Review:
Radiant Historia is one of the most unique little JRPGs I've ever played. Set on a continent threatened by desertification, Radiant Historia sees you traveling back and forth through multiple timelines to try and prevent the world's destruction. It has a super unique grid based battle system where enemy placement and moving them around is a core mechanic, which adds a lot of interesting strategy to the combat. The OST is one of industry icon Yoko Shimomura's best works, a truly brilliant OST that shows off exactly what's great about Yoko. The characters are really fun, the story is super compelling, it's a blast. And the art style in the original is just gorgeous, it's a shame what they did in the remaster. It has its problems, don't get me wrong. The game balance isn't spectacular, some party members are leaps and bounds above the others. The pacing can be all over the place, with a lot of stopping and starting as you jump between timelines. The individual storylines you experience can tend to whiff as you work towards a much larger narrative. But it's great, I'm super glad I played it, it's one of the best JRPGs I've ever played in my life, a top 20, maybe a top 15 candidate. 8.4/10
Diary:
11/16/25
This game was a long time coming. I bought Radiant Historia when it was new, 2011 I think, because I was a huge Nintendo Power fan and this was one of the rare games they spotlighted that was actually, you know. Good. Sorry to my fellow Nintendo Power fans but like, that magazine gave crazy coverage, it featured so many 6/10s just because they were like "core games" for the Wii. But I just never got around to playing it, I played like 5 hours of it years ago. And now, in 2025, Radiant Historia is the last game in my current DS collection that I have yet to either finish or shelve. It's been a long awaited game clear and I'm excited to play it, this game is super cool.
Radiant Historia world is very unique. Though on the surface it feels very Final Fantasy VI, that distinctive steampunk fantasy aesthetic, Radiant Historia quickly distinguishes itself through its world building. Hundreds of years ago, an empire that controlled the continent Radiant Historia takes place on, Vainqueur fell. This would normally be a good thing, you know, down with imperialism, but for some reason, no one knows why, the empire falling unleashed a horrifying plague upon the continent. Desertification racked the world, slowly turning the world barren and forcing the people to fight over resources. War is commonplace, as humanity, driven to the few green areas remaining, tries to survive the encroaching wasteland. This desert is, as you would imagine, supernatural, and it not only threatens to consume everything but also everyone. There is a mysterious disease that abounds known as the sand plague, a disease which feeds upon your life force until you turn to sand.
It is here that we meet our protagonist, Stocke. Stocke is a spy working for the intelligence agency of the Kingdom of Alistel. The game opens with Stocke accepting a mission from his higher-up, Weiss, to rendezvous with a fellow spy who is holding important secrets about Alistel's archenemy, the Kingdom of Granorg. Weiss also assigns him a party to do this mission with, something Stocke feels uneasy about as he is a loner by nature. The duo, Raynie and Marco, are former mercenaries whom have decided to seek a home in Alistel and have joined the intelligence agency to earn their keep. Weiss also gifts Stocke the White Chronicle, a completely empty tome that Weiss is particularly interested in for some reason and insists that Stocke take with him. Upon meeting Raynie and Marco, the tome reacts in a very bizarre way, showing Stocke an apparent vision of the two of them lying dead in the grasslands.
While Stocke is obviously put off by this vision, the three of them have a mission to accomplish and so they set off. Despite the loner nature of our protagonist, the trio become fast friends, very quickly learning to trust and support each other. Though they do successfully rendezvous with their target, the mission goes wrong very quickly, and Stocke's vision comes to pass. Raynie and Marco lie dead on the ground, and he chooses to go out on his own terms. And then he awakens in the weirdest place he's ever seen in his life. A bizarre labyrinth of endless staircases that wind around themselves, not abiding by any real logic or reason. Like that famous MC Escher print.
It is here that Stocke meets Lippti and Teo. The duo explain to Stocke that he is in a place beyond time called "Historia", a place he uniquely has access to due to his possession of the White Chronicle. Historia is a passage through which Stocke can travel through time, a passage for him to change history. A passage for him to save Raynie and Marco. After sending him back to the moment before he made the decision that would result in their deaths, he successfully saves his new friends and returns the spy to Alistel. However, he quickly passes out from wounds he endured in the original timeline he was from and, while unconscious, finds himself back in Historia.
It is here that Lippti and Teo explain what is actually going on. Stocke is not simply here to get do-overs. The world is dying, it is not only humanity but the world itself that is facing an end from the desertification that destroys everything. And can be saved if they can find the correct path, the correct series of choices that, if the right thing is chosen, could ensure humanity's future. Stocke must travel through the significant choices he must make in his life to find the correct sequence, using the White Chronicle to go back to the moment before he made those choices and take other paths should the need arise. Eventually, if he keeps exploring the timelines, if he keeps experiencing the events of his life, he may find the way to save the world.
I know that was a lot but like, this IS a JRPG. They have a habit of frontloading info, then having a lull and then backloading info. This aspect of Radiant Historia, the time travel narrative, it is unsurprisingly the thing that drew me to the game originally. Changing destiny and challenging your fate are, of course, very common themes in stories and especially in JRPGs, but I hadn't really seen a game approach time travel in what seemed like a pretty nuanced way. I can only imagine how much of a headache time travel is to incorporate in an interactive medium, having to not only have it be a narrative device but having to figure out how to literally incorporate it as a game mechanic. I think it's why, for all the games about time travel, they tend to either focus on a couple distinctive periods to travel back and forth through or only include time travel in the narrative. Radiant Historia really goes all out, with entire distinct timelines that you can indulge in that are separate from what is the "true path".
