Young Jack Russell has set his sights on becoming a renowned Royal Radiata Knight like his father, who served the kingdom as a member of that order for many years. Unluckily, Jack has quite a bit of room for improvement in his overall quality. He is a naughty boy with a sharp tongue and a preference for kicking objects and even people around, and he even tends to kick pointy things. Can a mission to save the planet teach this rude 16-year-old how to become a decent human being?
Square Enix’s Radiata Stories is a role-playing game that is a comical and lighthearted take on the fantasy genre. You take control of Jack as he ventures from settlement to settlement, searching for allies and performing menial jobs. There is another storyline that involves rescuing the kingdom from certain destruction; however, you will have plenty of time to go around and get to know the locals before you have to worry about that. The gameplay is very open-ended, allowing players to investigate new areas at their own pace.
In a typical role-playing game (RPG), the non-playable characters (NPCs) do nothing but loiter around and wait for the player to come and listen to their one line of dialogue. However, in Radiata Stories, every character has their own story. People get up, go places, do things, and then head back to their homes at the end of the day. It is essential to Jack’s success in the adventure that he learns the timetables of the characters and uses those schedules to his advantage. They may not always have the time to stop what they’re doing and chat with you, so it’s up to you to catch them at the perfect moment. This results in Radiata feeling less like a game and more like an actively alive and moving universe.
Real-time combat is utilized, much like that in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time and the Tales series published by Namco; however, you can provide broad guidelines to the NPC party members regarding how they should behave during battle. There is even a link mechanism that allows you to coordinate your group’s strategy with the other members.
Two primary storylines may be followed through the game, and once you’ve finished one of them, you get to maintain all of your previous progress, including your money and your talents, when you play the game again. It takes a minimum of two playthroughs of the game to uncover and recruit all 177 of the game’s prospective party members (reminiscent of Konami’s Suikoden series of video games). Once you have recruited people as friends, you can change the members of your current party at any time; however, the only character whose actions you will ever have direct control over is Jack; if his health bar reaches 0, the adventure will be over.
