So, for the week-ish, I've been playing a newly released NDS game, Radiant Historia. I finally beat it last night. Overall, I found it to be a pretty good game. This is the gist of how the game works: you are given the White Chronicle before your first mission. You learn, during that mission, that you can move back in time at specific key points to alter the outcomes of the future.
Now, I am very, very, very opinionated when it comes to time travel, since I do believe in the Butterfly Effect. I had to cast that aside to even be able to accept the idea that the small changes you make in time only affect small things. The idea that there are only two main timelines between which you travel around felt even more insane. Every action you make should create a new timeline, creating indefinitely many more timelines. I'm hugely straying from the point of the post, but I had to comment on needing to ignore the huge flaws in this time travelling.
You would hop back and forth between the two timelines, and pretty much play them in unison to complete the game. Overall, the gameplay was pretty good. The only problem was the "forced" checkpoints. They would force it so that certain things needed to happen in the other time before you could progress in your current one, effectively keeping you from getting too ahead in one. This kept the game flowing in the way the developers wanted rather than allowing a more free-flowing game where you can go to the timeline that you choose.
The battle style was interesting and fun. It was more based on good timing of when to attack or defend, since scaling in this game was extremely slow. They probably made stats scale slowly to make it such that when you travel back in time, things are still mildly difficult. So, things are more based on tactics, which I do like.
The story was good, too. It had a couple of twists along the way with a solid ending. The only real problem was one of the final twists: the raison d'etre for the End Boss' motive. It seemed a little weak to be the huge motive for everything. The two companions that follow you throughout the game have very little character. I disliked that too, since every other character got much more screen time in the story. Overall, the impact of the story was good and told at a pretty good pace.
It has a huge replay factor, since going back to complete all the small things takes a lot of time. I spent around 30 hours in this game, and I'm still not fully complete. I'm close, though. I recommend this game for anyone with an NDS. It's well worth the time (and money, in case you don't use a flash card).
Overall: 8.5/10
So, I mentioned last that I use a flash card (NDSTT), which is very outdated. Luckily, a new patch came out recently for the firmware and I can play some more games now. Two of the games were translated from Japanese (since there's no English localization), Tales of Innocence and Saga 2: Goddess of Destiny. I'll probably play those next.
Side note: I realize that, due to my anime-reviewing lately, I instantly thought of reviewing the game as I was playing first. I'm in a criticizing mode, I guess. Either way, it's almost time for Zombie episodes again. ~yay!!~
~Pearz