Combat in this game rules. Radiant Historia uses a somewhat traditional turn-based combat system, I'd say it takes a lot of notes from Final Fantasy X, especially with a turn order you can view at any time and strategize your plays around. But while the players are in a three-person party standing around, opponents exist on a 3x3 grid. Each opponent occupies its own space and, through player abilities, you can move them around their grid. The closer they are to the party, the more damage they will deal, stuff like that. `So a major part of the games' strategy is trying to play keep away with your opponent. However, an interesting addition to this combat system is how the positions interact with each other. If you push an enemy onto a space where another enemy already occupies, until the enemy's next turn, they are considered as occupying the same space.
Why does this matter? Well, character turns will happen back-to-back-to-back if your party members have turns adjacent to each other. Instead of choosing an attack and having it executed, you choose an attack for each party member who has turns connected to each other and once each turn's action is selected, you see the turns happen in sequence. So if you, say, use Stocke to push an opponent into a space occupied by another opponent, and then attack one of the opponents with another party member, you will attack every enemy that is registered as existing on that square. Comboing your party member's moves together is integral to this system, you can use their skills to strategically handle as many enemies as possible as fast as possible. To help facilitate these combos, you can even switch party member turns around, having a party member either give their movement to another party member or to the enemy to ensure a combo can work out. It's such a cool and unique combat system, I like it a lot. And it encourages people to use MP and not try to muscle through, which is always good for a combat system to do.
I'll be complimenting the music a lot in this game. So, Radiant Historia's OST is done by the greatest video game composer of all time and honestly, one of the greatest classical composers of all time because video game music has so much in common with classical music, Yoko Shimomura. I have known that Shimomura did the OST to this game, I don't really remember the exact reasons other than the time travel thing why I bought this game back in the day. But I have to imagine Yoko Shimomura was a massive reason. But even if I didn't know it was her going in, like, I would've been able to tell immediately. The first town theme, Mechanical Kingdom, already an all timer video game song is so Shimomura coded. The first battle theme, Blue Radiance, another great track, every RPG needs to have good battle themes. And like, the title music, appropriately named "Radiant Historia" is just truly gorgeous. This is already shaping up to be one of my favorite Shimomura OSTs.
I also want to compliment the art, which is an unfortunate thing to do. I'm sure you've noticed if you've been reading this blog, but a lot of my posts do not have screenshots in them. The reason is that I don't have a way to easily capture console games. Like I could use the built-in capture on the Switch and PS4, but I don't have a way to easily transfer them to my PC. And I especially don't have a way to capture DS games. I digress. The art in this game is so nostalgic immediately. It feels very classical, as if it's from a time before the anime-ification of JRPGs. It has this really painterly quality to it, characters look like they're kind of painted onto the screen, it's very good. It kind of looks like Breath of the Wild official art. I hear that, unfortunately, the 3DS version does make this game more anime and that's upsetting to me, the art style is so good. This was one of the last games this artist was credited on and I feel like we've certainly lost something by him no longer being the main artist for a game.
This diary entry comes very early into the game. Like, literally an hour in. I'm very optimistic about this game so far though. Part of me thought about doing more before I updated but I knew I would need to explain so much that I figured just doing a Diary entry off the first hour was warranted. If the story is there, I could already see this being a Top Ten list contender, this has been a crazy competitive year but like. Mechanically Radiant Historia already is proving to be one of the most unique JRPGs I've ever played. And I find that very compelling, I think I've gotten a reputation especially in some circles for being a "JRPG hater". I'm often critical of how long they are especially, but I also find myself dissatisfied with how samey a lot of them are gameplaywise. So a genuinely very unique and novel take on a turn-based RPG system has me very excited. We'll see how this pans out, I guess!
11/18/25
I got an ending! That was fast. Thank you all for reading, I don't know why Howlongtobeat said this game took 35 hours main story, I beat it in like 3. I kid I kid. So, Radiant Historia does this incredibly cool thing where if you choose a route that will, inevitably, lead to failure; the game doesn't actually make you play it out. You will instead get a cutscene showing the natural conclusion to your decision. So for instance in one of the endings I received tonight, our party lies in wait for the enemy army, trying to ambush them. Though they are temporarily successful, this decision leads the Granorg army to secure an important victory in the war without any resistance; effectively just marching into one of the most important strongholds on the border and claiming it. This, in turn, allows the Granorg army to march on Alistel and take it quickly and decisively, ending the conflict and creating a scenario where the world faces its desertification. It's a very clever way to really explore dozens of possible timelines while accounting for the limited space on a DS cart.
I got to the first big decision in this session, the point where the first major timeline split happens. When you return from the mission to rendezvous with the spy from the beginning of the game, Stocke's best friend, Rosch, has a proposition for you. Rosch is a high ranking member of the Alistel military and has been granted an army to try to intercept Granorg. This army, made of new recruits, is passionate about the cause but lacking in experience. They're in desperate need of someone to whip them into shape. And so Rosch approaches his friend to ask him plainly: will he abandon the life of espionage and join Rosch's platoon. This is where the first big split happens, depending on if you choose to stay with the intelligence agency or go with Rosch, two distinct timelines are created. Only one of them is the "true" history, mind, but both of them need to coexist to be able to eventually find the true path.
