"Inventive and pretty, but weak plot keeps it from greatness."

From Tri-Ace, makers of the popular Star Ocean series, comes this fresh RPG. While this game is very high on inspiration, nonsensical design choices and a positively lame story take Radiata Stories from what could have been an excellent game into one that barely manages to be good.

With RPGs, the standard on what can be considered a good story is higher than other genres, and in this respect the game simply fails to deliver. It starts off promisingly enough, though. You play as a young boy named Jack Russell, a hyper (and abrasively cocky) lad who is looking to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the Radiata Knights. Despite getting royally smacked down in the first round of the qualifiers by a girl named Ridley, he is let in on account of his father's fame, and both of them serve in the La Cochon brigade under the command of Ganz Rothschild, easily the most likable character in the game. The first missions are very interesting, and the comical rivalry between the loud Jack and the sarcastic Ridley, coupled with some other funny sequences, make the story enjoyable. However, over time, the story slows down to a crawl, becoming more and more superficial as time goes on. Eventually, the story does pick up, as you are faced with a choice that decides which of two paths the story will take from there. Either way, it is at this point that the story abandons the lightheartedness that made it unique in the first place and instead elects to take on a more serious quest. In doing so, this ends up making it completely boring. Playful humor is tragically ousted for stereotypical melodrama, and you get dragged along a disjointed and uninteresting series of events until the game's preposterously terrible end. I can't help but wonder what led the writers to shift the tone so dramatically, but the ultimate result makes the overall plot sub-par.

Gameplay is a relatively bright point. The general action RPG battle formula comes into play, with a few twists. You can only control Jack directly, using whatever weapon he has equipped to attack (he can't use magic). There are various types of weapons available as you go along, each with specific abilities. You put together your combo chain manually, selecting from a list of moves that grows the more you use that particular weapon class (the length of the chain varies with the weapon). There is some strategy involved here, as some moves link more fluidly with others, affecting the delay between each attack in the combo. As the game progresses, you are given the ability to direct the actions of your party through verbal commands and specific formations called "links" that each have specific advantages and disadvantages. While neither of these are required to beat the game, and combat does often degrade into button mashing, at least the options are there to use (especially since the partner AI is painfully stupid). The most unique aspect of gameplay is the character recruitment system. Radiata is a very living city: all of the characters in the city each have their own schedule, which they follow daily (including a few hours to sleep in their homes). In order to get a particular character to join your party (there are over 100 of them), you must follow their actions as the day goes on and find out how you might help them. Some characters are recruited simply by talking to them, while others want a certain item from another part of the world, and still others simply want to fight you to earn their friendship. However, the whole process is watered down somewhat by the fact that the characters themselves, while visually unique, differ very little from each other in how effective they are in combat. For the most part, just about any 3 characters of acceptable level make a decent party, so it isn't exactly rewarding to recruit the more important characters in the game (most of which require you to recruit all of their subordinates first).

Graphically, the game is quite stellar. The art style is vibrant and colorful, and all of the locales you visit are unique and well desigened. From Radiata, to lush forests, to barren wastelands....this game is a visual feast. The game's soundtrack is decent overall, and outstanding voice acting makes the overall sound quality very good. A few annoying design choices make things frustrating. Firstly, there is only one permanent save point in the world at any given time. This makes it impossible to do any of the game's missions (some of which take you to the far reaches of the world) unless you can set aside a long time to do so. You eventually gain the ability to teleport between certain checkpoints you have visited previously, but even with these, stakeouts to perform a task or simply to explore can last hours each. Also, this game desperately, DESPERATELY needed an adventure log of some sort to manage things. You have no way of keeping track of the various tasks set before you or what things others are wanting to join your party other than to write them down somewhere. It seems like an obvious thing to be included, but for whatever reason it wasn't. On a positive note, there is plenty of questing to do after you finish the main story, with plenty of bonus bosses to smack down. One of these quests brings you face to face with a familiar character from a classic Square title....

It's sad to see a game with so much potential be diminished this way, but the solid gameplay and concept of exploration keeps it from becoming entirely mediocre. Tri-Ace can do better.

STORY - 4/10

GAMEPLAY - 8/10

GRAPHICS - 9/10

SOUND - 8/10

SWING - 6/10

OVERALL - 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/07/06