Radiant Historia
Aug. 28th, 2014 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA mysterious brother and sister bemoan their inability to save the world from being engulfed in sand...again. But they resolve to keep trying. Then the focus shifts to Stocke, a special intelligence agent who has been entrusted with the White Chronicle and sent on a high-stakes rescue mission. When the mission goes very badly, Stocke is able to use the White Chronicle to reach "Historia" and, with the help of the siblings, travel back to set right what once went wrong. Now, it's up to him to change history and prevent the Sand Plague and desertification from destroying the world.
I originally played a bit of this right after I finished Sands of Destruction, which meant that apparently I picked two DS rpgs in a row where people turn into sand? What are the odds? (I get the vague impression that people turning into either salt or sand are kind of a trope in Japan.)
Speak of tropes, the game is rife with them: The main city is powered by "thaumatech" which the local closer-to-nature "Beastkind" don't approve of. "Mana", the lifeforce of people, is being drained by the "sand plague" which no one knows the cause of, even as the desert spreads and arable land is warred over. The hero has a mysterious past he doesn't totally remember and is obviously a chosen one. This game takes itself seriously; no real comedy and virtually no joke characters or goofy themes. It's not often in this day and age that something with many formulaic aspects works as serious, but it does here.
It also gets into remarkable depth with the themes and characterization, generally avoiding the "good vs. evil" thing. Granorg is ruled by corrupt nobles, but Alistel doesn't seem so great either, with a religious fever over "Prophet Noah" that the military is exploiting to garner recruits. Though Stocke can time travel, he still grapples with the fact that he can't save everybody because of the limitations of his abilities. Everybody has a motivation, and only a few fall into the "mad with power" trope (and usually only after getting an influx of superpowers for their final appearance).
It's a smooth-playing game that they obviously put thought into making fun. You're constantly jumping back to previous "nodes" in the timeline, but you can fast-forward through (or skip outright) cutscenes to make that bearable. Movement is fast and equipment is straightforward. The battle system is a turn-based system which puts the enemies into rows, and manipulating enemy position is a major strategic factor. You get a nice assortment of skills and actually useful consumable items for buffs and debuffs.
There are a LOT of "false endings", where you pick the wrong choice at a node and the game has nowhere to go from there, so you just get a cutscene of how the story ended badly. I understand how this gives you the illusion of choice while keeping you on history's ideal rails, but it still grates a little.
It also irritates me that the two major timelines "influence" each other, despite logic (and needing to be lampshaded), when the idea that Stocke's knowledge being transferred back and forth is enough to overcome roadblocks would work just as well. At a number of points, Stocke needs to learn a skill in the other timeline: Yay! Why not just have him learn critical intelligence that can advance the plot / change history the same way?
(They also keep you guessing as to which major timeline is going to be the "true" one, though in the end, it doesn't really matter.)
They foreshadow the major revelations well. I had pretty much figured them all out by the time the main antagonist reveals them in the pseudo-final dungeon, but I didn't feel like the characters were particularly dense for not figuring them out, given that the player has knowledge that no one character (even Stocke) learns until the end.
Playing the game actually reminds me of Suikoden in a sort of indirect way. There are a lot of very piecemeal sidequests, things that you need to do a lot of backtracking / talking to everyone / searching everywhere after each plot point. (Or you need to follow a walkthrough, of course.) So you'll go through a lot of drama where you get driven from your country of origin or betrayed by someone you thought was a friend...and then spend an hour futzing around in the past helping an artist find the right shade of green paint for his masterpiece. And honestly, some of these sidequests are absurd "how would I know to do that?" affairs. The sidequest required to unlock bonus skills for half your party is a well-hidden, world-traipsing bunch of bullshit. Though I give them a lot of credit that it doesn't seem like anything (items, skills, events) is actually missable. You can always go back in time and do things differently, even if that means replaying large chunks of the game.
(And for some of the sidequests, you will be replaying chunks of the game. You also go through the same dungeons a fair number of times, though enemies are always visible on the world map, and you learn a skill fairly early that lets you avoid encounters entirely at the cost of some MP. I generally object to heavy dungeon reuse, but this does make it fairly tolerable.)