See, it turns out our White Chronicle, the book we use to view and travel through time, is not the only such book in the universe. There is a counterpart, the Black Chronicle, wielded by an unknown entity. Whoever is wielding the Black Chronicle is utilizing its power to untether events from time, to make things go wrong on a multiversal level. The reason our party originally thought to stage an ambush in one of the bad endings was that the explosives they needed to clear out a path to where the Granorg army was stationed. They needed to do this because the wielder of Black Chronicle used their power to ensure that the merchant hired to transport the explosives to the Alistel army never made it to his destination. So, as the wielder of the White Chronicle, you can go into the other timeline, find out what happened to the person intended to deliver the explosives, and correct his disappearance, which will have ripple effects throughout every similar adjacent timeline. This is something I remember getting to back in the day when I first tried to play this game and thinking it was such a cool way to handle the question of making sure all these alternate stories matter.
I'm surprised by how quickly the plot is moving. Like, Granorg is the main antagonist of the game, obviously, this Kingdom is the omnipresent threat marking the prologue and it seems like the game is likely building to an assault on Granorg, maybe Granorg being the final area of the game. It's chapter 1 and in both storylines I have available to me, we are already pushing into Granorg. The "stick with the intelligence agency" storyline is about sneaking into Granorg through various passages while the "join Rosch" storyline is about securing the border and making the Granorg army retreat back into their territory. I'm very curious to see where this goes if we're already pushing into Granorg, there's been a lot of buildup about the political intrigue and the war narrative so if we're already moving onto the capital, y'know.
I really appreciate how it doesn't feel like you need to update your equipment that often in this game. Radiant Historia is, admittedly, pretty stingy. It's the kind of game where you get 100 gold for fighting a battle but everything costs 20x that amount. So if you did want to keep everyone's equipment updated constantly, you would have to grind money probably. But I think Radiant Historia functions in such a way where it doesn't super matter if your equipment isn't always the best it could be? It feels like the game is very well balanced around the lack of money, although it means equipment upgrades are going to be only when it's essential, the game rewards the player for smart strategizing in battle. You can tear through an entire grid of enemies like it's nothing with smart playing, mitigating your need to really upgrade. And this allows you to free up cash for more healing items, which you'll probably need because you're running yourself down on MP with your strategizing.
As you could imagine, I'm also enjoying the combat a lot. Your ability to chain movements together makes it one of the most strategic battle systems I think I've seen, you really have to think about how exactly you want your turn order to go to achieve the best sequence of actions. For instance, if four enemies are set up in the corners of the grid, you may want to do:
- Turn 1 Pass to Marco, have Marco use Grapple to pull your opponent forward
- Turn 2 Pass to Stocke, have Stocke push the two opponents down the column to hit the third corner
- Turn 3 Pass to Stocke, have Stocke use Push Assault to thrust the combo into the last enemy
- Turn 4 is now Raynie, have Raynie use a spell to decimate all enemies at once
Strategic enemy movement is absolutely something you have to learn as the game goes on because, not too long into it, the game introduces enemies that cannot be moved. Worms are enemies that are half buried underground and so you must readjust your strategy to move enemies onto the worm squares. I really like that they introduced this after letting you have a couple hours to get used to the flow of regular enemy combat because it was enough time to allow you to get a sense of what this game's strategic decisions are like but not so long that you're already set in your ways. It also comes out the perfect time to where Raynie is unlocking all her spells too, so not only are you having to rethink a lot of your strategy in positional combat, but you're also getting these new tools that change one of your party members into your "heavy hitter" of sorts. It's very good design, I like it a whole lot.
I like how intuitive the Chronicle actually is to use. The fact that it's laid out in such an easy to follow way despite its numerous branches means you can easily just go back to where branches happen and figure out what you need to do differently without too much hassle. It also effectively displays your endings in a nice linear fashion which is also fun. More than that, though, because it's so easy to use and navigate, it allows you to quickly read up on what you were doing in the path you're on/the path you need to go to without too much trouble. RPGs in general need good markers to remind the player what they were doing and while this one isn't perfect, it could certainly be in more detail, it along with having you replay the cutscenes when you start a "node", what the game calls a specific time period that contains a plot point, really helps a player to not get lost in what you're doing. Which is obviously very useful for a game about time travel and multiple branching timelines. The White Chronicle even keeps track of your sidequests, pinning them roughly in the same sections they belong to, which is a super handy tool!
11/21/25
I got a new party member in this section!!! I guess I haven't really talked in depth about the party up until now, mostly because a lot of their skills are homogenous. Like, they definitely do have roles, Stocke primarily pushes people around the battlefield, Marco learns a lot of skills to support the party, Rosch is your big attack dog with high strength and defense and Raynie is your mage. While these are all good party member archetypes, there becomes a lot of overlap within them (Raynie having push skills to support other people's plays, Marco having a bunch of random offensive skills, etc.) and they are pretty easily mapped onto characters in other games. Aht, the "thief" of the party is super unique and functions in a way that can only really work with this battle system. Aht's whole thing is setting traps on the battlefield, traps which trigger when an opponent goes over the space in question. This just adds a whole new nuance to the positional combat as now you can just have any unoccupied space end an entire group of enemies, it's so cool.
I think it's really interesting how the more political of the two stories laid out before me isn't the one where we're literally a spy. Granted, I am still very early on in both of these stories so that is likely to shift, but right now I'm finding the Rosch storyline more interesting than the Heiss(Special Intelligence) one because of all the politicking that's happening. The Rosch storyline starts out being like a pretty standard military storyline, you lead a platoon of troops and run missions to help in the war effort. But after their first big mission turns out a success, Rosch starts gaining favor in Alistel. The citizens love their new military leader, so much so that he is gaining upward momentum rapidly.
