Radiant Historia (NDS): A Unique Concept

Radiant Historia is a Japanese style RPG developed and published by Atlus.  I will admit here that my experience with JRPGs is rather limited and confined mainly to the offerings of SquareEnix and overall I am not really a fan of the genre.  I prefer RPGs that allow the player to define the protagonist as they see fit.  Being able to at least choose the class and personality of the player.  In my limited experience, which consists of dabbling in Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger and Golden Sun games for the most part, JRPGs are more like adventure games than true RPGs.  The stories are linear with predetermined characters who have set personalities.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing as it allows for the story to make extensive use of the characters personalities as a plot devise, but it also limits the amount of role playing the player actually gets to participate in.  In the end, I have found this genre to relegate the player to directing battles and purchasing gear to allow the story to progress.

That said, I am finding Radiant Historia to be rather enjoyable.  The game even gives the illusion of player choice with the split time lines mechanic.  This mechanic also happens to be the main gimic of the game, but more on that in a bit.

The plot of Radiant Historia revolves around a war between Alistel and Ganorg.  The games backstory states that long ago, the fall of an ancient empire started a process of desertification of the continent on which these two nations reside.  As the desert expands the nations fight for what arable land remains.  The game follows Stocke, the player character (PC), who is a member of Alistel's Specint unit.  Upon setting out on his first assignment, Stocke is given the white chronicle.  Stocke soon discovers this book allows him to travel through time and fix mistakes he made during the mission.  After completing the first quest, which serves as a turtorial, Stocke must choose whether to remain with Specint or join his former comrade an friend, Captain Rosch's unit in the army.  This choice creates two time lines, the real history and the alternate history.

This split time line serves as the main mechanic and plot device of the game. Stocke must use the chronicle to travel between the time lines to insure history follows the correct course.  Way points in the time lines are created when the player is presented with a choice of action.  Some actions can result in a game over, while others simply allow you to continue and others yet have an impact on the other time line.  In the end though, which option you choose at each point is irrelevant as Stocke can always go back to that point and make a different decision.

The other main mechanic is the battle system.  In battle, the player is thrown into a turn based combat where the enemies are place on a 3 by 3 grid.  By manipulating the order of attack and using different skills, the player can put the enemy in unfavorable positions and unleash combos.  This creates a simple, yet deep system that is very rewarding as the player has to balance many different tings.

So far, I have put about 4 hours into the game and I would say it feels like half of that was clicking through dialogue.  This isn't a bad thing necessarily, since the story is engaging and the characters are not really annoying as I have found characters in other JRPGs.  The amount of dialogue would surely be a detriment if there was no way of skipping it when you go back to make a different choice at a decision point, but since you can rapidly skip the text, I can't complain.

In the time that I have played, I have completed the prologue and started the first chapter for both the alternate history and the real history.  In the first chapter of the real history, I saved a merchant who was supposed to make a delivery to the mines, which then allowed me to progress in the first chapter of the alternate history where I had to stop the Granog army from getting through the mine.  I haven't really run into any tough battles yet, except for a minor boss fight when rescuing the merchant.  Seeing as the boss fled at the end of the fight, I highly suspect that this boss will be the traditional recurring boss fight in which every encounter with him sees him stronger and with some new ability.

The main difficulty in so far has been in attrition.  your characters do not recover health or mana over time so to heal, you must stay at an inn, use mana to cast healing spells or use items.  You can also use a mana crystal at a save point to fully restore your party, but the crystals are expensive and thus a limited resource in the early game.  This forces the player to try and be efficient in combat, even against trash and makes moving around the map strategic as the player decides whether he really should engage that group or try and avoid them.

Overall, I will say this game is promising.  Expect another update after I progress a bit more.

A New Direction

I have been following the CRPG Addict's blog for a few months now and I have to say that what he is doing, intrigues me.  He has set some rules and is systematically playing through CRPGs starting from the mid 80's to present in chronological order.  He is a self professed addict and is using the project as a way to do something productive with his hobby.  I am similar in some ways with my game playing, though different as well.  My problem is starting a game, playing if for a bit and then getting distracted by either real life or another game.  By the time that distraction is past, I either have no motivation to continue on in that game, have forgotten what I am doing, or have yet another distraction come up.

To remedy this, I created an account on the backloggery. The site allows users to post their game collections and the status of each game, whether it is unbeaten, beaten or completed.  There are also specialized status' called null and mastered.  Null is used for games you want to show in your collection, but have no way to truly win.  Mastered is used to denote completing a self imposed challenge to increase the difficulty of the game beyond the normal scope of the game.  An example would be a speed run, or a mega buster only run in a Megaman game.  This worked for a while to motivate me to make progress on my games, but lately is seems that is doing the trick.  Which brings be back to the CRPG Addict.

I figured I would take his example and impose a few rules, and use a blog to track my playing and thoughts about the games I am playing.  So, my rules that I will do my best to follow are as follows:

1. Only one game from each system that I own can be in my now playing.  These are the games I will be writing about on the blog.  Null games do not count for this purpose, though they may get occasional posts if something interesting happens or I have something to talk about regarding those games.


2. A game must be played for at least 6 hours unless beaten in less time before it can be removed and a new game can be added.  I considered making the time longer or even requiring beaten status to remove it, but that would just make it feel like a chore.  The blog will allow me to document my progress better than the backloggery site can anyway.


3. For each game, a blog post should be made when the game is added to the now playing list after a bit of play to introduce it and my initial thoughts on it.  Another post should be made when the game is removed.  That post should give a good idea where I left off if the game is still unbeaten and my final thoughts when beaten.  Interim posts should be made as needed as well.  (I will shoot for roughly 3 hours worth of gameplay for each post.

Well thats about it for now.  Should be posts for Radiant Historia and Mass Effect soon.