Every once in a while I hear critics and consumers talking about how a Japanese Role-Playing Game feels “old school” again. That the story and gameplay seem to match up to what came before on the Super Nintendo and, on occasion, PlayStation. It’s the same with just about every genre, but Japanese Role-Playing Games have had a radical change aesthetically, narratively and mechanically that lend them to the illusion that they’re not as good as they used to be.

In terms of Western games, a lot of times you’ll get people discussing about options and choice. Deus Ex and Planescape: Torment allowed you to beat the game by killing very few people, even right down to “defeating” the final boss of Torment with nothing more than options in a dialogue tree. First-person shooters used to be less linear, hold your hand less and have longer levels. For the most part, however, these genres are still the same at their core.

The Japanese Role-Playing Game, on the other hand, is a bit confused. What makes a game a JRPG? Simply that it is Japanese? That it has hit points? That it has a particular style? Even though Cthulu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII and all of the Penny Arcade games are developed by Western studios, their style has more in common with Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire than the likes of Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 2.

While fans of Western dominated genres continue to sit on their porch and proclaim how it’s just not as good as the old days, however, I continuously hear Japanese RPG fans herald select games as being “like the old days”, either in pre-release hype or after playing it. Radiant Historia is one such game, and I confess to praising it as such myself at first.

However, to do so both oversells the game while simultaneously does not give it due credit. A lot of players compare the game to Chrono Trigger simply because it involves time travel, but the nature of this mechanic is very different. Chrono Trigger’s time travel is still very linear. You do not go back to before you met Ayla in prehistoric times and change things slightly. Once you’ve done certain events in the past, they are done. You can adjust month, day and year on the time machine, but not hours, minutes or seconds. This focuses on a much larger, broad spectrum of traveling through time, where you begin planting seeds in a desert in one era only to find a lush forest in that same location in a future era.

This is not the approach that Radiant Historia takes, instead focusing on jumping between events in a very short span of time. Could be days, could be weeks, could be months. Either way you’re not crossing between the ages. In addition, the player also jumps between two separate timelines, progressing through what is referred to as the “true history” and the “alternate history”. A player’s actions in one timeline will have subtle changes in the other, forcing the player to continuously jump between the two until they get closer and closer to uniting them.

Which brings me to my first complaint. Jumping across time is actually rather tedious. The game has specific moments where you can jump to, and often enough these are at cut-scenes. Most of the time a player can simply skip through the exorbitant amount of text, but every so often this will also skip past any new dialogue or alternate outcomes. This leaves the player having to choose between scrolling through paragraphs of old text just to see if there’s anything new or skipping through and risking the loss of new context. This, in fact, happened to me and actually caused me to ponder having encountered a bug when the story progressed. I had skipped an earlier cut-scene that seemed to be a repeat for several lines of dialogue, and when I went to another moment in time I chose to skip another cut-scene believing it to be unchanged. It turns out I actually had gained the new ability I had been looking for, but I wasn’t aware as it seemed that I’d be treated to nothing but story I’d already seen.

There are a few ways this could have been avoided. One of which is to have a simple variable that indicates if the player had seen that text before. If not, then allow the player to skip up to that point and then show them all the new story. Otherwise, skip it all. These boolean variables won’t take up enough space on a DS cart as to be trouble. Alternately, in the event that a cut-scene is changed, simply prevent the player from skipping through.

The game also has a few pacing issues as well. There are moments where the story feels the urgent need to move on, to rush to the next objective, but the player will instead be forced to trek through the wilderness avoiding or fighting random encounters along the way. As these sections can easily become a little long in the tooth it is easy to become frustrated with what seems to be forced padding. Yet there are other times where it seems like the player has plenty of time for this sort of tour through the world, yet it skips ahead right to their destination.

Exacerbating this problem is the inability to skip over sections of the overworld. The game forces the player to go in and out of every location, choosing instead to insert more powerful foes every time you need to backtrack through older areas.

By the end of the game, however, it doesn’t matter. The story takes some time to gain momentum, but once it does you are brought into an experience that slowly reveals its theme to you.

Radiant Historia is a game about personal sacrifice. They don’t necessarily beat you over the head with it, but it’s also not so subtle that it could be a matter of personal interpretation. The end of the game is about how much of yourself will you give to make the world a better place. When you look back on the events of the game you can see this idea carried along, be it in evil characters or good.

If anything makes Radiant Historia an “old school” role-playing game it is simply in the manner of delivering this plot. It never really feels melodramatic and the player controls a group of adults (and one child) that are experienced military troops or adventurers (and one child) instead of a group of teenagers that have never fought anything bigger than a tsetse fly. It does not play to the old tropes.

This does not make it “as good” as the story of Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, but at the same time many players were younger at that time. We hadn’t read as complex a series of books or been exposed to the deeper philosophies of top-notch cinema. Such a comparison is pointless and impossible. All that needs to be known is that Radiant Historia has an interesting tale to weave, and it does it rather effectively.

The initial draw to this game, however, will be the combat. A semi-tactical approach was taken in Radiant Historia, arranging foes on a grid. They can move around this grid and even take up formations that improve their attacks, but the real trick is how the player’s special abilities factor into the grid. Certain characters will have moves that push foes across the different blocks on the grid, often enough mashing them together. If the player has multiple characters attacking in a row, then you can chain these attacks together to cause greater damage to more enemies. The player also has the option to change when a character will take their turn, swapping with other characters or even foes at the cost of some defensive capability.

The more the player chains attacks, the more the defense of each foe in that chain will fall, and the more enemies can be thrown into the barrage of blows. Early on this allows combat to be a short and empowering affair. The player may feel clever wiping out an entire group of foes in one slew of attacks, and the better combat performance the more experience and money will be earned.

Yet the system is not without its flaws, and particularly due to the time travel aspect of the game. Only the protagonist is capable of traveling through time. While the game will keep the other characters with the same stats and equipment no matter what period of time you’re in, you won’t always know who is going to be in your party. There are only two characters that remain mostly consistent across both timelines, and while they are mostly effective, towards the end their abilities are hardly the best for tackling the bosses.

It becomes another gamble, or forces the player to grind any other characters so that no one falls behind. They have adjusted experience for this reason, where weaker characters will gain more than stronger ones, thus allowing them to catch up more quickly. However, it is a lot easier to just use the same three characters the entire game without having to grind or risk being caught unawares. While the end of the game becomes more difficult, it is also far from being impossible.

It’s hard to really suggest a “fix” to this, though. The characters weave in and out with the story, and by the end they’re mostly all consistent. But you spend the majority of the game with all but two additional characters constantly leaving and entering depending on the events and the timeline, so it becomes easier to just rely on a single set party.

On the whole, though, Radiant Historia was perhaps one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve had in recent years. I got sucked into the gameplay first, and that allowed me to get pulled into the plot. While it certainly has its problems, that does not stop it from being one of the more enjoyable games, and stories, I’ve experienced this year. It is an easy recommend to anyone that has a Nintendo DS system, especially if you are, or once were, a fan of Japanese Role-Playing Games.