This, however, is not exactly a good thing. Becoming so popular with the people of Alistel has attracted the gaze of Hugo, the highest ranking General in Alistel and the mouthpiece for Alistel's leader, the aging Prophet Noah. Hugo was not always a military man, he was a politician, and so uses that background to ensure he remains in power by "dealing with problems" before they threaten his authority. Rosch is not the first one who is under his scrutiny, one of the most important military leaders is a woman named Viola. Viola was once beloved by the people of Alistel, so much so that she kept getting promoted job after job after job. Until Hugo saw her as a threat, and promoted her to the lofty title of "Field Marshal". A theoretically important job, but one that places Viola on the front lines indefinitely to where she can never challenge Hugo's authority.
As well, in the Rosch storyline, we are seeing the aftermath of Stocke's decision to join his friend in real time. Heiss, the leader of the Special Intelligence Agency and Stocke's mentor, has not taken kindly to having his man choose to leave him and while he has no authority of which to fight for Stocke back, Specint isn't even officially sanctioned, he is not beneath doing underhanded things to bring Stocke back to the fold. It's revealed that several soldiers in the Alistel army are almost certainly under Heiss' thumb and have been instructed to send Stocke messages throughout his journey. These messages make one thing clear: Stocke's time playing army man is over, if he doesn't return to Heiss immediately, bad things will happen to Rosch and the Alistel military. What Heiss' motivations in this regard may be is unclear, but he is certain that he would sink the Alistel cause right as its making genuine progress in the war and pushing into Granorg properly for the first time in years just to get his special boy back.
That's not to say I'm not enjoying the Specint storyline though. While, between the two, it's the more standard JRPG story, you know. Our main characters traveling the world and seeing it in all its glory. It does allow for the most forward momentum between the two and gets you insight into the world building of the game. Like, rather than having a structure of "complete missions, return to Alistel, get new missions", the Specint storyline has you just actively progressing into the continent as your characters slip into Granorg. You get a nice on the ground look at everything and because of this, you get to do things like meet Aht and join her traveling troupe to slip past the border and into Granorg. It's nice, even if right now it's the lesser of the two stories.
By the way, I didn't make this clear before but Aht is currently locked to the Specint story and Rosch is locked to the military story. So your party is entirely different between the two stories and as a result your strategy must be different as well. I mean I guess it doesn't have to be if you want to mainline Raynie and Marco the entire game, I guess that's fair. But one storyline is encouraging you to go for big decisive plays that end enemies in one finite blow while the other is encouraging you to think about positioning and try to be more clever and sneaky and I adore this. I think it's such a good way to kind of set the tone of a story in the gameplay by having the military story's gameplay be more about big offensive attacks and having the Specint story be more about traps as they get to roughly the same place in their respective timelines. It's so cool, I really like Radiant Historia.
I think it's really interesting how the game depicts the citizens of Alistel. Because we exist in two timelines, one where the war seems to be coming to a certain victory and another where it's always changing and uncertain, the citizens of Alistel feel like entirely different characters in the two timelines. Children will play make believe games in one where they do mock battles of the conflict while in the other they are united as members of the Alistel military. In one timeline, people are more openly questioning the Prophet and the military while in the other they're very hush-hush and almost afraid of disappearing at the hands of Hugo. There's a certain NPC who just says wildly out of pocket things if the war is going well about exterminating all the "beastkind" that they share a continent with, showing how much more open people are to be racist when their country is doing well. It's very well done for how relatively small of a game this is.
I'm starting to think Teo and Lippti are more involved in how the timeline changes than they are letting on. The twins make it clear pretty early on that their role in this story is to observe and instruct but not intervene. They can inform Stocke on what he did wrong and point him in the right direction to figure out where in the timeline he needs to be next to progress the histories, but they themselves seem forbidden from intervening. However, a very interesting story is told in this section. Raynie and Marco tell the story of how their mercenary troop met its untimely end, they were wandering through a mine for a job and got ambushed by monsters within it. This has left Raynie with claustrophobia due to being trapped in the mine after it collapsed but something weird happened as well.
To Raynie's recollection, a monster, rather than killing Raynie and Marco when it has the chance, suddenly turns, darts straight for a support beam, and causes a mine collapse, burying them within the mine. This seems very odd to Raynie, who is not used to monsters behaving in such intelligent ways, but Marco does not believe it was anything more than erratic behavior. Whatever the case, being buried alive ended up saving Raynie and Marco's lives and set them on the path that would lead to them joining and befriending Stocke, which is a necessary event to happen in order for the true history to unfurl. It seems possibly likely that the mine ambush was the result of the Black Chronicle and that Teo and Lippti, not having a Stocke with which they can save the duo, intervened, pushing this monster in a direction that would save their lives.
It's very funny the way that the game handles sidequests. So, unsurprisingly in a game with time travel, you have to go back in time to solve certain sidequests. In this section, for instance, you have a sidequest where one of your friend Sonja's coworkers is worried about her because she's been feeling off lately. The reason is that Rosch, who is a friend to both Stocke and Sonja, has been avoiding her for some time. So, you have to go back in time to before you accepted Rosch's offer to join his brigade, talk to him about how he feels about Sonja, and then tell him to hash it out with her. This solve the sidequest but creates an interesting problem: from that coworker's point-of-view, nothing was ever wrong with Sonja now so how is he going to give you your reward. The solution? He just basically says "I feel like you've earned this, but I'm not sure why". It's so funny.
