Sting's Tactics Games: A Case of Orthodox Unorthodoxy

When we last jumped into the wild and wacky world of Sting, I mentioned in passing that the studio's slow descent into experimental RPGs essentially starts with Treasure Hunter G, as that game isn't a straightforward approach to the tactics genre. At first blush, the Shining Force-esque bones of the genre pre-Final Fantasy Tactics are there and look rather familiar. But as a work by Sting, it's a Shining Force clone with some of the weirdest embellishments. Sure, out of combat, Treasure Hunter G has you running around towns, dungeons, and forests like Chrono Trigger, with each environment offering standard JRPG exits and transitions. However, unlike most tactics RPGs, your movement isn't based on a grand campaign map, and while the combat does take place on a grid, that seems incidental to what is structurally a very typical SNES JRPG. Then you enter combat and unfurl an SRPG with incredibly quirky bits and bobs better suited to something else entirely. With Shining Force, Chrono Trigger, and Trials of Mana already out, Sting should have known they were jamming round pegs into square holes with Treasure Hunter G, and yet they didn't care. And as we talk about Riviera today, Sting's weird fixation with merging multiple types of gameplay into SRPGs will be a recurring throughline.

Where all of Sting's gangster experimental stuff started: Treasure Hunter G

After Treasure Hunter G, Sting published Baroque, followed by two entries in their Evolution franchise, as well as the GameCube re-release, and paradoxically somehow got the license to make the WonderSwan version of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Those works, and Sting's unsurprising fandom of Wizardry, serve as another reminder of something Sting belligerently loves, including in most of their RPGs, even when they don't perfectly meld with the worlds or game structures they have committed to in any given work: roguelike gameplay. Until the later phases of their history, Sting's works, at least in their heart of hearts, adhered to CRPG orthodoxy rather than JRPG orthodoxy (i.e., your Dragon Quests, Final Fantasys, or Tales ofs). They were sometimes mean, always vexatious, and rarely explained their underlying logic or math coherently. That last point applies to almost everything Sting makes, by the way. And then there is that weird five-year period when every RPG Sting made had procedurally generated dungeons, which, luckily, Riviera isn't a part of! If anything, when playing a game from Sting, you have to accept that until they decided to sacrifice their reputation for being experimental for the sake of throwing in their lot with Idea Factory, whatever it is you are playing, you are going to discover Sting's favorite flavor of ice cream while they were developing it, by hook or by crook.

Evolution is likely an entry for next year's edition of "Summer of Sting." It didn't quite make the cut this year.

Nonetheless, we are gathered here today to talk about Riviera: The Promised Land, a game originally developed for the WonderSwan Color, which initially locked it as a Japan-only exclusive. Luckily, the game was remade for the Game Boy Advance and released in North America in 2005. This version added voice work (though it is not fully voiced), new CG and character art, additional events, and extra story content. The GBA remake was reused for the PSP release, which used the GBA artwork but at a higher resolution. What's more notable about the PSP version is that it was the first fully voiced version of Riviera and an early example of a localized JRPG that kept its Japanese voice acting with subtitles, without locking you into playing with English voice acting. That last point might be lost to some of you who are younger than me, but back then, when a non-English video game was localized, it wasn't common for you to be able to go into your audio settings and select the original Japanese voice acting. If something got translated, you were usually playing the game in the native language of your home country or wherever you bought it. Nonetheless, there's the PC/Switch/iOS/Android HD remaster of Riviera that came out in 2024. While the art style in this version leans too pastel or expressionistic, it's the version to get. It runs well on modern hardware without needing filters, emulators, or old tech, and it has incredible quality-of-life features that make it far easier and more enjoyable to play.

