Riviera: The Promised Land

"The Promised Land truly delivers.."

If the maximum score that could be given wasn't 10, I would've been easily convinced to give this game a much higher score. Riviera: The Promised Land is like nothing you've played on the GBA, and by the end of it all you'd be crawling back for more - that I assure you.

You assume the role of Ein, a wingless Grim Angel on a journey to destroy Riviera, believing that Sprites are evil and Riviera is the answer to where all the demons are appearing from. But a sudden turn of events throws you onto another path of the journey, where you start to see the whole picture from another perspective, living among the Sprites. There is a mixture of Norse mythology and fantasy in the plot, seen from the usage of terms and names like the Battle of Ragnarok. The pace is surprisingly slow in the first half of the game, but quickly picks up later when more is revealed. And when that happens, you'd simply be dying to know more about the surreal conspiracy brewing within. Every map or area you walk into will usually unlock another part of the plot, and sometimes you can even select your answers depending on whether you want to please the speaker. What is even more impressive is that before every enemy battle, you party would actually have a different conversation among themselves, from how exasperated they are to encounter another enemy to just pure anger. Multiply this by the hundreds of battles and you'd simply be astounded by the sheer effort that has been put in into the script-writing.

The game play is such a breath of fresh air from all the generic games the system has been rolling out in the past few months. Fans of adventure games during the DOS era are able to relive the good o' days when instead of controlling how your character moves by walking everywhere around a map and running into random enemies, you're actually able to pick things up, examine objects and basically interact with them. Those new to the game play would definitely relish the originality of it all on a GBA game. It'd take pages and pages to list out every revolutionary aspect of the game play. Battles are turn-based, and unlike most RPGs today, weapons actually have a life-span. They have limited number of uses, and you get the ability to learn skills from various weapons by increasing your experience with the specific ones. Sounds confusing? The learning curve of the game is not that long, so you'd get the hang of everything pretty quickly, thanks to the detailed explanation by Rose, the black cat (which could turn out to be a problem the second time playing the game as information such as this would be redundant and a pain to get through). An "Oversoul" bar also enables you to use "Breaker" skills, definitely a plus point for fans of certain console RPGs *cough*.

To say that the graphics are amazing would be an understatement. Cut-scenes are beautifully drawn, and sprites have a variety of face emotions. It's easy to tell when a character is happy or sad. My only problem would be that some maps are recycled, and you get a bit of deja vu at times. One such area would be when you're climbing the Stairways early on in the game. The maps hardly look any different, though the interaction with objects are. The enormous amount of skills all have their own animation and voice-overs. Another impressive element of the game would be the amount of voice-overs and exquisite music. Before every battle commences and after eliminating the enemies, a random character would yell something in victory or to taunt them, depending on the situation. You rarely get so much voice-overs in such a large-scale, and how they managed to pull it off is awe-inspiring. The music, regardless of it being background or battle, is beautiful. You get what you need for the specific sequence, but most of the time the music spells something mystical, mysterious - perfect for the theme of secrecy revolving around Riviera.

Riviera: The Promised Land is without a doubt one of the best GBA games to appear on the gaming scene. The flow and connection of everything is almost perfect, and never would a gamer be so engaged by the plot and game play than this. There are a lot of possible interaction with both objects and characters and you'd definitely play the game multiple times to see the various reactions. Buy or rent? If you think buying it is wrong, you'd never want to be right again.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/18/05