Radiant Historia - A simple trip through time

[Dracos]

Hello all, just finished this game and figured it was worth a bit of discussion.  It's a bit hard to discuss though without some spoilers, so I'll put them in a separate section.  Today I am yammering about Radiant Historia, a Nintendo DS game of 2012.  I finished it a few days ago and had quite a bit of fun with it, so I will say that it was an enjoyable experience that does have a lot to advertise it.

First off, got to talk about the overarching narrative mechanic.  The game is built as a lot of discrete events, with an early introduced time travel mechanic.  This has the end result of making it impossible to permanently miss anything.  Indeed, even boss fights can be redone for drops or steals.  This plays out in decision points, as well, giving you the ability to make the wrong choice and end the game and then go back to an earlier moment or a different timeline, but the most important thing about it is that it makes the game largely accessible for completion without a faq.  With one choice exception, everything can reasonably be done without trouble.

That one exception sadly is totally faq-bait and quite difficult to even notice is there without one.  Shame, pretty darn close.

Second, it has an interesting puzzlely battle system.  It uses a Phase based system, which is awesome because Phase based systems are the best, and improve all games they are used in (FFX, Mana Khemia for example).  These basically involve every character's action being prelisted in a time chunk, with ways to manipulate the speed and order of time chunks, but otherwise just continually going character to character until the battle ends.  In Radiant Historia, adjacent phases can be grouped into a combo attack by hitting the same enemy.  Phases can also be swapped with later phases or through the use of spells transformed to be other character's turns.  It's pretty neat. 

The game also operates on a battle grid, a 3x3 area where the enemies can be bounced around, pulled, tugged and positioned to gather them up and hit them as a group.  For half the game, managing to basically one turn encounters by gathering everyone in a square and blasting them with magic is the name of the game and it is fun.  Later, enemies become resistant/overlarge or otherwise render the tactics mostly irrelevant as they get replaced with: "Well, my magic can hit everyone in the area pretty much, so I'll push one person and then kill every other square to kill them all." and then later with "Just magic blast them to death."

Combos can be built up by consecutive turns to increase the power of later attacks or success rates for stealing.  A G-Fire at the end of a 50 hit combo might do a good 5 or 6 times as much damage as it would otherwise do.  This does make later boss battles more of a sudden: combo, combo, combo, combo, combo, SPELL SPELL SPELL scenario.  But they're still amusing.

The story is told by weaving together events from alternating histories that influence each other.  They start pretty aggressively strict and get to be fairly sloppy with how this all works by the end of it.  Which is a shame as the early, "Know just the right thing, saved the right person" type shadows of Amber style play is pretty cool.  In fact, if you liked Amber, this is probably the closest thing to a video game take on the sort of shadows of reality thing it had going.  Saving people in one shadow reality, saves them in another.  Finding out spy information allows you to see things coming.

And that's most of what I an say that's good.  The rest is a little rough to harsh.  Its story telling is both generic and amateurish.  Miniscule actions you take are always dramatically world changing, even when it feels silly for it to be so.  Many of the sudden ends are ridiculous sudden ends, instead of things just going on without a side plot activated.  Given that many of those sideplots are self contained and don't go further, it makes it really strange when say... not giving someone a book results in the political upheaval of the world.  I understand why they do this in a lot of cases, but it really ends up making everyone else in the world feel pretty irrelevant.  It's especially bad on some of the early ones where your gang of misfits being at one battle instead of another results in the entire giant army getting defeated.

The art and characters have problems too.  The art style for one doesn't really stand out.  It's servicable, but it looks sort of FFTacticsish.  I guess some people like that, but I always find that's a bit lazy.  You get two folks who are always with you.  One is a merc who looks too young in his art to be out on his own and the other is a generic anime girl.  It's things like this that more mar the experience than really bring it to life.  Sure the cast is plenty fun in all the interactable segments, but as a narrative group to save the world, it comes off as a group of ne'er do wells that just happen to be there because of Marketing rather than because they feel right as hardened Mercs.  Not all of them are quite so bad, and some are actually quite good, but the mishmash of art and character design versus what they're supposed to fulfill in the role ends up leaving the cast feeling arbitrary.

But to talk about what really keeps the game from rising above good despite it's interesting mechanics and structure...I have to spoil a bit, read on at your risk:

Spoiler: ShowHide

The biggest problem that the game has is the direction of its narrative and how it intersects with the motives of the characters in the game.  The villain has one motive: Keep the main character alive.  This is his driving goal.

Every action he takes interferes with it from start of game until end of game.  Pretty much every single one.  The big macguffin that lets you time travel, figure out what's going on, decide to separate from him and work against his goals?  He gives it to you.  Arranging for you to learn about it and have folks that you'd die to protect?  He does that.  Setting it up so you're given the choice of defecting or abandoning your friends?  Him again.  Arranging for you and him to be on opposing sides?  Him.  Screwing up your successful missions where you'd be able to come back and be a proud subordinate of him?  All him.

Literally, it's more than just doing nothing.  Without the aggressive continued work by the villain, there was no way his plot would fail.  It was so far above your awareness at the beginning of the game that it wasn't even something you could find out about if you were to go everywhere and do everything in your country.

And just separate from that...  Inevitably, that makes the main character's goal to die.  Even when it gets commented that this is a stupid way to keep the world alive, no one comments on other routes.  Sure, there's something to be said for self sacrifice and it kind of works to try and sell it, but in the end the victory condition you are fighting towards is:

"You are dead, world goes on, people are sad about you being dead."

I won't say whether or not that really happens, but that is the victory condition that's put forth and accepted for the latter fourth of the game and that everyone in the know conceals because apparently you have Dead Man Walking written on your forehead in a world with no mirrors.

Also, nevermind that you basically wipe out a good chunk of humanity during the routes.  Soldiers dying in war aren't important anyway :P

Anyhow, despite all that it was an enjoyable game and I'd recommend it.  But it's strengths are in it's mechanics and its structure.  Not it's narrative or characters.  So if the mechanics aren't jiving with you, there's not gonna be something charming to make it come together later.