11/06/05 >> Radiata Stories (PS2)
Genre: RPG
When I heard about Radiata Stories I was initially very excited: an RPG where you could recruit various characters into your party, right from the map! Having heard about it late in the game so to speak...this game didn't receive too terribly much publicity...I set about looking for information. Not entirely wowed by the story, I nonetheless decided to give it a try, to see if it was really what I was looking for.
Was it? In short, no.
More at length, the graphics are beautiful and colorful, very smooth and full of life, and very distinctive. The designs are likable enough and unique enough to give them a sense of liveliness, as well as to separate them from other similar games. There is a definite sense of location in every place visited, and there was obviously some great and hard work done on the visuals. Everything seems to have a life about it, which is hard to come by in some games, especially RPGs these days. Oftentimes you run into the same old same old, and nothing makes too much of an impact.
The sound and music are nice, although there are some themes I didn't particularly feel moved by. A nice bonus is that you can collect items throughout the game to play on a phonograph, of different music featured in the game. The voices were actually done well enough even in English that I had them on for a long while, but ultimately I turned them off because I don't particularly like voices in RPGs. Still, most English-language dubbed RPGs that I've ever played are terrible, so Radiata Stories scores extra points for actually bothering to cast talented actors in the roles, which actually seem to have been given a copy of the script a few days beforehand so they know their characters and what they're doing. There were one or two extremely annoying performances (Genius for example), but it wasn't inconsistent with the characters in question, at least not to my judgment.
Gameplay is a different issue altogether and it must be approached in several aspects: the controls are somewhat smooth but not as responsive as they should be, in battle and outside. It takes so long to open a door and go in on the map that you may find yourself checking the area map to make sure you're going the right way so that you don't have to waste minutes and minutes going in and out of rooms you don't need to. There are also some maps laid out so bizarrely that you will find yourself hopelessly lost and wondering where you're supposed to be going when you aren't being bottlenecked through an area by a temporary party member, which I'll cover below. All in all, the responsiveness and quickness of the system could have used some work.
This carries over into battle, which in an action RPG should be the first priority, a smooth and intuitive battle system. Unfortunately even when you block, which can sometimes be slow enough to let them hit you, you take damage. You can try for a counterattack, but sometimes this isn't much good and can even leave YOU open for a counter-counterattack! It seems good on the surface, but in execution it could have been better. The targeting system is also extremely frustrating because it doesn't change as well as it should and tends to leave your character running to attack someone who's not exactly close by, further complicating matters by introducing a system of 'orders' wherein the party leader tries to steer you towards attacking a certain foe or protecting an ally. It just makes things needlessly convoluted, and battles become less and less fun since you're expected to help your party members, yet they rarely seem as on-the-ball when it comes to you! However, at least in battle it's very easy to get to recovery items and items in general. It's also pretty easy to attack, and movement is smooth enough that if you aren't overwhelmed by sheer numbers or power, you shouldn't have too much of a problem defeating your foe. This is a relief considering many action RPGs don't bother making a system work as well as this one does, despite its shortcomings.
The special features of the game are, unfortunately, also the things most disappointing and frustrating about it; the ability to recruit numerous characters into your party is somewhat less directly fulfilling than the previous and promotionals would have one believe; it takes simply forever to reach the point where you're even free to do this, and up to then you're forced through a pretty narrow path. You're also given comparatively few foes to fight -and they don't respawn- which limits your powers and abilities. This can lead to disaster later on when the difficulty of enemy encounters increases steeply between areas, yet enemies don't seem to reappear so you can strengthen yourself before moving on. You can try to avoid enemies, but oftentimes they're too fast and catch you, which makes me wonder why there was any option to try and run in the first place. And speaking of running, you even need a special item to try and escape from battle...oh well, at least you can run at all, unlike some RPGs.
