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.
