Who doesn’t love messing with the time space continuum? When it comes to great video games built around time travel our options are few and far between. Currently the king when it comes to the rpg genre is still Chrono Trigger and while Radiant Historia doesn’t topple it, the unique mechanics still give us a great rpg.
The story is that the world is royally screwed. A strange malady is turning all the fertile land into desert and two powerful nations are stuck in war. You’ll play as Stocke, a secret agent for one of the nations who is given the means to turn things around with the white chronicle.
The white chronicle is a magical book that allows Stocke to revisit past events and change history. Sadly the book is not as powerful as Chrono Trigger’s Epoch or the Doctor’s TARDIS as it can only revisit decisions that Stocke makes. The first big decision Stocke makes involves staying with his secret agent department or returning to the army and this splits the timeline of the world in two. To the story’s credit both paths follow different routes and it is interesting to interact with different people at different points in time.
You can switch between the timelines at any save point and this is required to advance in the game. Many times Stocke will learn something important in one timeline that will be used in the other. Also there is this strange phenomenon that affecting an event in one timeline affects the other that is not really explained.
Side quests require Stocke to travel forward or backward along the timelines to get what is needed to solve them.
There are also a multitude of endings, the majority of which are bad. Stocke has to make important decisions throughout the story which show up in the White Chronicle. Thanks to the White Chronicle after getting a bad ending you can return to the decision and change it as you try to save the world. Moving on it’s time to talk about the combat system.
From the outside it looks like the old school traditional model of having the good guys lined up on the right and the bad guys on the left, however there is more at work here. First the enemies are placed on a 3×3 grid, the closer the enemy is to your group the more damage they’ll do and receive. This principle is also applied to how far away they are to the group in terms of taking less damage.
Turn order is a big deal in Radiant Historia. The top screen displays the next ten turns. Each character can change their position on the list, either swapping their turn with a teammate to have them go first or with an enemy to have your party members attack in a row. The consequence of this is that whenever you swap places that party member will enter a “baroque” stance meaning that they will take increase damage until they take an action. This forces you to weigh the consequence of setting up a big combo for damage vs getting hit a lot harder by enemies. There is an important reason for combos as it plays into the grid system.
Several of your party members have attack skills that allow you to push or pull the enemy across the grid which lets you prioritize who you want to fight first. If you knock an enemy into the same space as another enemy during a combo the enemies will be associated as one enemy in that space and take damage from attacks. You can do this as many times as you have character turns lined up and done right it will allow you to attack multiple enemies easily. Another use I found was using aliment causing attacks or status weakening ones; by grouping up the enemies I can try to inflict the entire group instead of one at a time.
You will have to get used to this system fast as for the majority of fights you will be outnumbered. Fortunately there are no random encounters, you will see enemies as you run around the map and can hit them with your sword to stun them before engaging, allowing you a first strike in combat.
I like how each one of your party members has unique abilities differentiating themselves. Each party member also has side quests specifically for them to learn new skills by finding special items in the world. Another strange affect of the book is that everyone’s stats are persistent between the two timelines. This does lead to the funny event of replaying a boss fight now that everyone is thirty levels above the fight. One problem though is that since in each timeline you’ll have different party members at different times and it does make it annoying to shop for everyone.
Leveling up party members will take some getting used to. As long as the party member is available to swap out for combat they will gain some experience after each fight. However there are long stretches of time when someone will not be in your party at all. When they are finally back later on in the game, they may be ten or more levels below the rest of your party.
One word of warning, or you could say a warning from the future. There is a sizable difficulty spike starting at chapter 4 of both timelines. At this point enemies begin using status boosting skills which unlike a lot of other rpgs is a big deal here. For example pre buff I was doing at least forty points of damage per attack, after the buff I was doing one. At this point in the game you won’t have access to skills that allow you to remove the buff.
Bosses start to become like brick walls and are more resistant to regular attacks. My best advice is using poison, getting bosses afflicted by it is almost like getting a free regular attack per each round of combat.
I want to stop things for one second to say that when I started chapter 4 my party’s level average was 25. I don’t know if I was under level, over level or just right for these encounters. The game is very generous with experience and you’ll also get extra experience for having longer combo strings during the battle.
Once you get past that sore spot the difficulty of the game evens out. Overall I enjoyed Radiant Historia, for the first game like this the designers did a lot right. I just hope if we do get a sequel the designers will allow us to mess with the time space continuum more such as creating messed up futures and getting a chance to play through them.
Josh
