Ideally I would have liked to make a video to demonstrate the system, but that would take too long (i.e. I can’t do it), so I’ll just briefly describe what Radiant Historia‘s battle system is like.
Firstly, it’s really just a normal turn-based system. You can field up to three party members at a time, and apparently you can switch them out but I’ve never had to yet you can’t switch them out so be careful when choosing your party. If you’ve played FFX or Nostalgia, you know what it’s like to have the characters moving according to their speed, with little icons showing who goes first and who goes next. If you manage to chain your allies’ attacks in a row, you get more EXP and money at the end of the battle.
But what do you do if the enemies’ turns interrupt yours? Well, then you can use the Change command to switch places with an enemy. Again I haven’t experimented much with this, but my few experiments show that the gains are not that big in a regular battle, and since the Change command leaves your party member highly vulnerable to attacks for a while, it’s dangerous to try in a boss battle. I’m thinking of trying it again when my characters are a little stronger, right now they’re only level 20.
Now, do you see those dots on the picture above? The enemies are arranged on the battle map in a 3×3 grid, with most enemies taking up one spot and a few larger ones taking up several. I’ve seen up to 6 enemies appearing at once. On that grid, they can move forward, back, left, etc. The closer they are to your party, the more damage they do but the more damage they take as well, and vice-versa the further away they go. Magicians and projectile-users don’t have such a handicap.
So what do you do when an enemy’s right in your face killing ur doodz (easy game is easy, but let’s just assume)? In this game, you have attacks that can change the enemy’s place on the map. Just use your “push” attack to knock him back on the map! Or use the “pull grapple” attack to pull that pesky bowman closer so you can knock his block off!
It gets even better, though. Attacks in this game don’t affect enemies per se, rather they attack the spot the enemy is standing on. What I mean is, if you use your push/pull/left/right attacks to get two or more enemies to stand on the same space, subsequent chain attacks by your allies will hit all two/three/four enemies. You can even knock enemy A into enemy B, then pull both of them together onto enemy C’s space before whacking all three with your best magic! Sweet!
It ain’t all sunshine and roses though. Let’s see, how do I describe this? Has anyone ever played Lufia and the Fortress of Doom? No, not the super-famous Lufia 2 that just got a DS remake, I’m talking about the first Lufia game. It’s one of the first RPGs I played on my own so I have very fond memories of it but damn, the battle system was stooopid. You entered all your commands at the beginning of a turn, then even if the enemy targeted was dead, the characters would still run up and slash at the empty space instead of picking another target!
Well, fine, Lufia 1 was released in 1993, 17 years ago. Radiant Historia was released just last week! Why the <bleep> do they do the same thing?! I’m talking about the chain attacks. If Stock attacks an enemy and kills it, why the <bleep> do Rainey and Marco follow up and hit it too? Sure it’ll break the chain, but shouldn’t any character with a lick of sense go for the next enemy?! You don’t get overkill bonuses in this game either and as I said the extra EXP isn’t worth it, so this is realllllly annoying! Argh! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Still, as I said, the battles are really easy so far. Either your level is high enough and you walk all over the enemies, or your level isn’t high enough so you spend some time grinding or moving the other timeline’s story forward instead. I’m only 8 hours in because I’ve been playing TokiMemo Girl’s Side 3 (Aizawa route), but it’s still on rails. Fun rails though, I’m having a good time. Later!
