Nostalgia

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Nostalgia, originally released in Japan as Nostalgio no Kaze (ノスタルジオの風, Nosutarujio no Kaze, lit. "Wind of Nostalgio"), is a role-playing video game developed by Red Entertainment and Matrix Software for the Nintendo DS handheld system. Initially released in November 2008 for Japanese audiences by Tecmo, an English version of the game was officially announced for North America by Ignition Entertainment for a October 2009 release. The game's development was headed by producer Keisuke Kikuchi, with programming and three-dimensional graphics by Matrix Software, who had previously developed Square Enix's Nintendo DS versions of Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV.

Taking place in an alternate reality steampunk version of the 19th Century, the game follows Eddie, a London boy and son of a great adventurer as he and his friends travel the world in an airship in search of his missing father. The game features both standard turn-based combat and aerial battles between the player's customizable airship, the Maverick, and enemy airships. The player's party, consisting of Eddie, the Street Urchin Pad, a witch named Melody and the mysterious Fiona travel to such places as New York City, Cairo, Tokyo, Northern Europe and South America.

The game follows The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches to a tee, most likely on purpose in order to invoke nostalgia of old school NES and SNES generation RPGs. Whether it's successful or not is a subject of debate. Though the narrative is certainly nothing new, the gameplay is simple and fun, and there are plenty of sidequests and other optional content to keep players occupied.

NOT to be confused with Nostalgia Filter.

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This game provides examples of:

• Abandoned Mine: The Eterna Mines
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer - London's sewer systems were never quite THAT large. It even has the obligatory giant rats for you to slay as your introductory quest.
• Adventurer Archaeologist - An entire society of them, arguably. Certainly enough to make an entire group, the Royal Exploration Agency.
• Notably, Aristocrats Are Evil is almost totally averted - and even the one wealthy character that could be seen as an antagonist is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• A Taste of Power: At the very beginning of the game, playing as Gilbert.
• Atlantis - The real one, along with Mu and Lemuria, are available as optional sidequest dungeons.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore - Compare the American boxart to the Japanese art, above. Oddly, the biggest complaint about the American box art isn't the addition of Angry Eyebrows, it's the change from "nostalgic" sepia-toned imagery to something less visually appealing but more obviously intended to cater to the anime-inundated jRPG fan demographic.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes - Beating the two most difficult Bonus Bosses nets you Melody and Fiona's ultimate armor, which are a Disgaea-esque demon-tail, horns, and fluffy nightie and angel-winged bikini, respectively.
• Awesome but Impractical - The Combination Attack skills each character gets as the plot unfolds. Sure, they're the strongest single attacks in the game and they hit every enemy on the field, but they also cost roughly 50 MP when few skills in the game crest the 20 MP mark and an endgame party won't have more than 300 maximum MP per character.
  • Dead Shot borders on this, as fully powered-up, it has a very good - roughly 75% - chance to instantly kill a non-boss enemy, which is invaluable in the final areas and Bonus Dungeon... but it's one of the more expensive skills to power up, and there's a good chance you've already discredited it by that point as a Useless Useful Spell.
• Awesome Yet Practical - See also Game Breaker below. Combo Attack, when fully powered up, consists of six full-powered normal attacks, complete with overly flashy jump cuts.
• Balancing Death's Books - In order to save Fiona from her Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the game, Eddie, Pad, and Melody each give up a third of their own lifespan so that the Ancient Father can revive her.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Pad and Melody are rather unsubtle about it, and Carlos lampshades it early on.
• Black Magician Girl: Melody.
• Blatant Item Placement: Why is there an airship repair kit in the Great Pyramid?
• Bonus Dungeon: A particularly nasty one, where you fight not only hideously powerful normal enemies, but if you wear equipment or use skills that lower the random encounter rate? You also run a higher risk of encountering powered-up versions of every boss in the game, including the final boss. Oh, and did we mention that every boss-type enemy in the post-game has at least twice as many HP and does twice as much damage on average as the final boss?
• Charged Attack: The Orb can be charged up as much as you want, increasing its attack stat until you just fire it into the face of your opponent For Massive Damage.
• Combined Energy Attack: All of the Combination Attacks.
• Convection, Schmonvection - Mt. Fuji is an active volcano - one that the bad guys are trying to use to power a makeshift atomic bomb.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Your entire adventuring party, save for Eddie, for whom running out and risking life and limb adventuring is in the blood. Played different ways for each character:
  • For Pad, it's Parental Abandonment that turns out to be a Sleeping Beauty style Rags to Royalty story via Laser-Guided Amnesia on both his and his mother's part
  • For Melody, it's dead parents and later, dead surrogate parent, leading to a gigantic You Killed My Father.
  • For Fiona, she's simply last of the Precursors. Their princess, in fact.
• Cliché Storm: Intentionally invoked.
• Cool Airship: Your only means of transportation in this game. You can fire guns and cannons and magically charged orbs on it, but that's standard issue. What really sets it apart is the fact that there's a BFS attached to the front which you use to impale other less cool airships by flying into them. Without taking collateral damage.
• Disc One Final Dungeon: The Mt. Fuji base fills every point of this trope except The Reveal and the presence of the Big Bad, who never actually shows his face until near the very last dungeon. While something is revealed, it's a much smaller plot point than some of the later reveals.
• Disney Death: Gilbert pulls this off so often - totally turning the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality on its head thanks to being the parent of a protagonist - that his Heroic Sacrifice later in the game loses all dramatic effect.
• Dueling Games: Black Sigil and Nostalgia. They compete for "RPGs that make us remember much older RPGs." Small victories indeed...
• Durable Deathtrap
• Eenie Meenie Miny Moai: Easter Island - or rather, the Easter Islands - are in the game. Nothing more needs really be said.
• Expy - Intentionally invoked with Gilbert Brown, a definite Expy of Indiana Jones. May or may not have been intentional with his son. Red full-length coat, arguably British, blonde-haired teen named Edward? Not familiar at all, nosiree. Melody also looks a lot like Lina, and likes throwing fire around.
• Fantasy World Map - Averted. The World Map in Nostalgia is an abridged version of Earth's. The creators take a few liberties with some locations, but this can be ignored since it's an alternate Earth.
  • Doubles as a Shown Their Work - later in the game you gain the ability to find World Treasures - similar to the "Discoveries" in Skies of Arcadia - and many of them are based directly on real-life landmarks... and are shockingly accurate in placement. It's the one instance where Google Maps actually functions fairly well as an impromptu guide. Which is helpful, since the NPCs that tell you about them are painfully vague in their locations.
    • Triples - possibly - as a Shout-Out: The one biggest geographical snafu with a World Treasure is the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, which are actually in China, appearing in western Kazakhstan, roughly 3000 miles west. This could arguably be seen as a nod to Skies of Arcadia, whose biggest Guide Dang It Discovery was a townsperson who notified you of a Discovery that was much further west than he actually said.
  • While the map of the world does have wrap-around (ie. fly east of Japan and you'll end up in California), it doesn't work properly for a round world. Fly south of New Zealand and you'll end up in... North Korea?
