Radiata Stories: The Game with Strong Story Element

A JRPG game made by Tri-Ace and published by Square Enix. Following the story of a young boy named Jack Russel who wanted to follow his father’s footstep to become a knight in the Radiata Kingdom. The game itself is similar to other JRPG games. However, this game gives lots of humors and beautiful world. Do note that this is a PlayStation 2 game, so don’t compare the visual with games from PS3 and PS4.

The story starts with Jack’s sister Adele talking to her father’s portrait, the guy that appear on the opening movie of the game. She talked about how Jack will go to the castle to become a knight just like his father. Jack is quite a funny character because he is childish but can be depend on at the same time. After a little spar with Adele, Jack went to the castle and fight a girl called Ridley. The battle is not even a tutorial battle because she can defeat you easily. When the champion was named, Jack was still accepted into the knights because he is the son of Cairn Russel, a knight from Radiata that has high achievements.

Jack was put on the same squad as Ridley. Because Jack was still accepted as a knight even though he lost, Ridley thought of him poorly, plus Jack acted very childish. They were put on the squad of Ganz Rothschild the son of Gawain Rothschild another knight of Radiata, friend of Cairn. Ganz has the appearance of a short plum man with moustache, he was not very captain-like, to be honest. The squad was named Rose Cochon (by the way, the squad names in Radiata is French and this one means Pink Pig, yep).

After joining the knights, Jack and co started doing missions, the first mission, your squad would be “helped” by Clive, a monk from Olacion Order. He is well… an idiot if I had to be frank. The mission was to go to the Earth Valley, the village of dwarfs. After that the squad would have to escort the dwarf from Earth Valley to Radiata, although it was called escort, it was just you walking as slow as possible while fighting monsters.

The second mission was to go to the Light Elf Village (There are only a few races, you won’t get confused, really), and this time the helper will be Genius Weissheit (The name is Genius, you didn’t read wrong) because apparently, he was a genius and knew a lot about elves. After being rejected by the light elves, the group then went to the Dark Elf Village to ask for help, which lead to a turning point in the game where Ridley got hurt, healed by Dark Elf Leader, Jack and Ganz got fired from the knights and left the castle. Jack and Ganz then decided to join a Warrior Guild, Theater Vancoor. However, only Jack passed and Ganz failed the test. Ganz then join the Bandit Guild. Here on forward, Jack did missions, met new friends, explore, then save the world (I know, big leap).

Radiata Stories has a system called Friend List, where you do certain things to recruit a character, then you can use that character in your party. Some of the character could be recruited as easy as just talking to them while others had more difficulties to be recruited. It is impossible to recruit everyone because of the story branching. The characters in Radiata Stories has their own routine. They do or go to certain places on certain times (yes, there is a time system in Radiata Stories) and some characters can only be recruited on certain time of the day.

The time system is very influential in the game because not only it is used to recruit people, the world actually got darker as the time went on. The enemy also respawn on midnight. Although Jack can live forever without sleep, certain event and main event can only be triggered by sleeping. This is also the reason why returning home must be at the time where the event won’t be triggered if you don’t want to continue the story. Continuing with the event may cause you to miss other events or the chance to recruit a character.

The story has a big branch in the middle, and that is Human Route and Non-Human Route. From the name, it was obvious, the human route was where you sided with humans while the other you sided with non-humans. The ending of each route was certainly different (of course), and the one you can use as your team mates are limited based on your route.

The story in Radiata Stories are mostly animated with sounds and voices. It was quite funny to watch the reactions and conversations of the characters. It became even funnier since you can kick everyone and everything. But do be careful when you kick someone, because you have to fight that person if you kicked him/her twice and sometimes that person is just too strong for you at the moment. Kicking certain places can gives you items and money.

The battle system of Radiata Stories is quite simple. You encounter enemies on the field and then you fight in a restricted place. The battle is hack and slash with you team mates moving on their own. You can though, give them commands like attacking a designated enemy, heal, defend, and so on. Every time you land a hit, a gauge will be filled slowly. This is the volty gauge. You can use volty blow, a stronger form of attack, and volty blast. Volty Blast is like a special move because it has its own animation.

There is also a Link System. Basically, it’s a battle formation. You can set different formation on each D-Pad buttons and you party will form the link. Link is quite useful since you can get you party members’ skill. Some of those skills are very useful in battle. You can use different types of weapon ranging from one handed sword, two handed sword, spear, staff and axe. Each weapon has its own visual and you can see them in battle. For armors, when equipping a certain armor, you can actually see how it looks on you without the need of going to battle.

The traveling system of the game is quite simple. It is an open world game system. However, after a while, you will be able to you the Journey Pig Statue. Kick the statue and you can warp to another statue as long as you have activated it beforehand. This traveling method is very helpful because you will need to travel to a lot of places since you’ll be doing missions while in the guild.

Other than the above, it’s just typical RPG things like using items, status ailments, level up, equipment that has effects and so on. Therefor this conclude my review of the game. Based on my personal opinion, I would give it 8 out of 10. I was quite frustrated to wait for enemies to respawn and to wait for certain time to recruit a character. Some of them even require me to recruit everyone in the guild to be able to recruit him/her. However,  it was quite fun to watch the characters and reading their descriptions in the Friend List Menu.

Authors:

• Yogi Udjaja
• Livia Jesslyn Chandra