Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology review

[Wilhelm]

Radiant Historia, a 2010 role-playing game developed by Atlus for the Nintendo DS, had a lot going for it: a clever combat system, a complex narrative and great moment-to-moment character writing. For all that Historia did well, though, the game as a whole never quite jelled, and the package added up to a little less than the sum of its admittedly compelling parts. This would seem to make Historia both an unlikely selection for a remake and, at the same time, a perfect candidate for one.

By looks alone, Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology for the Nintendo 3DS doesn’t do much to excite. It offers few technical improvements over a DS game that hardly pushed that system’s limits. The visuals now make use of the 3DS’ higher resolution; character portraits have been replaced with generic anime renditions; battle icons display more detailed tactical information ... and that’s about it. In terms of overhauls, this is certainly no Metroid: Samus Returns.

Nevertheless, beneath its dated visuals, Chronology contains one of the finest role-playing adventures on 3DS — a platform that’s seen no end of great RPGs. What Chronology lacks in technological upgrades it makes up for with a substantial amount of new story material. More importantly, it gives players a new play option that remedies one of Historia’s greatest failings.

In reworking the DS RPG for 3DS, Atlus has taken the opportunity to rethink the way the game’s systems interconnect. Historia featured an excellent combat setup, with a tactical format that proved both challenging and flexible. Its story told a similarly intricate tale based around time travel. Unfortunately, the complexity present in both its story and gameplay caused those two elements to trip over one another rather than work in unison. Happily, Chronology contains a new play mode — the “Friendly” difficulty level — that strikes a more comfortable balance between the two by downplaying combat.

You could readily assume “Friendly” difficulty to be nothing more than an easy mode that dumbs down gameplay for casual players. That’s true on some level, but the nature of Historia’s central gameplay mechanic gives this new format its own intrinsic value. Chronology in Friendly mode is nothing less than a transformative experience, effectively shifting the game from one genre to another. Here, what was once a flawed yet promising RPG becomes, in essence, a stellar visual novel.

Chronology contains one of the finest role-playing adventures on 3DS
Historia tells the tale of a soldier named Stocke who gains the power to travel through time, exploring the impact of different choices as he seeks to prevent the end of the world. In gameplay terms, this takes the form of a split timeline with branching paths and critical “nodes” to which Stocke can return as needed.

The player experiences this in the form of Groundhog Day-style loops as Stocke leaps back and forth through history to approach critical decision points from different angles. It’s an interesting premise, but it comes with a downside: You end up watching the same cutscenes over and over again as you chip away at causality. Solving Historia’s temporal riddles typically means viewing a single conversation several times, with each iteration introducing a few new lines of dialogue to reflect newly realized objectives or Stocke’s expanded awareness.

 Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology - artwork of dancing around a fireplace Atlus
The original version of Historia tried to mitigate the repetition by giving you the ability to fast-forward or skip repeated dialogue. Unfortunately, the game failed to account for the fact that you also had to play through the same sequences — which is to say, fight through identical RPG battles multiple times. Historia’s time travel format involves experimenting to uncover the proper course of action, and that means slogging repeatedly through the same enemy encounters during those searches. RPG battles can be tedious at the best of times, and Historia is no different. Even its clever combat system, which involves manipulating both the enemy’s position in the field and the player’s turn order, loses its shine once you’ve had to fight a given enemy formation for the umpteenth time while trying to figure out which vaguely hinted-at key moment in the past you need to manipulate in order to advance the story.

What was once a flawed yet promising RPG becomes, in essence, a stellar visual novel
Chronology’s Friendly mode allows you to simply bypass all these battles, and in doing so it greatly improves the overall experience. In the original Historia, you could attack an enemy on the field before entering battle to gain first-round initiative. In Friendly mode, striking a foe outside of combat instantly defeats them, granting you all the experience and cash you’d normally earn in battle. By removing all those constant, protracted fights from the picture, Chronology allows you to focus entirely on the story. This does wonders for the game’s most arduous sequences. Skimming past combat keeps the pace brisk and lively even when you find yourself struggling to advance the story.

