Radia Senki: Reimeihen

"This game makes it hard to believe that Tecmo was also responsible for Secret of the Stars."

For a long time, Tecmo's best known RPG was Secret of the Stars. Though it wasn't all that bad of a game despite seemingly being made for kids like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, it understandably wasn't received very well by many people. I remember half-heartedly defending this game once as being pretty good for a novice effort. The funny thing is that Secret of the Stars turns out not to be Tecmo's first RPG at all, and that their real original effort was far better despite being on an older system.

No, I'm not talking about Captain Tsubasa, aka Tecmo World Cup Soccer. Though Square obviously ripped that game off wholesale with Blitzball, it would still be stretching the definition quite a bit to call it an RPG of any sort. Instead I'm referring to Chronicle of the Radia War, a Japanese-only action-RPG released late in 1991. I'm going to go ahead and call this the fourth-best 8-bit console RPG I've played (behind Final Fantasy III, Just Breed, and Destiny of an Emperor II) just to further contrast it from Tecmo's other efforts in the genre.

Radia War looks and plays a lot like a colorized Final Fantasy Adventure, except that you have a party of up to five characters a la Secret of Mana. However, you can only directly control the actions of the main character, while the others are manipulated through AI. Also, the battle mode works like in Chrono Trigger; after you've moved a certain number of steps, you are ambushed by monsters (again, up to five) and have to take them out on whatever section of the map you happen to be in. Though all your main character can do is hit things with his sword, most of your compatriots have ranged weapons of one sort or another as well as magic spells that generally target every ally or enemy on the screen. Magic unfortunately isn't all that useful since you only get four spells per character, you get a low number of uses for each spell, and for some reason you can't use offensive spells on bosses. You also have a wide variety of items to use, some of which are similar to the spells while others have a unique effect.

As I said earlier, you'll be using AI to direct your other characters. Unfortunately, the AI is the weakest aspect of the game. You can tell your people to do a few things: attack a specific monster, attack generally, run away, and so forth. However, they often do these things really stupidly. You'll see ranged attackers getting close to monsters for no apparent reason, people getting in each other's way, people walking around in circles, and worst of all, people taking far longer to attack than necessary, getting pummeled all the while. Sometimes you might find yourself just telling everyone to go to a corner so you can take care of things personally. It helps that the enemy AI is also stupid, but not much.

There are a couple of nice features that mitigate the AI problem. First of all, when your other characters die, they come back to 1 HP at the end of the battle, which means that you don't have to waste revival items on them if you don't want to. Secondly, every living character gets experience when a kill is made regardless of who did it, so you don't have to babysit the AI nearly as much as otherwise. Most importantly, though, if you die (which forces you back to the last place you saved), you keep the experience you gained though you lose everything else (items, plot points, etc.). This encourages the player to keep trying without enforcing the drudgery of hard-leveling on him.

Speaking of experience, the attribute system is simple but effective. Besides HP and the D&D-like magic system, each character has four attributes: offense, defense, weapon speed, and agility. The most interesting part about this is the agility, since it very clearly affects the speed of the character in battle. At the beginning of Radia War your characters move ridiculously slowly, so the gradual speed-up is a neat expression of game progression. You can also see the weapon speed in your ranged fighters, whose boomerangs and ki-bolts move faster and faster as you go along.

Outside of combat, Radia War is a comfortable experience. Like in most action-RPGs, the game takes place on a number of interconnected maps (i.e. no world map). The world is pretty big, with two continents each with their fair share of towns, castles, and dungeons. A few of these areas you'll travel through repeatedly as the plot progesses, though the game uses some of the usual tricks to keep most parts of the world closed off until you're supposed to go to them. (In fact, I can think of only one little area you can go to before you're supposed to.) As with any modern RPG, you'll find items hidden in pots and cupboards and such, and each area is distinctive enough to not bore you to death whenever you reach new environments.

The issue of money is handled in a way that makes perfect sense but is remarkably seldom seen in console RPGs. At the end of most normal battles you get a "trophy;" sometimes it's a medical item of some sort, while in a rare case or two it's a piece of equipment. Most of the time, however, it's some form of currency; humans will drop money proper, while monsters will drop one of three different types of animal product, each of which is worth a certain amount of money. (There's also a special fourth type of animal part which is more like an item but for some reason is counted as a trophy as well.)

So far, Radia War sounds like a fairly standard action-RPG. Where this game really shines, though, is in a plot that is remarkably complex for the period. The basic story is that your character awakens in a forest with no memory and joins up with others to stop the bad guy from using the power of Radia Tower, where dreams come true. Though there are obviously the expected cliches (hero has amnesia, one of the party members is a traitor, etc etc), there is also a lot of action and a surprising amount of realism. For example, while in most early games you'd expect to see one villain who controls a big evil empire, in this one there are two separate countries ruled by villains working together. Though one of them is ostensibly working for the other, his country is powerful enough for him to do his part of the job in his own way with no oversight, as a real ally would do. There are also a mindboggling number of twists, including one at the end which actually surprised me a little.

Characterization is relatively good, as you might expect. Each of the main characters has a distinct personality, and unusually for the time, the hero gets a healthy number of speaking lines. There's also an "advice" command that you can use to get feedback for whatever quest you're currently on, which adds a bit to characterization between cutscenes. In addition to the player characters, you've got quite a few NPCs which get more than a couple of lines. The villains still suck as characters, though, but what can you do?

Though Tecmo has created a number of good games in many genres, I didn't know they had made a respectable RPG until now. The fact that it was their first is all the more surprising. It's too bad that it was never released in the US, but I suppose the market wasn't that big back then, and limited funds to spend on the high costs of localization and distribution would've went to more likely successes like Ninja Gaiden III and Tecmo Super Bowl. At any rate, a fan of the Seiken Densetsu style won't go wrong with Chronicle of the Radia War.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06