There's a nice flow with this game, at least right now. Like they don't expect you to go back and forth through timelines a whole lot, you certainly can if you want to. Like if the way you want to play is "changing off levels back and forth until you hit a roadblock", you do you. But it feels like they want you to "go in one story until you hit a roadblock and then go in the other story until you hit a roadblock, continue as needed". It allows you to get invested in each of the stories very naturally without having to ping pong constantly and lose what you're doing. I suspect as we go on, there will be more having to go back and forth but right now it feels very good.
This section definitely implicates Heiss as the wielder of the Black Chronicle. When Stocke and gang track down one of Heiss men, one who openly stated he sought to sabotage the Rosch investigation, said man was about to reveal all he knew about what was going on. Suddenly, though, time froze for the man and a voice called down to him, telling him his job was done. The man then got struck by black lightning and he turned to sand right before the eyes of Stocke and crew. This is not our first hint that Heiss may be the wielder of the Black Chronicle, mind. He has taken a particular interest in the White Chronicle, seeming more curious than is normal about whether or not Stocke had anything happen while wielding it. I'm not totally convinced Heiss is our opponent though, he's shady for sure but this is such an obvious Red Herring to me, idk. I expect him to be a pretty big villain in the game but I don't expect him to be the "Big Bad", y'know?
11/23/25
Well now. Guess I was wrong about the spy story being just "the standard hero's tale", lol. So, I reached Granorg in this play session, it's the start of Chapter 2, and Granorg is quite the kingdom. Obviously both sides of this war have tyranny as a central plot point, as mentioned previously Hugo, the de facto leader of Alistel, is manipulating the military to keep absolute power of the kingdom. But Granorg is an openly authoritarian state. Their Queen, Protea, is a ruthless, selfish leader who demands absolute fealty and who wastes much of the kingdom's money on her own foolish desires. We've seen Protea throughout the journey thus far and every time it paints a picture of a woman whose cruelty is only matched by her incompetence. And it turns out, that's just how the two generals of the Granorg army, Dias and Selvan, like it. Even though Protea is petty and has the power to cut off both their heads at a moment's notice, her lack of knowledge and deep seeded insecurity cause her to lean on the duo for basically every decision she makes. In a sense, Protea is just a puppet for the army, who get effective free reign in their war against Alistel. She is also incredibly unpopular, with the citizens living in fear of her and the only real reason they are allowed to speak of her incompetence as a ruler is because the guards are too lazy to crack down on them.
With such an oppressive ruler at the helm, you'd expect our goal in Granorg to be to do something about it. If you'll recall, the war is not going well in the spy timeline, the Granorg army has captured the border and while we're in Granorg, we hear tell that they pushed almost all the way to the Grasslands surrounding Alistel in a tactic that parities the early stages of the Rosch storyline. Doing something about this queen could throw the nation of Granorg into chaos, giving Alistel plenty of opportunity to end this war once and for all. And, indeed, we are in Granorg to do something about the royal family. Stocke and co. quickly meet with Heiss' man who tells them of their goals in Granorg. The trio is to sneak into the castle and assassinate... Princess Eruca?
Yes, our goal is not to assassinate the queen herself, but rather her stepdaughter Eruca. Princess Eruca is everything her mother is not. She is beloved by the people, outspoken about their rights, against the continuation of this endless war, frugal, you name it and she's it. Assassinating Eruca seems like it should be the last thing you want. Eruca would demand an end to the fighting, bring a peaceful resolution to decades, if not centuries, of war. Granorg and Alistel could stand side by side, trying to seek a brighter future together. Killing her would only bring more fire to the conflict, cause the people to rally behind the Granorg military and demand a swift subjugations of Alistel. The only real reasons Heiss would want to assassinate her are either that he benefits from the endless war because an endless war means a need for endless espionage, he's actually a traitor and has been working for Granorg the whole time, or he truly is the disciple of the Black Chronicle and he's hoping that he can get Stocke off the chessboard by sending him on a mission that, whether it succeeds or fails, puts him in a position where the true history cannot pass because Eruca is a requirement for it.
Something's also going on with Aht. We find out, in this chapter, that Aht is apparently a young "shaman". There are shamans among the Satyros, a race of mystical half-goat, half-humans, whose goal it is to put souls to rest. It's apparently so rare that even she doesn't know what her abilities are and what they can do. There's been a few weird instances with Aht at this point. Like Aht can see Teo and Lippti when they appear to Stocke while she's in the party. It's unknown if she can hear them or what but she can definitely see them, see the moments which are meant to be frozen in time. There's a spirituality to Aht that I'm interested to see how it pans out. I wonder if she'll be able to glance across the timelines, so when she meets Stocke and co. in the other timeline she'll immediately recognize them. Also I just want her back because she's currently out of my party in the Specint timeline and I'm sad, even if her skills slowed down battles considerably, lol. I love her little traps, don't get me wrong, but with my current skill spread on my other party members setting traps did often mean giving up movement.
I would, once again, like to shout out Yoko Shimomura's soundtrack to this game. This is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Shimomura works, it's not only great but I think it really captures her style in all its forms. Like you have tracks like Unending Clear Blue Sky which are very bright and very bouncy and sound like her extensive work on the Mario & Luigi series, OSTs I adore. Forever Proud, the music of the Kingdom of Granorg, is very pompous and insistent, it's like a lot of her JRPG kingdom themes like that. To the Future That Waits Ahead is such a Kingdom Hearts coded track, it even has like a bit of the Hand in Hand motif in it, you know? It's kind of like Shimomura is writing a love letter to her own work. Its such a good OST, I recommend a lot of people listen to it because it's genuinely super underrated and it's probably a top 5 Shimomura work.
