"If you love RPGs, you WILL become addicted to this game."

When I went to the Electronic Boutique looking for a new game for my PS2, I came across Radiata Stories. I'd never really heard of it before, and I knew absolutely nothing about it, but from the description it looked fun enough and the medieval-like environment it promised also looked like a good reason to buy this game. I was not disappointed.

Story (7/10):

Although the storyline is not the most original in the world (every medieval story has to have its dragons, right?), you have to give them credit when you're nearing the end of the game and you think back to what the story was in the beginning. It comes a long way from the kid setting out to follow in the footsteps of his father by joining the knights.

You HAVE to play the game through at least twice if you want to get the entire story, which is actually quite interesting when you see the story from the point of your former enemies. Certain characters don't seem as bad when seen in a different light. Also, when you choose one side or the other in the war, the storyline plays out quite differently on each side. Yes, some of the bosses are the same, but some are different and you're fighting them for different reasons.

Graphics (6/10):

Okay, this isn't the highlight of this game, but if you're into RPGs, I assume you don't choose your game based solely on the graphics. The characters are very cartoonish, not at all like the more realistic characters seen more recently in other games. The towns on the outside are pretty much the same except for being different colors, and really nothing impressive. The monsters are probably the worst of all, as they just seem to get bigger or change colors as they get more difficult. However, while you might get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again, the graphics are pleasing enough to the eye, despite being nothing special.

Sound (4/10):

The sound was just annoying. I suggest turning it off and finding some other music to listen to while you play. It was extremely annoying to hear Jack yelling "huh, huh, hah!" over and over again. I would personally rather that he said nothing at all than to have to listen to that repeated sequence over and over again. The other characters sounded repetitive as well, though to be fair to the sound team, I'm sure it was difficult to come up with unique sounds for all 177 characters. The music was annoyingly repetitive, and it would get stuck in my head and I'd be playing it over and over again. This is not the good kind of song that gets stuck in your head, by the way. I thought they could have done a much better job with the sound in this game.

Gameplay (9/10):

This is the most important part of any game, and this is where Radiata Stories really shines. While it may only take you about 25-30 hours to play through on one side (depending on if you do all the extra tasks and go around recruiting all of the characters), to get the full story, you play through again on the other side, giving you another 25-30 hours, so this game offers about 50-60 hours of gameplay.

I think one of the more fun features of the game was to go around recruiting as many characters as you could. There are 177 recruitable characters that you have to help, which is like going on lots of little mini sidequests. To those who say there is no point in recruiting lots of characters as you can only have 3 with you, you've obviously never recruited some of the better characters. To recruit each of the guild leaders, you must have recruited everyone else from their guild. For example, I always kept an attacker, a thief and a healer on my team. However, once I had recruited all of the members of the priest guild, I recruited the head priest, and switched out the healer I'd been using for the better part of the game for a healer that was much more powerful in healing and fighting than she was. However, she had been useful for the time that she was with my team, so it was useful to recruit her as well. Although there are no guild leaders on the nonhuman side, it was fun just to go around recruiting elves, dwarves, goblins, and even orcs. However, I found that I ended up just sticking to fighting with elves, since they tended to be better at fighting, plus some of them could heal. The humans were by far the better characters, though.

The only flaw I can find with the gameplay is that I think that if you chose the nonhuman side, there should've been a big elf city (like the disappointing City of Flowers) like Radiata. Radiata was lots of fun to explore, but the elf city was small and quite disappointing. However, the nonhuman side made up for the lack of exploring in that the storyline was a lot more interesting than the human side.

Replay Value (10/10):

Whether or not you want to recruit all of the characters and do the bonus dungeon to have a "perfect game", you still have to replay this game at least once to experience both sides in the war. It's extremely addictive, and you'll probably want to play more than that just to do all of the things you missed or recruit some awesome character you didn't manage to get the first time around. Sometimes battles are different, depending on whether you win or lose them, and sometimes if you progress the storyline without doing everything there was to do, you'll miss a couple of sidequests, so you'll want to play through and do those, too.

Radiata Stories is an addictive, fun game that all RPG fans should have in their collections.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/04/06