Overall: A gem of a DS rpg that I would generally recommend, especially if you like games with a more serious tone and want to see time travel that doesn't rely on "San Dimas Time".
I originally played a bit of this right after I finished Sands of Destruction, which meant that apparently I picked two DS rpgs in a row where people turn into sand? What are the odds? (I get the vague impression that people turning into either salt or sand are kind of a trope in Japan.)
Speak of tropes, the game is rife with them: The main city is powered by "thaumatech" which the local closer-to-nature "Beastkind" don't approve of. "Mana", the lifeforce of people, is being drained by the "sand plague" which no one knows the cause of, even as the desert spreads and arable land is warred over. The hero has a mysterious past he doesn't totally remember and is obviously a chosen one. This game takes itself seriously; no real comedy and virtually no joke characters or goofy themes. It's not often in this day and age that something with many formulaic aspects works as serious, but it does here.
It also gets into remarkable depth with the themes and characterization, generally avoiding the "good vs. evil" thing. Granorg is ruled by corrupt nobles, but Alistel doesn't seem so great either, with a religious fever over "Prophet Noah" that the military is exploiting to garner recruits. Though Stocke can time travel, he still grapples with the fact that he can't save everybody because of the limitations of his abilities. Everybody has a motivation, and only a few fall into the "mad with power" trope (and usually only after getting an influx of superpowers for their final appearance).
It's a smooth-playing game that they obviously put thought into making fun. You're constantly jumping back to previous "nodes" in the timeline, but you can fast-forward through (or skip outright) cutscenes to make that bearable. Movement is fast and equipment is straightforward. The battle system is a turn-based system which puts the enemies into rows, and manipulating enemy position is a major strategic factor. You get a nice assortment of skills and actually useful consumable items for buffs and debuffs.
There are a LOT of "false endings", where you pick the wrong choice at a node and the game has nowhere to go from there, so you just get a cutscene of how the story ended badly. I understand how this gives you the illusion of choice while keeping you on history's ideal rails, but it still grates a little.
It also irritates me that the two major timelines "influence" each other, despite logic (and needing to be lampshaded), when the idea that Stocke's knowledge being transferred back and forth is enough to overcome roadblocks would work just as well. At a number of points, Stocke needs to learn a skill in the other timeline: Yay! Why not just have him learn critical intelligence that can advance the plot / change history the same way?
(They also keep you guessing as to which major timeline is going to be the "true" one, though in the end, it doesn't really matter.)
They foreshadow the major revelations well. I had pretty much figured them all out by the time the main antagonist reveals them in the pseudo-final dungeon, but I didn't feel like the characters were particularly dense for not figuring them out, given that the player has knowledge that no one character (even Stocke) learns until the end.
Playing the game actually reminds me of Suikoden in a sort of indirect way. There are a lot of very piecemeal sidequests, things that you need to do a lot of backtracking / talking to everyone / searching everywhere after each plot point. (Or you need to follow a walkthrough, of course.) So you'll go through a lot of drama where you get driven from your country of origin or betrayed by someone you thought was a friend...and then spend an hour futzing around in the past helping an artist find the right shade of green paint for his masterpiece. And honestly, some of these sidequests are absurd "how would I know to do that?" affairs. The sidequest required to unlock bonus skills for half your party is a well-hidden, world-traipsing bunch of bullshit. Though I give them a lot of credit that it doesn't seem like anything (items, skills, events) is actually missable. You can always go back in time and do things differently, even if that means replaying large chunks of the game.
(And for some of the sidequests, you will be replaying chunks of the game. You also go through the same dungeons a fair number of times, though enemies are always visible on the world map, and you learn a skill fairly early that lets you avoid encounters entirely at the cost of some MP. I generally object to heavy dungeon reuse, but this does make it fairly tolerable.)
Overall: A gem of a DS rpg that I would generally recommend, especially if you like games with a more serious tone and want to see time travel that doesn't rely on "San Dimas Time".