I found an ending that was locked to a sidequest decision, which is super interesting to me. So, we were asked by a historian and biographer to meet with the Field Marshal, Viola, and hopefully either gain an interview for him or gain her story for a biography he's writing about the Prophet Noah. Viola, being a high ranking military official, is one of the only people who has seen the Prophet in some time and her account on him, his teachings, and her own life would prove fruitful to his project. In the original version of the Rosch timeline, Viola seemingly dies on the battlefield after a gambit by the Granorg army goes well, destroying the Sand Fortress and separating the Alistel army. This was one of the many things that Teo and Lippti reveal as the Black Chronicle's wielder meddling in the world's affairs.
After Stocke successfully prevents the destruction of the Sand Fortress, he meets with Viola and Viola, now seemingly very ill, decides to hand over the journal she has been keeping with her to Stocke to give to the historian. This journal is very personal, and not only does it uncover much about the Field Marshal but it uncovers much about the manipulation happening behind the scenes at Alistel castle. Handing it to the historian could not only put him in danger, but also reveal every secret about Viola. So Stocke is given an option: does he protect Viola or does he hand over the journal. If you choose the former, the historian says it's quite alright, that the task asked of Stocke was near impossible, and it matters little anyways as he has arranged to meet with General Hugo. This will be the last time the historian is ever heard from, he disappears after entering the castle and Hugo uses his position with the people to erase Viola's legacy from history before, eventually, supplanting the Prophet himself as Alistel's ruler. It's a really interesting idea to lock one of the endings behind a sidequest like this, showing that even the side content has ramifications that can bring about the end of the world.
There was a very funny sidequest in this section too. So, shortly after arriving in Granorg, you can meet a painter, Kaizan, who asks you for a favor. There is a specific green paint, made out of green crystals, that he needs to finish his masterpiece. He is making a tribute to one of the greatest artists in the continent, an artist who, in the Specint timeline, had recently passed during a conflict between the Granorg and Alistel armies in a mine. So, with this information, you know now to go back to the other timeline and find the artist in said mine before it was evacuated for a similar operation. But when you get there, you find out that the last of his green paint was just recently purchased and that it will be some time before he can create more, if ever as the Alistel army is about to evacuate and secure the mine for their battle against Granorg. The artist recommends you instead track down the person who bought the paint. That person, of course, being this timeline's Kaizan. You then have to bounce between timelines trying to convince Kaizan to let himself have the paint so he can finish his own masterpiece, almost causing Kaizan to give up painting altogether in one timeline when his counterpart won't budge. Hilarious. Whoever wrote this is a genius.
11/25/25
I basically spent the entirety of this play session in the Rosch Brigade storyline. It's fine, I feel like that's going to be a more common occurrence going forward, I'm going to have longer periods of time where I'm just one on story, but it is a little disappointing to me. One of my favorite things about this game so far is jumping between timelines and time periods to solve roadblocks and having longer stretches where I'm not doing that is just a little disappointing all told. But also like, I enjoy the Rosch storyline a lot so I'm not mad about it at all. I guess this is going to be the flow from now on, spending one play session on one story and switching to the other after about 4 hours of play. I spent much of the last play session doing the Specint storyline similarly so that checks out.
So, when we previously advanced the Rosch storyline, we had successfully prevented the destruction of the Sand Fortress and Rosch had returned to Alistel to accept glory for this. Immediately, though, he was called back out to battle. Alistel has Granorg on the run and the war may end within a matter of weeks if they keep up the pace. Alistel intends to deploy their secret weapons, their mechanized heavy artillery units which had been in testing for quite some time, to make a massive push into Granorg, securing the grasslands surrounding the city and using them as a tactical position to make an assault on the city proper. So General Hugo has sent out the two most powerful squadrons, Field Marshall Viola and Captain Rosch, as well as their armies, to fight in the grasslands. As you'll also remember, these two Commanders are Hugo's political rivals, the two people who have gained more popularity with the people of Alistel than himself and, should they make it out of the war, could challenge his absolute authority as both the voice of the Prophet and as the leader of the military.
As you can imagine, this "military operation" is intended to be a bloodbath. With the war ending soon, Hugo is setting up his possible future political rivals to die glorious deaths on the battlefield, deaths where they will be celebrated as heroes but never be around to challenge his authority. And, if it were not for the White Chronicle, he would've almost succeeded. The plan was for Rosch to meet Stocke at a specific rendezvous point with a survey of the frontlines. At which point Rosch would push his army further into Granorg territory while Stocke would run back to Alistel with the intel so that they would know how much they needed to reinforce the army. When they reach the meetup point, however, a Granorg military commander and a small army is waiting for them, striking down Rosch before Stocke can reach him and almost doing the same to Stocke. Rosch's continued existence is important, however, for the true history to arise. So what do we do about this obvious dead-end?
Luckily for us, the Granorg military commander drops a letter that reveals that this rendezvous was always a trap. There is collusion between someone in Alistel and the Granorg army, a need to keep the war ongoing indefinitely. With this letter, we can now go back to before the operation began and inform Viola of this trap, allowing her to order the heavy artillery to go into battle earlier on. This action saves Rosch's life by forcing the Granorg military to move erratically to avoid them, but he is still heavily wounded and his brigade has sacrificed themselves to ensure his survival. Moreover, Raynie and Marco stay behind to save them both, potentially sacrificing themselves to ensure Rosch's survival. Stocke manages to move Rosch, who is broken both physically and emotionally, back to Alistel where their mutual friend and Rosch's maybe love interest, Sonja, can heal his wounds. Stocke reports the events of the operation to their higher up, Lt. General Raul, and they both come to the same conclusion: only Hugo could've done this.
