Radiant Historia is a recently released RPG for the DS made by tri-Ace, and published by Square-Enix. The two most notable things about this game are the immense amount of cues it’s taken from previous works in the field, extending their lifespan and notoriety, and the implementation of a relatively successful interactive narrative structure.
Radiant Historia is a Japanese RPG that, after roughly a six year drought, weaves some of the most successful elements of prior works into its experience. The music is heavily influenced by the music of Xenogears; the plot is influenced by games in the Ivalice series of games including Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics and others; the art style is similar to tri-Ace RPGs that had come out before their attempt to switch to 3d, which was not well accepted. The importance of the influence of these prior works, and the creation of a successful game using those ideas in the modern ecology of game sales, is that, due to systemic factors of the direction the games industry went in the late 90s, these games were killed.
RPGs, requiring at their core, a great deal of dramatic writing, evocative music, and implementation of a compelling battle system, lost out when the industry swung toward next gen consoles that were sold almost entirely on their ability to run high level 3d graphics; RPGs, having to traditionally cut corners with graphics or use unique techniques in order to make games that look good without having to devote all their resources to graphically animating the world of the game, were left in the dust. Radiant Historia proves that there is still a dedicated market for those types of games; and with the emergence of newer distribution venues such as iPhone and Facebook, the limiter created by next gen consoles is being lifted. Once the systemic problem — the consoles and their aim — was removed, the drought of RPGs ended almost abruptly.
The meatiest part of Radiant Historia, and the most relevant piece to interactive cinema, is the successful implementation of its interactive narrative structure. The plot is simple; the country is at war, and the special intelligence branch of the government and the army at at odds for who controls the country’s power — it’s a very Hamlet style of story. The way the interactivity works is that the player chooses very early whether to side with the special intelligence side or the army side; this main narrative branch is the only major branch in the plot, going against the overuse that killed narrative branching. After choosing, the player can then switch freely between the events of either timelines, visit the past, and use information only available in one timeline in the other timeline. Radiant Historia improves upon the interactivity of the branching idea in new ways, in addition to successfully avoiding misusing it: it implements the narrative map itself into the game and uses it extensively to fill specific gameplay elements.
The narrative map — literally the map of all the events, branching plots and structures visually represented in the game — is used as a puzzle space in order to solve problems within the game. An example is: when working for the special forces, you need to know the intentions of General Hugo, the leader of the army, in order to continue so you, the player, bounce around in the available times searching for an appropriate moment to speak to General Hugo. Additionally, the map is used to fulfill two common gameplay mechanics: checkpoints, the places where players revive if they die or reach a dead end in the plot; and new game+, the ability to revisit events that have already happened.
Its use of the plot points as checkpoints interweaves the story with the gameplay mechanics in a new and successful way. This weaving also improves how the story is experienced in different ways. Traditionally, a game story does not have many of the conveniences of other media that communicates story; conveniences such as being able to fast forward a movie, or skip a chapter that is not interesting or relevant in a book. However, in Radiant Historia’s model where the plot map is heavily integrated with the game itself, conveniences such as the ability to skip text, fast forward events, and jump around time, makes the presentation of the plot much more open and accessible than most games. Any chapter is open to revisiting; any chapter can be skipped and returned to later; most events can be avoided or put off, so the player can make meaningful choices about which plot elements to access and in what order.