Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology was a nice surprise for me in 2018. As someone that personally did not like Octopath Traveler, I felt like I got a lot more of what I was looking for out of an RPG out of this DS remake.

Although the story line is incredibly linear, it tells a fairly interesting story of warring nations against the backdrop of an impending “desertification” catastrophe. The game does a good job of maintaining a sense of high-intrigue with a cast of NPC characters that have different motivations, that will either ally themselves or oppose you depending upon the situation or timeline. The main cast of party characters, while occasionally tropey, each have moments that are legitimately well written and voice acted, to the point where I did genuinely care about ensuring that each of them had a “happy path” ending to their storyline.

The plot of this game does a good job of baking itself into the game-play systems as well, specifically via the re-navigation of the games timelines to progress the story-line or solve side quests. I enjoyed the puzzle solving of remembering which part of the history you may need to return to in order to change certain events.

I even enjoyed some of the “failure” scenarios that can occur when you make decisions at certain critical junctures. Some of them in particular were kind of hilarious, when a seemingly innocuous decision could destroy the world, and they were good for a quick laugh before getting back to the main game without much hassle.

Lastly, regarding the battle system: at the beginning of the game I found it to be somewhat dull. However, once you unlock all of the characters and their abilities, the possibility space of the synergies in battle start to get a lot more interesting. While simple at first, the battle system actually has a fair bit of depth to it, especially when you periodically change your combination of characters. It is incredibly satisfying to game the turn order in order to build up the combo meter and unleash brutally high-damage attacks.

Overall, Radiant Historia was a game that seemed to come out too-late on the DS, and this remake may be coming out too-late on the 3DS as well. I think it is worthy of any RPG fan’s attention.