Radiata Stories is more innovative than Dragon Age Orgins

Why are the two most boring characters given the most screen time?

Radiata Stories (NO I don’t know what Radiata stories means)

Normally I don’t explain why I’m reviewing a game, it’s just an arbitrary decision based upon my whims, and so I’m not going to start now. Nah, just kidding, through that would be funny, instead I have I a whimsical story which serves as a forced metaphor for my views on the game rather than just saying them directly (spoilers, its mediocre). I also love self aware narration. Anyways, I got this game right after I bought a PS2 at my Grandparents, basically as a test game to play something cheap before I went home and borrowed (steal) better (slightly less crappy) games from my friends (people whose addresses I know), and I jus saw my younger sister (younger sister) playing it today when I basically remembered its existence, and figured that since I’m playing assassin and I’m hiding inside my house (there everywhere), I might as well write a review on it, because despite the fact I think the name is silly and I really don’t like the art direction other than character creation, I think it had enough potential to be wroth an article. Basically, I don’t really want to write about what the game is, which is as you’ve noted, a mediocre time killer, but more what it had the potential to be. Because unlike almost every other bad game out there, Radiata Stories faults are born not from lack of creativity or ideas, but simply through general incompetence. And I know that this is going to shock people, but Radiata Stories was possibly one of the bravest attempts in gaming in the last decade.

Now as I have made abundantly clear at this point, I don’t really like JRPG (grr, Final Fantasy) so I’m naturally bias against the game, but it did make some attempts to move away from what normally bothers me, it just didn’t do enough. They ditched turn based combat, but I’m still going into another world to fight and its still limited and tedious, just less so. The outfits aren’t as stupid as Final Fantasy’s absurdities, but they still make everybody look gaudy and out of place, and while the system isn’t as obsessive when it comes to all this minute details, its still boring to the point where I don’t really want to actually modify my character in the least. Beyond that the characterization is simplistic, the dialogue lacks any trace of subtly, and everybody has stupid hair. However it is where Radiata Stories tries to do something original that it all goes horribly wrong. Basically the game has the set pieces to be great. The story is about a young noble boy named Jack Russell (I hope that is more subtle in Japanese) who wants to join the nights of his realm. Unable to get past the entrance exam due to his general ineptitude, he is accepted into the knights through blatant nepotism instead. This got the whole game off to a very good start, because it subverts the normal JRPG, instead of my excitable not so smart character overcoming the odds based on the power of his will, he has to deal with the guilt from his lack of actual merit. This built up the expectation that the game would be about my character trying to come to understand how the world really works and being forced to confront his own privileged background, rather than the main character being the underdog. But like almost everything else in this game, all of these small subversions only serve to disappoint me after raising my expectations because the game doesn’t go anywhere with this idea. Jack has a few seconds of “OMG I don’t deserve this” before going off like the typical JRPG hero non the wiser. Sure he will feel guilty once or twice, but it will come completely out of nowhere and feel like an obvious effort to insert angst. Later once the actual game play starts, this happens again, the castle you start out in is HUGE. Its this massive complex full of different people and stuff happening, it could be a whole game in itself. But you can’t actually do anything with the fact that they have this huge castle because all of the rooms are practically the same and the characters are so dull it just feels like your wasting your time. So, contrary to my nature of saving the main quest until absolute last, I ran to do the main quest before I became more hopelessly lost. Yeah, I know that I missed a massive backlog of important information and potential characters/items, but it was just so generic and uninteresting that what could have been a great beginning. Anyways, so I am then introduced to my party, the snotty rich girl, the overly noble knight and…….my least favorite character the southern hillbilly priest. WTF. Why does every character with a southern accent have to be a dumbass hick? I mean I know this is the fault of the dubbers not the game itself, but I’m half southern, my moms from North Carolina, is the game so bad at characterization they have to use an offensive stereotype. I mean imagined if his character was exactly the same but I made his accent Hispanic. Anyways, I planned to resume the plot summery but honestly, I really don’t care at this point, I just want to talk about the game’s main selling point, the immersion. Basically, the main city (and by extension the surrounded towns when you get to visit them) are all populated by 150 NPCs who you can get into your party. All of these characters have their own schedule and personality and you can collect all of them (Between two play through obviously blah) like lawyer collecting clients through a variety of tasks. These vary from simply talking to them, talking to them at a certain level, fighting them, saving them, having a friend of theirs, to having a special item. The game is run in kinda sorta real time, so you have to pretty much stalk these people before getting them into your party. As you can expect, it suffered from all of the problems you would expect from such a system, namely all of the characters being underdeveloped, existing more as an accomplishment than a party member (you don’t even get to talk to them once you get them in your party), many of them being totally unmemorable, and their listed personally traits never actually effecting the game. For example, I don’t remember his name, but one Frankenstein guy was described as being as sociopathic mad scientist, but once I got him to join me, that never came up, he never betrayed me for his own personal gain or tried to actually experiment on somebody it was just an idea that never came to anything. However the idea is pretty much what I want from an ideal RPG game, if we had a game with better funding and writing backing it, this could be the most innovative game since Baldur’s Gate. Instead we get this idea coming from a mediocre JRPG, where it fails horribly, but at least they tried. And I’m rapidly losing interest, here is some basic information (filler) before I come to the stunning conclusion

The Good and the Bad (wait what else would their be?)

