Radiata Battles
Cutesy little characters don evil armor and save game-producing goats all the time in Japan.
Published: May 27, 2005
Radiata Stories is the newest game from tri-Ace, popular developers of the Star Ocean series and RPG fan-favorite Valkyrie Profile. There was a rather lengthy demo at Square-Enix's booth during E3, and we were lucky enough to get a nice, comfy chair to sit down and play in.
The demo opens up with the game's producer, Yoshinori Yamagishi, who has (sadly?) been turned into a goat for the purposes of the demo. He gives you the option to either venture into the dungeon and defeat the boss in its depths in order to free him from his curse, or to play through the story mode of the demo. Naturally, we opted for the more manly path of hack-and-slash.
The first thing that sticks out about the game is its rather bland appearance. Now, this may entirely be the fault of it being an E3-only dungeon that they whipped together in a few days, but it really felt uninspired and was done many times better in Valkyrie Profile. Like the aforementioned game, the dungeon is basically comprised of a large number of single, interconnecting rooms with enemies visible on the map as you run around.
Being a tri-Ace game, the battle system is obviously a large focus of the game, and fans of Star Ocean 3 will eat this one up. You are given four characters per battle, one of which you have direct control over while the others are AI-controlled. You have your typical weak and strong attacks, as well as the ability to use magic and items. You can target specific enemies and run around freely in a similar fashion to Star Ocean 3. It definitely plays out a bit slower than Star Ocean's fast-paced madness, but it's still incredibly addicting, nonetheless.
You are also given the ability to set up your group into different formations. Depending on the formation, you might be given special attacks. For instance, we set our group into an 'arrow' formation, and when we hit the attack button, the lead character would charge with his spear and damage all the enemies in his path until he hit the wall on the other side, with the rest of my party following behind.
And don't think that you're stuck with only using one character. You can easily switch between party members, and also issue commands to your AI-controlled comrades if you need someone to be healed or whatnot.
There is also a limit-break-esque meter that builds up the more you attack. When it hits max, if you pound the square and x buttons at the same time, your character will perform a super-fancy special attack. What's nice about this feature is that the attack will vary depending on the weapon you have equipped. In the demo, they allowed us to choose from four different weapons, a sword, a sabre, an axe, and a spear. We can assure you that each of their specials were very awesome-looking. It also looks as if you can build up specials during the course of the game to make them even more power or to have completely different attacks, but we weren't able to delve deep enough into that to find out for certain.
The game also features a paper doll system, wherein your character's appearance will change depending on what you equip on him or her. While wandering around the dungeon, we stumbled upon a suit of Demon Mail. Upon equipping the main character, he turned from a cheery little boy into a brooding, evil armor-clad menace. You can probably be sure he was smiling happily under that suit of pure terror, but it definitely didn't show on the outside. It may be that we're just easily amused, but the ability to play through the game in a suit of evil armor while saving little kittens from trees sure puts a grin on our faces.
Eventually we stumbled upon the boss and proceeded to destroy him, then made our way back out to find out that Mr. Yamagishi had been sent back to his 'own' world, wherever that may be. Overall, the battle system seems like it could be a lot of fun. With over 150 characters to choose from in the game, it's likely you'll be able to customize your squad to your heart's content when the time comes. We'll have to wait and see how the story portion of the game turns out, but the battle side of things is looking fairly promising at this point in time.
The demo opens up with the game's producer, Yoshinori Yamagishi, who has (sadly?) been turned into a goat for the purposes of the demo. He gives you the option to either venture into the dungeon and defeat the boss in its depths in order to free him from his curse, or to play through the story mode of the demo. Naturally, we opted for the more manly path of hack-and-slash.
The first thing that sticks out about the game is its rather bland appearance. Now, this may entirely be the fault of it being an E3-only dungeon that they whipped together in a few days, but it really felt uninspired and was done many times better in Valkyrie Profile. Like the aforementioned game, the dungeon is basically comprised of a large number of single, interconnecting rooms with enemies visible on the map as you run around.
Being a tri-Ace game, the battle system is obviously a large focus of the game, and fans of Star Ocean 3 will eat this one up. You are given four characters per battle, one of which you have direct control over while the others are AI-controlled. You have your typical weak and strong attacks, as well as the ability to use magic and items. You can target specific enemies and run around freely in a similar fashion to Star Ocean 3. It definitely plays out a bit slower than Star Ocean's fast-paced madness, but it's still incredibly addicting, nonetheless.
You are also given the ability to set up your group into different formations. Depending on the formation, you might be given special attacks. For instance, we set our group into an 'arrow' formation, and when we hit the attack button, the lead character would charge with his spear and damage all the enemies in his path until he hit the wall on the other side, with the rest of my party following behind.
And don't think that you're stuck with only using one character. You can easily switch between party members, and also issue commands to your AI-controlled comrades if you need someone to be healed or whatnot.
There is also a limit-break-esque meter that builds up the more you attack. When it hits max, if you pound the square and x buttons at the same time, your character will perform a super-fancy special attack. What's nice about this feature is that the attack will vary depending on the weapon you have equipped. In the demo, they allowed us to choose from four different weapons, a sword, a sabre, an axe, and a spear. We can assure you that each of their specials were very awesome-looking. It also looks as if you can build up specials during the course of the game to make them even more power or to have completely different attacks, but we weren't able to delve deep enough into that to find out for certain.
The game also features a paper doll system, wherein your character's appearance will change depending on what you equip on him or her. While wandering around the dungeon, we stumbled upon a suit of Demon Mail. Upon equipping the main character, he turned from a cheery little boy into a brooding, evil armor-clad menace. You can probably be sure he was smiling happily under that suit of pure terror, but it definitely didn't show on the outside. It may be that we're just easily amused, but the ability to play through the game in a suit of evil armor while saving little kittens from trees sure puts a grin on our faces.
Eventually we stumbled upon the boss and proceeded to destroy him, then made our way back out to find out that Mr. Yamagishi had been sent back to his 'own' world, wherever that may be. Overall, the battle system seems like it could be a lot of fun. With over 150 characters to choose from in the game, it's likely you'll be able to customize your squad to your heart's content when the time comes. We'll have to wait and see how the story portion of the game turns out, but the battle side of things is looking fairly promising at this point in time.