The Case For Riviera: The Promised Land As A "Sting Gateway Drug"

In many ways, Riviera is the platonic ideal of a Sting strategy RPG. It has an approachable story, which we will discuss shortly, with some fun twists, but is mostly workmanlike in that regard. Like later Sting SRPGs, Riviera's tutorials are maybe a bit more in-depth than they need to be and stretch the introduction of new mechanics out for far too long. Yet they aren't overwhelming, and the story's structure and progression are gradual enough in the early phases that you can learn by doing without getting your teeth caved in. Gone are the procedurally generated dungeons and roguelike gameplay of Sting's earlier works, replaced by a linear campaign map with dating sim interludes. This game was made when Sting was entirely invested in its strategic relationship with Atlus, and you can really tell. The game isn't a short-for-shot copy of Majin Tensei I or II, as there aren't demons for you to recruit and Riviera doesn't have ambient music that rocks your socks off like any OST by Hidehito Aoki would. Nonetheless, there are definite whiffs of it in Riviera, and I'll tell you what: when I got to the first downtime sequence, and Riviera did its best Atlus-like dating sim act, I thought it was some of the most adorable shit imaginable. In many ways, Riviera looks and reads like a developer completely out of their element and forced to work with parts and pieces they've never touched up to that point; and yet, the game works.

Notice the highly unorthodox framing of battles and how small fights feel. Both end up working in the game's favor.

Where Riviera really diverges from the RPG norm is when you are outside of combat. Instead of exploring a hub or navigating an overworld to talk to NPCs or explore new towns or locations, you, the player, don't have full control over Ein, the game's main character. Instead, you switch between "Look Mode" and "Move Mode," and depending on your actions, you'll trigger environmental interactions or even battles with simple button presses. Each environment you find yourself in is a series of five to seven screens, with later environments being much longer than earlier ones, and when in Look Mode you use your directional buttons to trigger events on the screen almost like you're playing an adventure game, but with some triggers only available after you have exhausted all previous actions. This mode has its own action currency in the form of "Trigger Points," so there is a slight FOMO element if you are not careful, which is definitely a problem, but not playing the Look Mode sequences hyper efficiently isn't ever going to be what prevents you from finishing Riviera. With "Move Mode," you can backtrack to previous screens, though this is sometimes limited. Action triggers are still on the screen, but they don't require Trigger Points; however, actions will add a turn to a turn counter on your screen. Sometimes there's no turn limit and other times there is, and I honestly couldn't tell you what the rule or logic is because this part of the game always threw me for a loop. Nonetheless, when you exit a stage's final screen, the game always prompts you to save before transitioning you to a new environment.

Again, I go back and forth on whether I like the pastel look of the remaster more than the pixel graphics of the portable releases.

Whether in Look Mode or Move Mode, your characters will eventually trigger a battle, and that's where I think Riviera really shines. First, while your party grows over time, you can only bring three combatants into battle at a time. Second, each character must go into battle with optimized equipment and weapons. As I'll discuss shortly, Riviera is one of those tactics or strategy RPGs where prep work matters more than your tactical decision-making. Third, before any battle starts, you can choose an Attack or Magic formation for your party, and these labels are a bit deceptive. For example, picking the Attack formation doesn't make your sword-and-board characters hit harder or better. Instead, it shortens the recharge time for physical attacks AND sets your party formation to two characters in the front row and one in the back row. Magic formation, by comparison, lowers the recharge rate for magic attacks and sets your formation to one character in the front and two in the back. Items and equipment have durability, but more critical to your mental calculus is that you can only hold up to sixteen items, and you CANNOT upgrade your storage. On top of that, you can only bring four of your sixteen items into battle for all three of your characters to use. That leads to another interesting part of Riviera: most items work for multiple characters and, depending on who uses them, those items can do completely different things. For example, a mage's staff might serve as a melee weapon that deals damage when one character uses it, and when another character holds it, it becomes a healing item.

Getting almost everything in this game is not worth it. I can tell you that from experience.