• I like that there is a lot going on. People are going into houses, out of houses, regular schedules, and doing their own thing. It makes the society feel alive and people actually having a point. Disturbingly enough, it handled it even better than Oblivion/Morrowind did, by having the characters actually change their reactions when they are in different locations. True is a shallow portrayal that is based entirely upon adding these characters to your friends list, but that’s more than most games can say.
• The races. Despite having their art design ripped off from World of Warcraft, Radiata stories actually are pretty fleshed out. Ok, no they are just shallow stereotypes, but they are new shallow stereotypes. The Light Elves are winged fairy elves who are isolationist and snotty. Ok that’s typical, but they are more fairy elves rather than LOTRS Elves. The Black Elves are the tree loving nature elves who are into physical exertion and are kinda a sporty martial artist race who are kinda all athletes. The Goblins are either Green, who are basically an entire race of trashy hobos, or Black who are all stoners, and the dwarves are all Russian industrialists. Apparently there are two types of orcs too, but I never bothered to recruit them. The downside of course is that they are again, only shallow stereotypes, jut with kind of a nifty idea.
• The weapons are very much hit and miss, but about half of them are pretty cool. The rest are just stupid
• While the NPCs are almost universally shallow representatives of actual characters, they at least have a nifty concept they revolve around. While they lack anything resembling depth, when you first met them they seem pretty interesting. Again, if they actually developed these character you could have bioware styled interesting characters.
• A cool plot. This they almost pulled off perfectly, a almost totally morally grey battle between humans and nonhumans. The latter are slightly more morally justified, but that’s like saying the allies were slightly more justified in WWI, its true but the resulting conflict was way out of proportion, as the humans are more likeable honestly. The fact that for the first two thirds of the game you have been making friends on both sides makes the resulting confrontation between the two sides hammers home the feeling of “Wow, this is a civil war, not a war between good and evil”. Of course then you realize how shallow the characters and cease to care, as well as your allies tendency to respawn, which makes the whole point of a civil war kinda pointless. Also the fact that humans get so much more characterization makes all of your non human allies seem weird (Also why are the purple people considered human? Eh?). The problem is that by the end of the game, the purpose or even conclusion of the war are kinda obscured, due to a mix of shoddy story telling and stupidly long periods doing pointless quests.
• The quests that involve talking to people and fighting unique foes and interaction between characters was cool, all of the rest were a pointless waste of time
• The actual set pieces of the plot were cool, you have these long painful periods of filler intermittently mixed with really good cutscenes that actually make me eager to keep playing (unlike final fantasy games, where I’m just killing time for the whole game). I liked most of the major characters other than jack (see below), the voice acting was good, and while the game didn’t actually make any use of their personalities, they were presented really well in the limited screen time they had. The fact that random NPCs suddenly showed up and made a different was really great, if again, they actually did something with that beyond a few disconnected scenes
• The only thing I really didn’t like was the main Character. Jack is simply put, unappealing. Like his namesake, he is excitable, really stupid, moronically brave (I had to use moronically because I had used stupid already), socially awkward and shallow. Basically, the typical JRPG main character, why does Japan love the stupid brave guy with a good heart motif? His lack of intelligence just makes him unappealing, because the random NPCs are honestly more interesting as characters, because he feels like he should be a random NPC who joins your party, because he has about as much depth. This is a massive personal issue I have with JRPGs, but stupid main characters cripple games that rely upon complex stories, because the character himself is unable to actually understand the complexity, thus forcing the game to dumb itself down to the point where it is patronizing. A stupid main character also forces the minor characters to be more polarized so he (and presumably the audience) can understand the conflict better, the main human villain Lord Cross has to be such a massive ass so Jack can know who to fight to. Also its boring, he doesn’t have anything to say, he just follows around from plot point to plot point. A good protagonist is central to a video game of this design, a distinctive personality is vital for this understanding.

So in conclusion, Radiata stories was a brave, but ultimately futile attempt to make something good out of the JRPG format, and to try out some really inventive new ideas. However its departure from the norm made it unappealing to JRPG fans, while its sticking to old traditions made it useless to WRPG fans. So in conclusion, Radiata Stories is more innovative than Dragon Age Origins. While it isn’t as good as a game by a long run, it does something that Bioware didn’t attempt to do, namely try to depart from a formula that has long since proven stagnant.

From

EE