It might seem a shame to cut Historia’s excellent battle mechanics completely out of the picture. That’s what makes Friendly especially great: You don’t have to remove combat altogether. If you like, you can fight enemies properly rather than simply defeating them with a preemptive strike. Plus, certain plot-critical battles (along with all enemy encounters in one of Chronology’s new side stories, the Vault of Time) can’t be avoided: Some combat is required no matter what. Friendly mode doesn’t abandon its RPG elements; it simply allows players to focus on exploring the story without the burden of constant distractions.

With this new approach, Historia’s excellent plot truly shines. You advance the story by visiting and revisiting critical junctions in history, exploring different outcomes in the process. Time in Historia branches into two forks (“standard” and “alternate” history), but those timelines don’t exist in isolation. Your actions in one timeline can influence events further down the road in the other. To make things even more complex, Stocke isn’t the only one with the power to change history, and he constantly finds his actions being parried by a mysterious enemy agent who possesses the same ability to reshape the future by visiting the past. The story plays out through a combination of earth-shaking upheavals and subtle nuances, and it uses constant iteration of key events to its advantage.

Were Chronology to offer nothing more than a reduced-friction rendition of a thoughtful but uneven game, it would merit a look for that reason alone. There’s more to it than that, though — about 50 percent more, to be precise. Chronology expands the main storyline somewhat with a handful of new event “nodes” on the timeline chart. It also adds two substantial new bonuses that exist on the periphery of the original narrative and add hours of extra game to explore.

Chronology’s Friendly mode greatly improves the overall experience
The first of these, the aforementioned Vault of Time, plays more or less like a bonus challenge dungeon. It consists of floor after floor of monsters to fight, with the stakes growing ever higher as you advance. Victory becomes ever more difficult the further you travel, but the rewards you earn along the way scale commensurately with the risk. The Vault contains a shop that sells unique (and often quite powerful) equipment, making it especially valuable for those who opt not to tackle the game in Friendly mode.

However, it’s the second bonus feature — the Dunamis — that proves the more interesting of Chronology’s new additions. While this plotline occasionally intersects with the main story, for the most part it exists separately from the standard and alternate timelines. The Dunamis, set in a time-traveling vessel captained by a mysterious woman named Nemesia, allows players to explore interesting tangents from the canonical storyline. It takes a what-if approach to Historia’s world, thrusting Stocke into strange alternate realities where his comrades and enemies behave in unexpected ways. These play out in the form of a quest for mysterious magical artifacts. While mostly insubstantial in the overall scheme of the plot, the Dunamis provides a fun and often surprising window on familiar story elements without feeling like it’s simply treading water.

I should stress that while I appreciate Chronology’s Friendly mode for presenting a great story with minimum fuss, by no means is it the only way to play the game. The original Historia’s standard difficulty remains intact, with the countless battles it entails. The game also adds a Hard mode that genuinely forces players to master the nuances of the battle system. Again, though, the unique nature of Historia’s plot advancement makes Friendly mode something more than a beginners-only breeze. It strips away the constant, distracting battles that bog down the cyclical storyline, while offering just enough mandatory and optional combat to ensure players don’t miss out on its thoughtful RPG systems.

Wrap-up
Chronology finally makes good on Historia’s promise
With Chronology, Atlus has finally made good on the promise inherent in the original Historia. Then, the company threw in several hours of new material for good measure. The fact that Chronology’s bonus additions divide out into one about story and one about combat reinforces the remake team’s understanding of the game’s underlying duality.

Thanks to its late release, Historia on DS has been largely overlooked or forgotten. Chronology seems likely to suffer a similar fate, arriving at the presumed tail end of the 3DS’ life. It deserves better. Does it seem counterintuitive that this RPG works better when played as a different genre altogether? Perhaps ... but somehow, that seems perfectly fitting for this strange, convoluted, time-traveling tale.