But I digress. The character recruitment, while lending even more of a life to the surroundings with the characters' daily routines and distinct personalities, falls flat when you consider that some characters will not join you depending on which of the two rather limited storylines you choose in the single major branch of the entire game. It reminds me of how cheated I felt in playing the first Suikoden, when I found out that ultimately my decisions really didn't have much bearing on what happened anyway. You get to choose a major decision, but...it's too little and too late, and it doesn't really matter much anyway. It doesn't matter who you recruit or don't recruit, it doesn't even matter if you ignore most of the side quests. You can probably blast through the story in half the time it takes to do all the quests you can pertaining to a certain 'side' you play. And ultimately it's that sort of futility that makes the game lack any compulsion to keep going. If it didn't pretend like it gave you such depth and free control over the outcome by recruiting all these characters, it wouldn't be so frustrating. But it does, and it is. You can't even rename the main character, that's how little influence you have on the proceedings!
The characters, while voiced well and visually impacting, are almost all entirely annoying. It's very unfortunate, because this is a kind of game that makes you really want to like it, with its earnest approach and its sometimes painful attempts at humor...it's nothing if not straightforward in its silliness...but at the same time it could use some work on its writing. The characters are not always consistent, and neither is the story, which at times is outright terrible.
To boot, the mood changes wildly from scene to scene, and sometimes you may find yourself wondering exactly what you're expected to do next, since the game is so dependent on you adhering to a rigid schedule of events rather than doing what you'd like to do, at least most of the time. This touches on another ambitious aspect of the game, which is the day/night time cycle, which ultimately ends up being another excuse for standing around and doing nothing but simultaneously being unable to go anywhere of interest, for long periods of time.
The game as a whole isn't as clever as it probably thinks it is at times, and while it's a bit of a sort-of-funny twist on the RPG stereotypes, it's not engaging enough on its own to be much more than a moderately entertaining parody. There are moments when it's plain to see the dialogue is trying to be 'funny' again, and it flops too many times and starts to become irritating. When you meet a new character, after a while you start to think 'oh great, I wonder what annoying quirk this one's going to have that will make me never want to see him again.' You may think this is a harsh generalization, but I came up spontaneously with some pretty rude nicknames for several of the characters forced into the party, some of which aren't repeatable in respectable company but seem to fit the characters spot-on.
The player is expected to see the world as lightly as the writers obviously did, but it doesn't work in so many cases where the characters are outright rude, in serious ways, and yet it's the 'hero' and his group who make it out to be somehow deserving of this and not to treat these characters on the terms they've set out...that is, to be as rude to them as they are to you. At one point the issue of trust comes up, that it must be earned, which is why the Dwarf you're supposed to protect treats your party like idiots (and says as much, plainly); what would have been nice at that point would have been someone chiming in with 'trust is a two-way street!' One does not earn trust by name-calling.
There are multiple other instances where the game tries to go down the 'serious RPG' avenue and ultimately fails due to these events' glaring contrast to the 'light' image it tried so hard to establish, which seems to me a huge mistake in consistency: either keep a game consistently lighthearted, or keep it consistently more serious. It would also have been nice to have a little more character development, although I know it's a tall order since there were so many characters to have in the party. Still, the core couple of characters would've been nice to have some redeeming qualities, at least more than the annoying ones they sported. Nonetheless, they managed to be much more likable than the entire cast of Tales of Symphonia, and in almost exactly the same sort of story. Where Symphonia preferred a more heavy-handed method, Radiata opts for a less stern and unforgiving route. Radiata also has vastly better voice acting.
Overall, Radiata Stories is just above average, but there's nothing in it that really pushes you to the next part. If you've played RPGs before, you won't find anything new or interesting here. It's not that funny, the characters aren't that great, the story is inane at best, and it's not the kind of system you want to put too much effort into. Still, if you're relatively new to the genre of RPGs, Radiata could be what you're looking for. It's a good sort of game for someone who is interested in the genre but hasn't had much experience with it. Definitely a rent-first though, because I feel it's a 'like it or hate it' title, and I don't honestly think it's engaging enough to keep people playing for too terribly long after they figure out it's all pretty futile and that they might as well just sit back and let the game take over. In this day and age, a game as streamlined and limiting as this, with so few redeeming qualities, has no role or value but as an introductory game to the genre. In that capacity, it can serve decently and probably will be well-remembered by those who play it. However, those who have been playing RPGs for a while will only see it, most likely, as a waste of time.
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Game Score: 7.9
