Desertification has been ravaging the continent of Vainqueur, forcing the two major countries of Alistel and Granorg into a war over the remaining fertile land. We play as Stocke, a special intelligence operative for Alistel. One day, Stocke receives from his boss what appears to be a blank book—but turns out to be a magical artifact known as the White Chronicle, which allows Stocke to travel through time. Teo and Lippti, children who act as advisers to the holder of the White Chronicle, warn Stocke of the world's inevitable destruction from desertification and task him with stopping it.
Since the White Chronicle gives Stocke the power to travel through time, you'd probably expect Radiant Historia to be a time travel story. And you'd be wrong. On its face the game tries to act and present itself as a time travel story, but it falls apart once you apply the smallest bit of scrutiny.
The plot constantly gets hung up on problems that could easily be solved if Stocke used his time travel powers to their fullest extent. For instance, at one point in the game, Stocke discovers his friend's battalion was routed in a battle. Stocke travels back in time and rushes to the location of the battalion's defeat, only to discover that his friend was the only member of the battalion he arrived in time to save. Yet there's no reason Stocke couldn't go back further to arrive even earlier or simply warn his friend. The weirdest part is that while Stocke seems to absolutely refuse to use time travel to overcome obstacles in the main plot, he constantly travels through time to solve trifling problems in side-quests.
The game isn't even totally consistent on its own terms. The game presents Stocke's task as searching through the myriad timelines to find the only one where the desertification is stopped... but there are only two timelines in the entire game. While Stocke makes a certain decision near the beginning of the game that splits the timeline in two, every single other choice in the game either causes the plot to advance or leads to an immediate game over.
Events in one timeline affect events in the other, but this doesn't make much sense. If these are alternate timelines, it seems like they should all be equal possibilities simultaneously coexisting with each other. So why does simply experiencing one timeline affect the other?
To top it off, the game explicitly states that the White Chronicle only affects "Stocke's" time, yet all the party members retain their experience and equipment even as you travel through time, which makes absolutely no sense in-game.
Each of these game systems make perfect sense from a practical standpoint. It would take a massive amount of resources to design an exponential number of timelines, and would be a waste if most of them were unimportant dead ends. Allowing timelines to affect each other prevents the player from progressing too far in one timeline without making enough progress in the other. And retaining the characters' status at each point in time would be complicated, and force you to constantly undo your own progress.
Yet despite their practical benefits, they all contradict the story's internal logic, and the game is worse off for it. It's obvious that the game doesn't take its story and rules very seriously, as it bends itself backwards to allow events to progress in the way it wants, or to make things more convenient for the developers or the player. And if the game won't take its own rules seriously, it's hard for me to do so.
If you simply drop your expectations, think of Radiant Historia as a dual timeline story rather than a time travel story, and give the game leeway to drive its plot in whichever direction it desires, it isn't half bad. Not that great, but certainly not bad. Much of the game's plot revolves around political drama, which is surprisingly competent for a shonen video game.
In fact, the plot's biggest failures occur when the game drops its political maneuverings and enters traditional hero story territory. At a certain point, the party discovers that the thing they were trying to do to stop the desertification would essentially be doing nothing more than putting a band-aid on the underlying cause. The party resolves to find a way to permanently fix the issue once and for all... and promptly proceeds to slap that band-aid on and call it a day. This makes the main story's conclusion unsatisfying, since we know that we did little more than a temporary fix.
Fortunately, this was fixed in the bonus content added in the Perfect Chronology. While the main scenario covers two game-spanning timeline, the bonus content adds a large quantity of short timelines which culminate in a final resolution of the desertification problem. The game recommends accessing these timelines during the main quest only if you've played the game before, and otherwise doing them in the post-game, but I'm not sure that's the best idea. If you do that, you're then forced to play through all the introductory quests, which are already relatively dull and will be even more boring if you're over-leveled. On top of that, there is a certain plot element introduced in the bonus content that will make a certain scene in the main quest much more impactful, but only if you do the bonus content first.
The plot of Radiant Historia is serviceable, but doesn't end up particularly special compared to JRPGs in general. The dual timelines do give it a unique blend, but it doesn't reach the full depths of a time travel story that it seems to be reaching for.
Even if the game faltered a bit on the story, it took advantage of the dual timeline structure to deepen its characters. This is most readily apparent for the villains. In most games the villain may be sympathetic to a certain extent, but that's the only side we get to see with them. However, in Radiant Historia, we get to literally see multiple sides to the characters thanks to the dual timelines. A character might seem like a cartoonish villain in one timeline, but then we get to deal with them on less antagonistic terms in the other timeline and see where they're coming from. The extra content further deepens our understanding of the villains and other side characters through a large number of shorter timelines.
That being said, they majorly screwed up with the Big Bad, who's an utter disappointment. The issue is that the Big Bad could have won at basically any point if they had chosen, and they simply... never choose to. In fact, they end up taking several actions that fly directly in the face of their apparent goal. It really feels like we beat the Big Bad not because we overcame the odds on our own power, but because the Big Bad was incompetent and/or simply didn't choose to win, which is unsatisfying. When looking at the main quest alone, this discrepancy between the villain's stated goals and their actions seems to create space for depth in the character... but that space simply isn't filled in with any development by the game. On top of that, the 3DS bonus content almost explicitly rejects any sort of complex interpretation of the Big Bad, practically confirming that the unsatisfying surface-level interpretation is the correct one.