• Four Man Band:
  • The Hero: Eddie
  • The Lancer: Pad
  • The Smart Girl: Melody
  • The Chick: Fiona
• Likewise, Four-Temperament Ensemble:
  • Sanguine: Eddie.
  • Choleric: Pad.
  • Melancholic: Melody.
  • Supine: Fiona.
• Game Breaking Bug: The now-infamous Albion glitch, where the second part of a Sequential Boss refuses to spawn on some cartridges, making the game Unwinnable on that cart, no matter how many times the game is restarted. Considering that said boss shows up about 2/3rds through the game - about fifteen hours in, give or take - and there's no other way of telling if a cart has the glitch, the Albion glitch has ruined the game for many players.
  • Ignition Entertainment (hopefully) caught wind of it shortly after release, though.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In a cut scene after one Hopeless Boss Fight, Melody comments that her attacks aren't doing anything. If any other character said this it would be fine (all physical attacks automatically missed against this boss)...but Melody's magic was the only thing doing any damage against the boss, making it a bit jarring that she's the one to comment.
• Global Airship: The only method of traveling across the World Map. Thankfully, you get one right near the start.
• Purple Rocks: Eterna, which is used to power airship engines, also somehow manages to be ancient Unobtainium that makes the strongest equipment in the game.
• Handicapped Badass: Magi.
  • One of her first appearances has her, due to poor design thought, riding up a flight of stairs in a wheelchair. Even ignoring her badassitude in-game, this has turned her into a bit of a Memetic Badass as well.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Especially notable as only a handful other characters in-game actually seem to use swords. Two are minions of the Big Bad, one is an Anti-Hero Sky Pirate, and one is the hero's father. The other explorers and adventurers in-game are hinted to use firearms or nothing at all.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: All but the last two fights against Carmine and the first fight against Yuan Gai. Even though they WOULD be potentially winnable, pushing down the bosses' monstrous HP before the game's script kicks in absolutely requires a cheating device. And breaks the game.
• Joke Weapon: Melody gets quite a few of these through the game as part of her standard equipment. While the guns, staves, and swords are all fairly standard, Melody's weapons include the typical magical rods, and less typical things such as a candy cane and an apple on a stick.
• Last-Disc Magic: Magic starts out quite effective, but by the end of the game, Melody (the party's designated mage) ends up typically throwing out healing items, which end up being more effective than what Fiona can heal with her magic, leaving her to simply exist for the sole purpose of giving Eddie more turns.
• Lighter and Softer: In fact, it practically makes Skies of Arcadia look Darker and Edgier.
• Like Father, Like Son: Eddie becomes an adventurer just like his daddy. More justified in Melody's case, as Mervielle Village is a literal village of mages and witches.
• Lost Forever: Averted with items/treasure chests, but played straight with maps on two dungeons (which change layouts after their Load-Bearing Boss is destroyed) and with certain enemies in one segment later in the game. Only a problem if you're looking for One Hundred Percent Completion.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: It couldn't be more blatant that the tablet fragments you're handing to the Royal Exploration Agency will end up in the wrong hands.
  • On top of that, there's also Fiona herself, who voluntarily goes BACK to the Tower of Babel after Gilbert rescues her from it in the prologue.
• MacGuffin Girl: Fiona
• Magitech: Flight cores and Orb weapons.
• Metal Slime: The Pegasus and Soleil, when encountered in the airship. In the dungeons they appear in, they're much less beneficial (but much easier to kill).
• Monster Town: The Land of Korol.
• Motifs: Time and clocks in general seem to be a distinct, recurring motif throughout the game.
• Mysterious Waif: Fiona
• Pixel Hunt: Finding JUST the right point to uncover a World Treasure can be an ordeal, especially at high altitudes.
• Politically-Correct History: none of the dark-skinned characters are treated with anything but the utmost respect. A ("coloured") NPC mentions that she wishes that people would treat the native africans better, but this never comes up again.
• Random Encounters
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Magi.
• Redemption Equals Life: Inverted; Scarlett's Heroic Sacrifice to protect her sister is the shock needed to jolt Astell out of her brainwashing. The Heel Face Turn afterwards is an obvious conclusion, and as of such, she's the one agent of the Big Bad's cult that doesn't end up dying by your hand.
• Retired Badass: Gilbert when you finally manage to drag him home.
• Ruins for Ruins Sake: Averted partially - most of the ruins you explore in the game have real-life and/or mythological roots.
• Sky Pirate: Scarlett; it's suggested that there's more than just her out there and that many of the Random Encounters in your airship are pirates, but she's the only one you actually meet.
• So Proud of You: Melody's mother, about fifteen years after her death. Witches are apparently Crazy Prepared.
• Stable Time Loop: Happily averted with Pad's mum.
• Standard Status Effects: Notably, your airship can get them, as well - catching on fire is analogous to poisoning, electric surges cause your airship to short out, working like paralysis, and disabling weapons ...disables your weapons.
• Static Character: Eddie gets basically no Character Development at all while the rest of the main team at least gets some.
• Tech Tree: The special attacks fall into this, some of them only showing up when you've advanced certain skills far enough (as well as leveled up).
• Title Drop: Not in-game, but plenty in English promotional material and press regarding the game.
• Tyop On the Cover: The cover of the Adventurer's Notebook says "Adventuer's Notebook." It wouldn't be so blatant if it didn't show the cover EVERY TIME YOU OPEN IT.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Julius Fogg
• Where The Hell Is Merveille Village - Yes, it's in France, but where exactly?
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Played straight and toyed with in the case of Magi. Somehow related to her Psychic Powers, she describes herself as a 'broken clock', and suggests her powers and her improbable age are applications of being cursed with Time Stands Still. Toyed with in that near the end of the plot, it's suggested that the party has somehow allowed her to start aging again.
• X Meets Y: Many people describe the gamesetting as Skies of Arcadia Meets Indiana Jones.