Radiant Historia

It seems the modern venue for JRPGs is increasingly becoming the handheld arena, with studios creating compact adventures that don't necessarily require them to abandon strong narratives or striking artistic styles in order to tell the stories they wish to tell to the regrettably smaller audiences that still wish to hear them. The serendipitous result of this necessary technological scaling-back is that these RPGs have re-entered the 16/32-bit age during which they were at their most prominent and well-regarded. So when I say that Radiant Historia feels like a lost PS1 RPG, I want it to be known that I mean that in the most effusive manner possible.

Radiant Historia depicts the story of Stocke, a special intelligence agent working for the grimy, mechanical city state of Alistel who is currently locked in a perpetual war with their neighbors Granorg. Tasked with dangerous missions of dubious moral value, he is one day unexpectedly given two subordinates and a mysterious white book by his handler, Heiss. After the mission goes disastrously wrong, with his subordinates lying dead and he himself gravely injured, Stocke discovers that by holding this book he is able to travel through time and change past mistakes. Thus the game sets up a wealth of possibilities as well as a veritable Poiret novel of mysteries to solve, with both of these narrative hooks fully utilized in all manner of interesting ways as its tale progresses.

In order not to become too bogged down by multiple branching choices, the game splits into two discrete and disparate timelines early on that often play into each other. Despite the timelines having no formal connection to one another beyond the single decision that splits them, it becomes possible to make small changes to one that will subtly affect the second. The game also uses this idea to set up barricades in one timeline to prevent the player from heading too far ahead of the other, which might require that Stocke learns a sword-dancing performance art from a character in the second timeline in order to successfully fool enemy guards from the first into believing he's part of a performing troupe. Make no mistake: while there are the inevitable plot holes that come with any kind of time-travel fiction, the game's central conceit of flitting between nodes of narrative import and putting the timeline back on its correct path can be astoundingly clever at times.

The game's intelligence isn't limited to its story, either: the combat is deeply tactical in a way usually reserved for strategy RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics. Each battle presents a 3 x 3 grid upon which enemy units are situated and the player is able to manipulate these enemy placements to their own advantage. Several characters have what are called movement skills, which allow them to knock an enemy in certain directions, such as sending them from the front line to the back to lessen their damage output or drawing ranged units closer to allow allied units to cause more damage to them. However, the strategic potential increases further once you discover how to knock enemies into each other, which causes them to occupy the same space and thus allow them to hit be simultaneously by additional attacks. Enemies can be bunched up with a few movement skills and then taken out in one go with a strong finisher attack. Furthermore, the player is able to manipulate the turn queue of their allies and enemies, allowing enemies to take their turns early in order to stack up long chains of allied units and performing devastating combos, or perhaps switching the active character's turn with, say, an allied healer in order to provide much needed medical aid to the party. These two features alone create such a wide range of tactical options that the additional enhancements of the enemy's intelligent AI, each playable character's diverse set of skills and aspects like elemental traps, weaknesses, status effects, buff/debuff zones and limited-use specials are simply icing on a particularly layered cake.

The presentation is excellent too. The game uses scaled 2D character sprites on serviceable polygonal landscapes, a system popularized during the PS1 era, which works well for the game. The city of Alistel in particular has a marvelous-looking rundown steampunk feel to it, which complements its desperate use of thaumachines: devastating machines of war. Both graphically and tonally, Alistel reminded me of the early sections of Grandia or Xenogears. The music is equally superb: the game has a classic orchestral soundtrack with some very nice leitmotifs for the settings. I particularly enjoyed Alistel's somber theme and the standard battle music. The soundtrack feels very Final Fantasy 9-ish in spots - though there's been a deliberate decision to stay away from anything too electronic and stick with traditional orchestra instruments. The music is the work of Yoko Shimomura, one of the finest video game composers working today, and is easily a highlight.

The game's not entirely without its issues. For one, the game will often revisit the same locations over and over; in particular, the party passes through the green Lazvil Hills just outside of Alistel around a dozen times throughout the game, though it becomes easy enough to breeze through the place once the player's learned its map off by heart. The characters of Eruca and Rosch are only really available in one timeline apiece. The other two, Gafka and Aht, don't spend a lot of time in the player's party either but have interesting abilities of their own and really deserve more screen-time as characters as well. Unfortunately, not only do you have very relatively little access to these four characters, but they tend to be under-leveled when they come back to the group as a result. This is an unfortunate and unavoidable side-effect of traveling to points in time when they can't be with you, and relying on the default team of Stocke and his two subordinates Raynie and Marco, but it would've been nice to let the other members receive a small amount of the XP earned outside the group to keep them on a competitive level. However, by that very same proviso, many of these limited-availability characters are considerably more powerful than the standard two characters: Rosch and Gafka become powerhouses at high-levels, with Gafka in particular having some of the best movement skills in the game. Aht's special elemental traps are absolutely brutal at any level and Eruca's got the most versatile combination of skills save for Stocke himself. In addition, the nodes that can be revisited are often spread too far apart (or too close together to be of any use) and results in a lot of recurring cutscenes and dialogue needing to be skipped before the player is able to do what they traveled there to do. There is a button to skip these scenes, but will need to be tapped several times for particularly cutscene-heavy nodes. I also take umbrage with some of the more obnoxious JRPG combat tropes it employs, like enemy attacks that remove MP or prohibit you from using items, but I appreciate that these are personal bugbears and are all part and parcel of the game's deliberate emphasis on deeply strategic battles.

Overall Radiant Historia is an excellent game that is wise to never underestimate the intelligence of the player. Its combat is not intensely difficult in the same way as, say, the Megami Tensei games can get, and many boss battles allow for multiple strategies rather than one singular dominant strategy that the player has to discover, but even so getting to grips with the plethora of options it presents, and the stratagems you can conceive with the characters available at that point in the game, is the key to success. The story is well-written and holds the player's interest by dangling its various enigmas in front of them like a carrot on a stick, spurring them ever onwards to solve them. Its Matsuno-esque focus on conspiratorial nobles, military drama and a charismatic lead serves it well. It's an imaginative and clever RPG all told and well worth the time of anyone, especially those who might dismiss the genre as pandering and unchallenging fare.