I Just Couldn't Keep Playing
By way of background, I've played JRPGs by the truckload since the original Final Fantasy. While a great JRPG is something I truly cherish, my attention span for mediocre RPGs has worn thin since I've played so many. I'm at a point in my life where I would love to have time to go back and replay Persona 4 or Final Fantasy VI with the limited time I have for games, so I don't have time to suffer through bad games.
Bottom line, Radiant HIstoria just didn't hold my attention for longer than 5 hours. The game starts off really interesting in terms of throwing you right into the action and presenting a cool scenario: You have the power to time travel and rewrite history and you'll be the only one that knows that you changed something. I honestly think the setup of the game was cooler than Chrono Trigger within the first hour, which is clearly the standard you have to measure this game against (the influence couldn't be clearer in many ways). Ultimately, nothing really gets better from there. After 5 hours, I didn't care about any of the characters, which is the kiss of death for me in an RPG. Of all the reviews I read of this game, I never heard anyone comment on characters they loved and instead focused on the music, time travel, etc. While I admit I quit this game early, I didn't see the problem of bland characters fixing itself. I quickly found myself clicking through the dialogue. Since you have to time travel and rewatch scenes over again (which thankfully you can skip through), the problem exacerbates itself in terms of sheer amount of time spent clicking through a story I don't care about. I can get over some poor RPG design decisions, battle systems quirks, etc, but not having characters I like is a no-go for me. I also think the two characters that coach you through time travel got very annoying over time. Every time you have a plot decision, they show up and armchair quarterback your decision to tell you that there is no right decision and you need to go on a fetch quest to have a potential "right" decision. This happened enough times that I stopped caring about which options I was picking in dialogue. I think the designers wanted this to encourage exploration or different paths, but I'm not sure that is a good thing.
Beyond that, the battle system is just boring. None of the characters are unique in terms of their skillset (everyone has some combination of heal, attack skills, attack magic, etc. that seems doled out in an arbitrary way). When you combine this with the bland character personalities, I just didn't care about any of the people in my party. The battle system seems to be a cross of traditional turn based RPG combat, Grandia (the turn order system) and Valkyrie Profile (setting up combos). I think this could have been cool, but it just doesn't add up to anything interesting - just your standard mash-fest. Couple this with same-y enemies and no boss encounters that far into the game and I just couldn't will myself to play more.
The highlights of my time with Radiant Historia was the soundtrack and a glimmer of cool storyline moment between the two commanders in the enemy army (the music alone was good enough for the 2nd star in the review). The storyline is one of political intrigue similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. While Radiant Historia is definitely less obtuse in terms of sheer volume of characters/factions/etc., I can't say that it captured my interest as much. If you have more willpower than I do, maybe you like that sort of genre enough to keep going to the end as that part of the game is what kept me going. I'm glad I quit when I did and would encourage anyone looking for a JRPG fix to just dust off some of the classics and relive the glory days. While I haven't given up on the genre by a long shot, we JRPG fans just need to be honest with ourselves that not every game is a classic and Radiant Historia is certainly not one of them.