Also, while the villains and side characters benefit from the multiple timeline story structure, the party member gets dragged down... by two of its members. Those two members are Marco and Raynie. The issue is that Marco and Raynie are boring, and also your main party members for most of the game. They have the most dialogue and screentime (after Stocke), but the least personality (besides the stoic warrior character, maybe) and no plot relevance. In fact, at one point the game does try to give Marco and Raynie plot justification, but their plot justification is literally that they have no other plot justification. The other party members have depth, development, and unique attributes, but just aren't as prevalent.
Sometimes the characters can feel flat because the graphics don't do a great job at conveying emotion. The characters are generally represented by well-done retro-style pixel graphics, and the important characters all have gorgeous character portraits. However, while these graphics are technically impressive, they aren't expressive. The sprites are never exaggerated for effect, and only have a small handful of bubbles to convey emotion. The portraits are amazing, but only the facial expressions change. Since we can see the entire upper body, the fact that it never moves make the characters feel physically rigid. That being said, the (Japanese) voice acting is extremely emotive, and more than makes up for the graphics. The voice actors do a fantastic job of bringing life and emotion to every scene they're a part of.
The other place the graphics fall through a bit is the world-building and atmosphere, although this is also partially the fault of the writing. Radiant Historia is supposed to take place on a continent ravaged by war, famine, and desertification, but we never see it. The cities have plenty of people (and able-bodied men) and the villages are lush and green. Vainqueur looks like a standard bright JRPG fantasy world, not a land on the brink of destruction.
Otherwise, the graphics are lovely! The main game world graphics are done in retro-style sprites, and the party members get slightly higher resolution battle sprites as well. The character portraits and auxiliary graphics are sleek and modern.
I already praised the voice acting, but the musical soundtrack is... okay. Radiant Historia has a nice orchestral score, and while all the songs sound nice and fitting, none of them are particularly spectacular or noteworthy. Additionally, since you'll be time traveling and repeating scenarios, you end up hearing the same few songs over and over again, even though the soundtrack is actually of a decent size.
The battle system puts a noteworthy twist on traditional turn-based JRPG battles, but unfortunately gets a bit stale in the endgame. If you've played some JRPGs, you've probably run into one with a row system, where you can put your party members in the front row, where they deal and receive more damage, or the back row, where they deal and receive less damage. The big twist of Radiant Historia's battles is that is uses a similar system... for the enemies.
Your party members have set positions in battle, but the enemies appear on a three-by-three grid. The closer the enemy is to your party, the more physical damage it will both deal and receive. Naturally, your party members have special moves that can move enemies around the grid. Additionally, you can move enemies onto the same space... and then attacking that space deals damage to both enemies. (However, the enemies will split onto separate spaces once your characters' moves end.) Attacking multiple times in a row also triggers a hit counter, which multiplies the damage of subsequent hits.
Clearly, the battle system is about physically manipulating the enemies and building up large hit counts to damage all enemies with massive damage. Forming the proper chain of moves you want often requires your characters to be in a particular order, and so the game allows you to swap your character's turn in battle with any other character's. Including enemies. (If you swap your turn with an enemy, however, your character's defense drops until they move again.) Giving the enemy your turn a bunch of times in a row, you can build up a huge chain of your characters' turns, allowing you to form a massive combo.
This is a simple yet inventive twist, and adds depth and excitement to the battle system for about the first two thirds of the game. It truly is fun seeing what sort of combos you can create as you unlock the characters' skills, and get forced to develop new strategies for new enemy types that get introduced. However, as the end of the game approaches, your characters learn skills that just clearly outclass anything else they have, and enemies simply get more stats or baddies per battle, rather than new abilities.
The only way to take advantage of the battle system is to have your characters move a couple of times in a row, but when facing several strong enemies, this becomes quite difficult since if you give the enemies your turns to build up a chain of turns for yourself, you'll most likely end up using those turns just to heal. You're then forced to just wear them down with standard one- or two-move turns, which is boring and much less effective.
Full disclosure: I went down to the easiest difficulty level for the final fifth of the game solely because it let me skip the random encounters. (Once you go down to the easiest difficulty level the game doesn't let you increase it back, so... oh well.) On top of that, the enemies don't scale in any way whatsoever, so if your party (or just a character) get overleveled, there's no way to counterbalance it or have the game catch up.
I really liked the idea of the battle system, and it is fun for most of the game, but unfortunately as the game wears on the battles transition from being fun to tiresome, which is admittedly a problem for a lot of JRPGs.
The whole package of Radiant Historia is... okay? It's a decent modern JRPG. And only "decent," despite what some people claim. While the dual timelines let us see more of the characters (especially the NPCs) than we get to see in most games, the game plays fast and loose with its "time travel" rules, weakening the experience.
To me, the biggest argument against Radiant Historia is Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a time travel JRPG masterpiece, and does basically everything Radiant Historia does better. If you decide to play Radiant Historia anyway, you'll have a decent time. But it's an experience that doesn't do anything particularly special, and will most likely be lost to the pages of history.
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