After searching for clues to connect Hugo to the crime and fighting our former commander, Heiss, Stocke discovers that Hugo has been working with Granorg's chief tactician and the Queen's top advisor, Selvan, this entire time. The war has been intentionally ongoing to amass more power behind Hugo and it is only now ending because Hugo can supplant the Prophet as the singular ruler of Alistel. This information in tow, Stocke must flee Alistel with Sonja and the wounded Rosch and hopefully reconnect with Viola at the Sand Fortress, who may be sympathetic to their cause. They are, however, pursued into the grasslands and while Stocke saves the trio, he passes out. Where two faces, one very familiar and one entirely new to us, find him and take him in.
Stocke awakens in the Satyros town of Celestia. After reuniting with Aht (my theory on Aht being able to see between timelines is not confirmed but it's not necessarily denied) and making a new friend, the gorilla man Gafka, Stocke is asked to run missions for the town to gain their trust and, in exchange, they promise to sneak him back into Alistel to gain news on what happened to Raul and see what Hugo is up to. The sight that greets them is harrowing. Hugo addresses the people, stating that, with victory against Granorg on the horizon, they must now turn their sights to those others who deny the words of the Prophet Noah. A holy crusade must be undertaken to convert or kill all who deny the divine word, and to exterminate the "lesser beings" with whom they share a continent (read: the Beastkind like Aht). With this bad news, the crew reunites with Raynie, Marco and Raul and makes haste back to Celestia to plan for a war with the soon to be combined might of Alistel and Granorg, both armies with Hugo at the head. A war which will require forcing Rosch to take back up arms and lead their meager forces on the battlefield.
Gafka doesn't really add much of anything to the party as of right now. He's very limited in skills and most of what he does feels like it's designed to fill in roles of either Marco or Rosch, both of whom are out of the party for extended periods of time when Gafka joins. He can mostly push and pull opponents, making it very good for him to change turns with Stocke to set Stocke up for a movement before Aht comes in with a Trap on a square opponents end up at. But what Gafka has going for him absolutely is that he is a monk. He is fully min-maxxed into strength, when he joins the party, despite being underleveled, he can already one shot a lot of enemies with relative ease. It's almost a problem how effective Gafka is as a big guy to swing at things, a lot of my combo setups feel wasted because he just immediately does the job on his own.
The Satyros bring up a pretty interesting idea. So, the Satyros do not trust humans, many of them are openly prejudiced against Stocke and gang and only really allow them to stay there because Aht, their shaman in training and as such a person of great significance, is protecting them. The reason being that they believe strongly humans are to blame for everything that is going wrong in the world. Like in a very literal sense. The Satyros believe that the desertification of the world and the way that the native flora and fauna are transforming into gruesome monsters is directly caused by the humans failing to maintain balance with nature. That their petty squabbles and focus on industrialization have thrown the world out of balance and that, as such, they are causing the impending end. It's a pretty common theme in fantasy literature and especially in JRPGs, this idea of the world being inherently wrong now because of rapid industrialization. But it's a compelling argument to bring up here when the game is literally about nature dying and turning to sand.
When Stocke returns to Alistel as a fugitive undercover, the game does a very interesting thing with its soundscape. There's no music upon his return. Like none at all. Not the Alistel theme, not the creepy theme it plays when something is amiss, nothing. It's so cool, it's such an effective way to communicate to the player that they don't belong anymore. That this world isn't theirs' anymore. Stocke has become such an outsider, such an unwelcome presence, that even the music is telling you that you don't belong. The only thing I will say about how this does not work is that Stocke shouldn't be able to sneak into Alistel like this. He is one of the most famous military men in Alistel in this timeline, the right hand to the Young Lion of Alistel himself, he took out a large chunk of the guard of this city by himself very recent and the army does absolutely have orders to be on the lookout for him. Even the game has Stocke be like "how am I allowed to be here" and nobody really notices him despite him running around in the open, only running him and his friends off after Hugo radicalized the citizens against the Beastkind.
I don't think I've talked about the overworld abilities yet, mostly because they aren't the most interesting. Radiant Historia, as you progress, will have Stocke unlock certain abilities to help you solve puzzles and progress with the game. Very early on you unlock the ability to push and pull boxes with super strength, allowing you to push through walls in your path. By solving the situation with the merchant in the Prologue, you gain the ability to ignite gunpowder barrels into bombs to clear rocks in your path. Your sword gets upgraded eventually to cut down vines in your way instead of just stunning enemies. The big one now though is that you can just disappear. In this session, after fighting Heiss, you unlock Heiss' ability to turn yourself invisible. For the cost of 1 MP per second, Stocke can move about without anyone seeing or hearing him, allowing you to easily bypass enemies if you would like. As an aside, Heiss definitely knows more than he's letting on about the White Chronicle but I don't think he is the wielder of its counterpart at this venture, knowing now that keeping the war going on indefinitely was one of Hugo's goals in the first place and Heiss has a close alliance with Hugo. This is like the first time I got an overworld ability and was like "oh that's neat". It's also very handy for revisiting past time periods because to complete a sidequest, you will sometimes have to go back in time and play a chunk of game and enemies don't lose aggro at any point so fighting them is just a waste of time.
