Radiata Stories

I loved the characters on this game, but the battle system is rather shallow. All you do is just hack, hack, hack, then slash your way to an easy victory. There was rarely any strategy to the game. The dungeons were short, and were also easy to go through since there pretty linear with easy to find dead ends. I never had trouble with this game, if you are lost, then check the map and it will point you to your destination, if you want to advance the story, then head to your room or go to sleep. The only challenge in the game was finding all the characters, but that’s completely optional. The main quest was just to short, but if you put the time and effort into finding the recruitable characters, then you might get something more out of this game.

----------Battle System----------
Radiata Stories is an action / RPG similar to a Tales of.. or Star Ocean game. The monsters are always visible before you attack them or they attack you, but it's hard to run away from them since you're in such a restricting game. If you're attacked from behind then all your characters end up confused, its more of an annoyance than an advantage since the monsters are weak.

You only play as Jack in the game, however you can recruit up to 177 different characters, but can only take 3 of those with you at a time. You probably won't be playing as every character you get in the game since most of them are useless or extremely weak. The best characters usually take the most effort into recruiting them. You and your current team level up by gaining experience like 99% of every RPG out there. Jack can equip 1 weapon, 1 piece of armor and 2 accessories. You can't change the equipment of your team mates though, so they're stuck with what they have. There's only 4 weapon types in the game, a spear, axe, 1 handed sword and 2 handed sword. Each weapon type will learn around 10 moves. Each weapon also has a certain amount of CP (combo points). Each move you equip to your sword costs CP, so you can change your move set anytime. The attacks always go in the order as you place them too.

Jack also has a Volty gauge. You gain a Volty point each time you land a successful attack, once you reach 100 you max it out. You can do various things in battle with the Volty, each weapon has 1 Volty attack that costs 10 Volty points, then later in the game once you complete half of the training dummies you learn a Volty Blast, which costs all Volty points, but it’s the most powerful attacks in the game. Some enemies also have Volty attacks and Volty Blast attacks, they can even kill you in one shot. You can also send commands to your troops, some of those commands costs Volty points, this is one of the few ways to control your other characters.

Later into the game you learn Linking. Linking lets you control your entire time as one unit and gang up on one monster. This is the only other way to manipulate your supporting characters. The AI of your troops is weak (same goes with the enemies AI), so Linking becomes really useful. They don't introduce Linking until the half way point to, so that annoyed me.

Jack can equip 1 skill aswell. Each extra character has 1 skill too, Jack can eventually learn their skill if he Links with them during battle. Even though Jack can learn a wide variety of skills, he can still only equip one at a time. The game was very easy, but it also made it even easier by allowing you to change your skills and weapons during battle. You can actually equip "Full Power", which boosts your Volty Blast, then de-equip it once you finished the move. This just made it to simple.

----------Characters / Story----------
The story is alright, but it's the funny dialog and charming characters that make this game shine. In the game you can recruit up to 177 characters (not all in one game however) but over the course of the game you'll meet most of those, plus many more that you can't recruit. That's ALOT of characters, and I must say even the lower-tear characters show more personality than most RPGs I've played. They put a TON of detail into these characters. The game is kinda linear, but there's always a few moments of pure freedom where you can walk around the town and do what you want for aslong as you want.

----------Graphics----------
The graphics are pretty good for the most part. I really hated the style of the linear worlds, but I started to warm up and loving it. The backgrounds look great, but there's just to much restriction on your movements. The enemies aren't anything special, there was a few cool looking ones, especially the bosses and bigger monsters like the Orcs, giant turtles, and cactus man, but you'll end up fight alot of ants, goats and bats for a long time, even til the end. The non-playable characters do a list of various tasks during the game. It's like a whole living world in this game, but once you start getting deep into the game and wondering around the town for hours on end, you end up seeing their routines and figure them out. It starts to end up like Groundhog Day. Otherwise, the developers put a ton of detail in with the people in this world and gave them alot of characteristics.

The game opens with an anime cutscene before you actually start th game, but that ends up being the last time you will see one of those. The cutscenes are in-game engine stuff similar to Xenosaga, the characters have a wide arry of emotion and hardly ever repeat mannerisms. The battle system is fairly ugly however. There's really no magic attacks to use, and the characters that do use them end up being nothing special. The only impressive attacks in the game are Voley Blasts, but they're nothing special in their own right.

----------Sound----------
The music is very upbeat or very laid back, the music fits the game perfectly. The only voice overs in the game are in the most important cutscenes. There are personality traited voice clips of most characters you meet along the way, but they're short Link styled grunts and stuff like that. Whoever kills the last monster in a battle gets a victory dance with a subtitle for their speech, but they don't actually talk, this would of been a nice addition. They also say things during battle, but its once again subtitled, and what they actually say is mostly "yeah" or something short like that. The sound effects they use for Jack when he hack and slashes his way to victory can get really annoying, everytime he swings his weapon he has to grunt, so throughout the entire battle all you hear is grunt after grunt. It's even more annoying since Jack is mostly the aggressor.

----------World Map----------
The world map, much like the rest of the game, is set on a somewhat linear path similar to an old arcade beat'em up like Final Fight or Golden Axe, but you'll encounter forks or turn offs similar to the old NES game Friday the 13th. Each country is separated by a gorge, linked up by a huge bridge. Later into the game a statue of a pig will activate and that allows you to warp across the map to certain spots to speed up traveling. If the story requires you to walk to your next destination, then they will de-activate the Pig Statue and block off all other exits, so you're forced on a linear path. When you're told what to do within the story, they're always a marker pointing to the direction you need to go, with that and blocking all other exits, and the characters explaining the whole direction and situation, you end up feeling this game is kinda linear.

You can only save at one spot at a time, a Red Flag will point you to that direction. However, from time to time a Blue Flag will pop up, this only shows up during long story points and will disappear after you progress the story.

----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before credits)----------

Before the Split: 35:28:02
Non-Human: 47:51:26
Human: 40:21:59

Before the split I tried my hardest to get every character and to find every secret, that’s why it took me 35 hours. I picked the Non-Human quest first and once again, tried to get every sidequest and character. Instead of replaying it with a new game+, I just used my Before the Split save that I kept and went on from there, but this time I didn't bother with sidequests or extra characters, as you can see, there's a huge time difference. So after the split, there's only about 5 hours worth of game.

I enjoyed the Non-Human story alot more, plus I'm glad I played it first since it explains the back story about the dragons alot better and fills you in on stuff that probably wouldn't make sense during the Human story. Each story contains a couple of repeating dungeons, and even a few repeating scenes, but the rest is fresh stuff you can't get from each other, so its worth playing them both, but I don't see much of a point of restarting the entire game just to see 5 hours worth of stuff (or maybe around 4 hours since you repeat stuff). The endings to each story is also pretty short, I think the credits was actually longer.