Nonetheless, the best part of Riviera's combat is its Overskill system. When you give characters items and they train with them, you unlock new moves or special abilities on a gauge called an OverDrive Gauge. This meter fills up as characters deal and take damage during combat. You can use a special Overskill ability that either applies a bevy of buffs or deals massive damage well above what your standard attacks can do. You have to be careful how often you use these abilities, though, since they have durability and will break after a set number of uses. There are even "Execution" moves that immediately shatter items, but they're devastating, and their inclusion means you usually have at least one nuclear option in combat to avoid losing. Plus, with Riviera maintaining such a stringent inventory system, this game ends up being the doyenne of the adage "smoke 'em if you got 'em," and I have to give Sting credit: they made a JRPG that forces you to avoid bloated inventories full of stuff you've been hoarding since the start of the game. I shit you not, this may well be the first JRPG I have ever played to completion where I can honestly say I didn't have a single item from when I started it. However, watch out for that Overskill mechanic, as enemies also have a gauge that powers up a special ability much like yours. In the case of many of the mid- to late-game bosses, those enemy Overskills can spell an immediate "Game Over," which means Riviera is a mix of a tactics game with a push-your-luck mechanic, as every encounter becomes a timed battle with you needing to assess and prioritize which Overskills to power up, while also needing to consider that there are consequences if you take too long to enact your plan. Despite all the game's weirdness, the combat has a genuine, tangible tactical nature, and with how linear the game's structure is, it maintains its pace and cadence far better than most SRPGs I have played in my lifetime.

The Sting-isms That Aren't Dealbreakers

As a game developed by Sting, Riviera has some item requirements that are exceptionally cryptic and random. If you're one of those types who refuses to use a guide, you'll likely end up grinding an extra three to five hours because the best equipment is easy to miss, and the only workaround is to raise your stats. To compound that, Riviera has a maddening design quirk regarding battle drops. Rather than having battle drops be a set of items that unlock depending on a dice roll, Riviera has you only getting one single battle drop with each encounter, and that drop is dependent on the LAST DEFEATED ENEMY. On top of that, drop quality is tied to your battle rank at the end of the encounter. So, if you took too long to beat some enemies or used the wrong Overskills, you'll end up with a paltry potion because your battle rank is low. Mind you, to get an S-rank in Riviera, you need to finish a fight with a Diviner's Overskill or any Overskill at Level 3, and during all of Chapter 1, the only character capable of doing that is Ledah, which makes lining up your battle order and set of actions so they can land their Overskill a complete pain in the ass. Even when you have multiple characters with Overskills, you'll often find yourself passing whole turns to avoid characters using their Overskills out of fear they'll break an essential item. The good news is that you can get battle drops in the game's practice mode, but the practice mode is locked to A-rank, so if you mess up on a critical boss encounter, you're shit out of luck for the rest of the game.

A boss getting ready to do some cheap bullshit on me like all JRPGs.

The game's linearity is a double-edged sword. In many ways, Riviera reminds me of Final Fantasy X: you can backtrack, but it is incredibly limited, and the game often punishes you for it. On the flip side, unless you are deliberately running away from combat, you don't need to grind much. That's not to say I didn't run into a few "gear checks" that made me back off a few screens. Still, even then, considering how the game revolves around items and squeezing as much utility out of them using a limited pool of playable characters, more often than not, most of my combat failures were resolved not by grinding away on mooks, but instead by swapping my party compositions or reassessing the items I brought into combat. Nonetheless, this isn't a great game for those of you with FOMO or analysis paralysis. Riviera forces you to make snap judgments about keeping your inventory tight and tidy, and that often means throwing things out, which feels wrong if you're more accustomed to traditional SRPGs or RPGs in general. And given how Byzantine the game is about loot and hidden items, getting everything in the game, whether it be collecting every weapon or obtaining a complete bestiary, this game is up there with Final Fantasy XII or Baten Kaitos as a completionist's worst nightmare.

And unsurprisingly, there's anime horseshit in this game.

I could honestly give or take the dating sim element of this game. Like most RPGs with a dating sim mechanic, you'll want to look up a guide on which giftable items or dialogue choices are best for each character in your party. Earlier versions of Riviera don't communicate your affinity with the supporting characters, so it's usually a surprise how your interactions affect your ending unless you hyper-specialize in talking to a specific character. The Steam version mercifully lets you check your notes in a menu, which shows your NPC relationships. I also thought it was hilarious that to get the Rose Ending, you basically have to be an asshole for the entire game, which leads us to a discussion about Riviera's story. Riviera: The Promised Land coasts on cozy vibes for the first couple of chapters, then gets incredibly dark, which is a bit of a Sting-ism with their tactics games. The game makes vague gestures that it takes place in a Norse-inspired world where a war called "Ragnarok" devastated humanity and the pantheon of gods and goddesses that protected the planet. It has a great final few chapters, but for far too long the story coasts on JRPG tropes and idioms which end up painting a false picture about what it actually entails. Likewise, the story is too slow in ratcheting up its stakes, with the first two and a half chapters feeling like you're going through the motions of a very by-the-numbers JRPG story. It does "get there" but after hours of kicking and screaming.

