I know it's getting really easy to just completely discount new DS releases as of late. The 3DS is closing in quickly and I'm sure many people have already written off everything coming out that isn't fucking Pokemon.
God damn Pokemon.
But missing out on this gem would be a shame. A damn shame. A shame so damnable that no amount of saintly behavoir will ever redeem it.I do not think I have had this much fun with a portable RPG since the original Golden Sun. Everything is just fresh and exciting. Radiant Historia has gone a long way to just completely dispell all my pent up cynism that has built up around the genre known as the Jay-Arr-Pee-Gee.
But let's not skirt around the issue with fancy punctuation and thesauruses. Let's get to the point.
They made enemy encounters the best part of the game.
And that isn't to say that everything else is subpar either, I meant the combat is just
that good.
And I'm not talking boss battles either, I mean all the battles. All the battles are fun. This game has been balanced in such a way that you never feel safe and you never feel like you are at a complete advantage.It's probably better to just show you a video of the game in action, but let's do our best to parse this out textwise too shall we?
The battle takes place on a 3 by 3 grid where your enemies reside while your party member sit off to the adjacent. The main crux of the combat involves moving your enemies around via special attacks so that you can attack more than one at once and rack up more damage. For instace, you might knock an enemy back one square into the enemy behind them so that you can strike both at once with your next attack. Since all party members that are next to each other in the turn order act at once, following you issuing commands to all of them, you can create combos of movement skills and high-damage attacks to take out enemies quickly, which you will want to do since most monsters in the game will pose a severe risk to your party regardless of level.
THAT IS THE SIMPLE PART.
There is also rows to be concerned with. The close an enemy is the more damage it does, but it will also take more damage. The same goes for the back row except with the opposite effect, lowered attack power but heightened defense. So do you bring an enemy up front? Maybe you start a combo off by grappling an enemy forward and then knocking him back with the final blow?
DID I MENTION THERE ARE COMBOS?
Every attack you do on the same enemy adds to your combo hit counter. The higher your hit counter, the more damage you do. There are a myriad of ways to increase this counter as well. Alternating to a magic spell after a physical attack, and vice versa, will bump the counter up an extra level. Some attacks automatically hit twice each time. Did I mention traps? You can lay down traps and knock enemies into them for big damage and a number of combo points.
Not only are combos good for damage, but they also determine your loot. Extra XP and gold are rewarded for smart play rather than just letting the game autobattle.
Then there are like 100 OTHER THINGS like elemental weaknesses and being able to switch character turn order and burst limit type spells that allow you to alter the flow of combat and unleash deadly special attacks and and and and
AND AND AND
THIS IS A BIG GAME.
And we haven't even gotten to
ANYTHING ELSE YET.
Okay, next is the story. Damn I don't even want to begin with the story.
I mean, some of the characters are lacking solid personalities, yes, but it's so much grander than that.
At the risk of spoiling anything let me put it this way.
This game is two RPGs in one.
Here's the short of it, this is a game about time travel. You will be traveling between two distinct timelines that the main character, Stocke, has created via one very important choice near the begining of the game. You will be traveling between the present and past of these two times lines both simultaneously and interchangably. Let me put it this way.
Imagine an RPG in which you could travel back to any major plot point in while still retaining all your levels, skills, items, and knowledge of future events.
YEAH, IT'S KIND OF FUCKING CRAZY.
Imagine if you could go back and make every single choice in a Mass Effect or Fallout game in one playthrough and then have half of those choices be game ending. Imagine if you could watch your party member die a horrible, grisly death and then go back ten minutes into the past and completely prevent it.
Basically, do you want to be
A FUCKING TIME WIZARD?
If so, Radiant Historia may be the game for you.And this isn't your bull shit "Let's save the element crystal spheres." RPG story either. This is a story about war, politics, and fanatical religious leaders.
Once again, let me put it in simple yet frighteningly alluring terms.
You are a steam punk FBI agent that works for a militaristic theocracy fighting against another nation that is the supposed root cause of the entire continent turning into a giant fucking desert because your prophet says they are evil.
YEAH, I KNOW.
It's one of those stories where the betrayals are frequent, brutal, and almost never satisfying. If there is one thing this game does right with its narrative it is creating looming sense that the unknown may come crashing down on top of you at any moment. You never get a fucking break, something horrible is happening to everyone all the time constantly.
God I want to spoil everything right now so SO
MUCH.
But I won't, not here anyway. And I'm not trying to say Radiant Historia is a perfect game, in fact it is quite the opposite. Some of overworld art is a bit bland, all the characters only have one detailed "talking head" sprite, and the story is actually super linear and almost entirely out of your direct control.
But for it's few faults, I will say this. I will never forget the first time I brought an item from the future into the past to complete a quest. That is something just mind blowingly awesome that needs to be experienced by everyone. The way they give you direct control over the flow of the story blows so many preconceived notions of this genre out of the water that I would dare to call it "a mother fucking spectacle."
Radiant Historia is pretty good you guys. You should play it.
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