Do you remember games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6? Did you love the hell out of them? Have you been wondering for the last 15 years why RPGs went hardcore next-gen and have been unable to really capture the simple magic of sprite-based storytelling and turn-based combat? Then Radiant Historia
Atlus has really sealed itself in as the king of JRPGs, after Square-Enix abdicated the throne a year or two ago. Radiant Historia on the DS is a great RPG filled with classic aesthetics and mechanics, that manage to stand the nostalgia test that all “retro” games must take and that few pass.
Like the name implies, the story has to do with time travel… sort of. It takes the concept of Chrono Cross’ two universes, one “right” and one alternate, and adds a ton of structure to it. You play Stocke, a commando for the kingdom of Alistel who gets possession of the White Chronicle, a book that lets you go back in time to events in your life and change them. On the small scale, this involves figuring out how to fix your screw-ups so you can continue. On the large scale, this involves time splitting into two major branches, and your attempts to use both of them to get things right. And to find a way to prevent the encroaching calamity of the entire world drying up into sand. What, you thought there wouldn’t be a worldwide, epic quest?
The first thing you’ll notice about the game is that it looks like an old-school, 16-bit RPG. It’s almost entirely sprite-based; the characters are sprites, the enemies are sprites, the combat effects are sprites, and most of the background consists of sprites. The only modern concession is the occasional 3D model when exploring towns. Besides the polygonal buildings, this is an entirely sprite-based game. Despite that, it doesn’t look particularly dated or ugly. While it’s less graphically impressive than a Disgaea game, Radiant Historia’s sprites still have enough detail and animation to convey everything they need, and dialog is augmented by higher resolution anime portraits of characters. It looks like it could have been plucked out of a Super Nintendo last week.
It’s more linear (or bi-linear) than it sounds, but the White Chronicle adds a lot of texture and logic to what would otherwise be a haphazard time travel game. It also provides a great way to navigate not just the world, but the plot itself; the White Chronicle provides a timeline with plenty of nodes where you can go back to buy items, fight bosses over, and reach previously unaccessible areas. The only complaint with this format is how the nodes are handled; if you decide to time-hope when you’re not right at a node, be prepared to fast forward through several cutscenes and a few battles to get to where you were.
Combat is refreshingly strategic, and manages to avoid the fight-fight-fight-win tedium of most JRPGs from the 16-bit era. The enemies are arranged on a 3 by 3 grid, and their position determines how much damage they can deal and how much you can deal them. More importantly, this layout lets you push them around with various moves, forcing them into a square to deal stacked attacks to the entire enemy force. The turns are arranged based on speed, but you can trade your character’s turn for an enemy to cluster your turns together. By combining enemy-stacking and turn-stacking, you can deal huge combos to the entire battleground instead of chipping away at each enemy with the fight command. It feels like a cross between Final Fantasy 10 and Mega Man Battle Network, with an emphasis on strategy. Unfortunately, while combat is full of strategy, character progression isn’t. It’s strictly old-school leveling, gaining stats and skills but not actually controlling it. Still, held up against the combat system, it’s a net gain.
Radiant Historia isn’t a perfect RPG. Its storytelling feels lodged in the SNES/PSX era, and doesn’t quite hit the emotional resonance of Shadow Hearts or Lost Odyssey. While the combat is refreshing, the lack of the basic fight-kill grinding means every encounter becomes a minor strategic chore. Still, it’s a great JRPG and one of the rare cases of a truly good modern work based entirely on a bygone gaming era without screaming “Look at how retro we are!” every five minutes. If you remember the wonder and fun of playing through Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 the first times through, you’re going to want to play this game. It’s one of the few modern-day chances we have to play a new JRPG that hits all the right notes of the old school.
