ones you can play are great, for one thing. The credits music is top-notch. The Lufia-inspired track is also fantastic. The problem is that these aren’t the tracks that you hear the most of. The background music in the areas you’ll spend hours going through sounds more like ordinary, run-of-the-mill jRPG music, and it just never grabbed my interest the way everything else did.

Story: 2.5/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Viola: The Heroine’s Melody review. It took me about 7 hours to get stuck, then another 6 to restart the game from the beginning and beat it on the easy difficulty.

Viola: The Heroine’s Melody review (Steam) – Borrowed goods first appeared on Killa Penguin