How is Radiata Stories, gameplay wise?

[Leroy]

I saw this was $20 at Fry's.. (and it has 480p 16x9 mode!). I'm just curious how it is from a purely gameplay standpoint, I know it's an action RPG but I also heard it takes like six hours of talking and crap to get into the game, which is a big turnoff. I don't exactly need another Adventure/RPG game on my platter but I have a weakness for cheap games.

[supersonic1453]

It's decent.  I'd give it about a 6.5 or 7.  The combat's pretty good, but you can only control the main character.  You can pretty much go do whatever you want between advancements in the story.  There are a lot of characters to recruit your party, but there is no real point to keeping characters in your party for the sake of development.  The people you can recruit don't learn any new moves and you can't change their equipment or anything, so the people that suck, will suck for the rest of the game.

Yeah, the beginning is pretty boring, but you can do whatever you want after that.

[Cless]

I still haven't touched this game. I'm a failure of a tri-Ace fan.

I pre-ordered and bought it at full price...

[supersonic1453]

Well I'm at the very end of the game and have not beaten it, as I do with so many games.

[Leroy]

Yeah, I'm not much of a tri-Ace fan.. but that's more because I haven't really played much of theirs. I have Valkyire Profile sitting in my "to play" stack for years now and I just seem to pass by it again and again.

So is Radiata a long game? If it's not too long I might as well pick it up.

[supersonic1453]

It's really as long as you make it.  You can dick around a lot in that game, but if you just went straight through the main story, I don't think it's that long.

[Leroy]

Can you get a fulfilling experience out of it in the 30-40 hour range?

[supersonic1453]

Yeah, probably.  It's hard for me to tell though because I spent a LOT of time recruiting people and doing sidequests.  I still haven't recruited all of the humans yet.  You should be able to beat it and get some good party members though in that time.

[Panda_Samurai]

Can you get a fulfilling experience out of it in the 30-40 hour range?

Yep. I got 40 hours on my 100% complete file with all the characters and what not.

[supersonic1453]

Well, I still can't beat Elwyn.

[Phren]

Radian gave me absolute FITS trying to kill.

The battle system's kinda slow, and recruting characters is a good chunk of what you do in the game, if you try for as many as you can. Some are rather difficult and depend on some retarded factors, so ou might want to skim through a recruiting guide. The replay value is in trying to get everyone in your book and seeing the other of the two plot sides to the second half of the game. Some mild after-game stuff involving Lenneth is neat.
All in all I give it a 6 out of 10 - Wasn't bad but let me down from what I was expecting. It could have been so much more. 

For your hatred of forced plot, it's pretty bad  in the beginning, admittedly, but slacks off and lets you loose later on.

Cool thing is that I think there are NO generic characters in the game (other then soldiers and stuff - not sure, been a while..) and you can fight just about anyone by walking up and kicking them in the shin a few times.

[supersonic1453]

Yeah, everyone is unique except for guards and you can recruit every single townsperson at one point or another.

[Panda_Samurai]

Well uhm, I just went through the game again to more closely observe flaws and strong points (I do this with most games). I found that the combat system reminded me of a more fluid Dynasty Warriors (I admit, I adore these games, even if they have meh graphics and pretty repettetive, mediocre gameplay. After 5 years of playing them, I STILL haven't figured out why slashing the hell out of things with the same button combinations is so satisfying.) The unique characters are one of my favorite parts, I thought it was very inventive and gave the game more depth. I like the idea of being able to recruit unique characters by doing sidequests, never got old for me. Along with that, the way recruiting characters revolves around time is seldom used in JRPGs, so I enjoyed that as well.I loved the music as well, almost all of the tunes were catchy for me. I found the variety of weapons and volty attacks/blasts made the combat feel fresh, but then again, this is coming from someone who has bought Dynasty Warriors 2-5, Samurai Warriors 1-2, all of their "expansion" packs and enjoyed all of them. The story didn't take itself too seriously at first, so I didn't mind it. Later though, the plot became sort of serious, which surprised me.  I didn't like the ending very much, it was unsatisfying, but overall I thought the story was decent. My main problem was the length. While I find kind of cool that Tri-ace put so many characters and little sidequests in a short game, I abhorred the fact the game could be beaten in 25 hours. I got up to 40 by running around killing stuff and getting every character. If the games story was longer, I'm quite sure I would have enjoyed it much more.

I give it a 8.5/10, as much as I hate to be so specific with ratings ( I prefer the 5 scale, lower parts of 10 are sort of useless, .5 intervals are sort of unnecessary in most cases, but I feel a 4/5 is too low and a 5/5 is too high for this game. I think more people should play it.

[supersonic1453]

I like all the character recruiting and whatnot, but it's just that the characters you get at the beginning are going to become useless regardless of how much you level them.  No one is going to be better than Elwyn in a fight.  One or two other people could be substituted for Kain for healing.  The higher level Guild members are just better than the others in every way possible.

[Phren]

lol, I just found I wasted too much healing all my other members and they distracted me from dodging and counterattacking, so I just went solo after the first part of the game was over.

[neogalahad]

I thought it was a pretty good game actually. I loved the graphics. they were kiddish but very well made. The gameplay was sort of mediocre but I loved the story and the amount of characters was amazing. What was truly impressive was the fact that every character had their own personality. They armor designs for the main character were really cool too. though some of them were kinda funny like the wood armor. It has a wierd helmet for it. Overall I would give this a 8.5. It is in my top 10.