But BE WARNED ABOUT THESE STUMBLING BLOCKS!

Sting has historically been terrible at in-game tutorials. The worst is yet to come with Yddra Union and Knights in the Nightmare right around the corner, but even in Riviera you watch the game dole out tooltips and gameplay mechanics well into the two- to three-hour mark. And even after the tutorial, Riviera doesn't fully open up all its mechanics. As I hinted earlier, the game's entire first chapter only lets you use the Overskill mechanic reliably to get S-ranks with just one character. And even then, the opening acts don't provide the best on-ramp to the right mindset for doing the mental calculus to make optimal in-game choices. However, like many tactics games that feel like drawn chess puzzles, there comes a point where you figure out how to circumnavigate its design foibles meant to limit your abilities in combat. Around the midpoint, I consistently found myself always heading into battle with the Einherjar special weapon, two additional primary weapons, and a fourth item that usually healed my characters or passed the time. Even then, the best course of action is to train each character to use every possible Overskill, either on the first screen they can use it or when a new character joins the party. The issue is that you have to do that before chapter bosses, and the RNG isn't always going to fall in your favor, and tracking Overskills using the Item Library isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world.

Also, Riviera isn't a long game, which is definitely a feather in its cap, but it also stop just as it starts to jive with its story and mechanics.

I ended up liking the exploration bits more than most people, but that's because I personally love old-school adventure games. What I cannot forgive is the inordinate amount of QTEs during the Look Mode sequences. They're "of the era," which means they're horribly punishing, come out of nowhere, and can really screw up your progress if you fail them. And when it comes to the combat, I slightly buried the lead on one of the game's most controversial design decisions. In Riviera, you don't choose which specific enemy to attack. Instead, the game picks your target based on your current weapon assignments and the formation you selected before the battle starts. You still choose your attacks and commands, but sometimes the game's choice of where attacks go feels inefficient. I should also mention how the game deals with death. When everyone in your party reaches 0 HP, Riviera lets you retry the battle, but with the enemies' stats lowered. It's a weirdly forward-thinking, if not ahead-of-its-time, system, but if you care about optimized battle drops, you'll still restart battles that end in a "Game Over."

This sequence is so much worse on the GBA and PSP version. Just straight up booty cheeks.

Riviera also has what I can only describe as one of Sting's worst puzzles in their entire history as a game studio. Now, puzzles in JRPGs are already a dubious proposition, what with some of the worst of the worst coming from even the best entries in the Final Fantasy franchise or even evergreen works from Atlus or FromSoftware. Nonetheless, the forest maze in chapter three is one of the most notorious levels Sting has ever designed. In the Nelde Ruins, you encounter a forest that shifts through the four seasons depending on which direction you enter and exit the screen. The problem is that the game gives only the vaguest clues about the correct directions and what to do if you get lost. One fundamental issue is that each season is tied to a color: Spring is purple, Summer is green, Autumn is orange, and Winter is white. The tells for which background color matches which season aren't immediately obvious, and again, trial and error makes you run around in circles, not knowing where you are or how to get back to the hub, which is Spring. On top of that, because the forest is an exploration sequence, you have to worry about spending Trigger Points if you want to explore the entire dungeon. Worse, even if you figure out what the colors connect to, the actual end goal of the level, which is getting two useful items for Cierra and Serene, isn't clear, and your sense of whether you're getting closer to either of those treasures is nonexistent.

All my grousing aside, the game is a blast and an easy recommendation. The tactical combat is tight and generally paced well. Sting solves the inventory bloat issue in JRPGs, even if their solution is unflinchingly brutalist. As long as you can push aside preconceived notions of how a tactics RPG should play, most of Sting's experimental design in Riviera is, at the very least, palatable; I can't say the same about the next two games we'll be talking about. Oh, dear God... I'm not looking forward to talking about Yddra Union and Knights in the Nightmare.

Knights in the Nightmare might actually beat Unlimited Saga as the video game with "the most." What genre is it? Yes.