Speaking of replaying chunks of games, to complete two sidequests in this section I had to literally replay half a chapter. Man am I glad for cutscene skipping. Can't imagine how annoying this game would be if you couldn't skip the cutscenes. I had to basically replay the part of the game from Stocke arriving in Celestia to Stocke returning to Alistel, which is like almost an hour if you are doing it with dialogue, over again to be able to finish two sidequests. This is probably the biggest annoyance I have with the game thus far, the fact that sidequests are so directly tied to specific time periods that you can't just trust you'll be able to find the relevant NPC later, you have to go to a specific node to talk to them. Sometimes it makes sense, like, you're only able to find an NPC because they're stationed at the Sand Fortress and that they are about to die in the oncoming battle. So that makes sense that would be the only time you can talk to this NPC and tell them about their son missing them. But then the son, who is in Alistel, can also only be talked to at the specific point where he was originally talked to and doesn't really appear later on down the line. It's weird. It's not really impacting my enjoyment that much, I'm still really loving this game, but man is it weird.
11/29/25
I can confirm that I am probably spending entire play sessions alternating timelines from here on out. Admittedly, a lot of this is because I am doing every sidequest, I have a GameFAQs Guide open to make sure I don't miss any sidequests or potential endings. This guide is really good, by the way, like it doesn't have an ASCII art of the logo so you think "this can't be that good". But it's one of those guides that includes incredibly detailed ASCII art maps and really good looking shop breakdowns. Great guide. Anyways, I spent most of this session playing in the Specint timeline, with just dipping my toe back into the Rosch Brigade storyline near the end. Again, I wish you were more directly jumping between the two timelines as the story progresses if you're following the natural flow of "play on this timeline until you hit a roadblock, then jump to the other". It's not that this system is bad, it's just that I wish I were doing more timeline jumping personally.
As you'll recall, the last time I was on the Specint timeline we had received an order from Heiss to conduct the assassination of Princess Eruca. This was, of course, odd to us, Protea is a tyrant and it would seemingly benefit Alistel to dethrone her and allow Eruca to rise to the throne. However, I think that with the knowledge we have gained about Hugo's relationship to Granorg and the purpose of the endless war, it's clear that Alistel does not want a kind hearted ruler taking the throne in Granorg. If Eruca is working towards a better future, the people will then realize that Alistel is ran by a tyrannical government of religious zealots and maybe rally behind Eruca to take down the corruption in Alistel. And since Heiss is in Hugo's pocket and also is our boss in this timeline, it benefits Hugo to keep Protea on the throne and eliminate all her opposition. So Eruca has got to go.
Or at least, that's what we think is happening. After using the Vanishing technique we learned in the other timeline to sneak through the Granorg castle, we find ourselves in the princess' room. However, the princess is not there. Instead, a small force of Granorg soldiers are awaiting our arrival, stating that our operation in the castle was "leaked". Knowing what we know from the other timeline, it's not difficult to parse that this leak was a setup, that Hugo ordered a fake assassination of Princess Eruca in order to have Granorg redouble their efforts. This would then give Alistel an excuse to go all out on them,, to make a final push to "win the war". And Stocke, Raynie, and Marco, three potentially problematic figures to Hugo's future reign, were set up to take the fall for it.
Luckily for the trio, one of the members of the underground resistance finds them when they appear to be cornered. The Resistance, a group of Granorg citizens who operate under the table to try and eventually end the tyranny that rules over their nation. This member, Otto, brings us directly to the leader of the resistance, a person who has eyes across the continent and has been watching Stocke since before he left Alistel. The leader of the resistance believes Stocke is the key to setting things right, to putting a halt to the desertification, dethroning Protea and her goons, and creating peace across the continent. This person is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Princess Eruca herself.
The trio is at first uneasy about this encounter. Not only is Eruca the future leader of Granorg, their enemy, but is also their target. Choosing to help her will be betraying Alistel, betraying their home. The fallout will be immense. But they choose to hear Eruca out in the moment. It's not like they really have a choice, after being caught in their assassination attempt, they require the Resistance's assistance to leave Granorg regardless. Eruca immediately launches into what's really going on with the desertification and how she intends to, if not stop it, then at least halt its spread for a while. It's a story that corroborates the Satyros' account of "humanity ruining the planet", which I think is very cool, It also means that, depending on what order you do events in, the Satyros' hatred for humanity is either foreshadowing or confirmation.
As we've already established, centuries ago an unnamed empire ruled over the continent and their downfall led to the start of the desertification. Eruca reveals that this was due to their own carelessness, they took too much from the planet, stole too much of its lifeforce for their own selfish needs, and when they eventually fell, the planet started dying. The last vestiges of the empire, the priests who fled during the fall, founded Granorg, becoming its first royals. The priests came up with a plan to, if not stop the desertification, halt it for a lifetime, There is a ritual that only the royal bloodline of Granorg can undertake, a ritual to bring enough lifeforce back to the earth to stop the desertification. The problem is, however, Eruca is the only one alive who can conduct this ritual. Her brother died trying to end the tyranny of their father, their father was murdered shortly after that, and her stepmother is not only apathetic to anyone else's needs but her own, but also is not of royal blood and thus cannot be used for the ritual. So Eruca turns to Stocke, someone who is also not of royal blood but who she senses has great power anyways. Eruca offers Stocke a chance to save the world, at the cost of betraying his home and becoming a fugitive. With that, she sends Stocke and friends off to consider her offer.
Something very interesting happens with the party here. They retreat to a nearby village to hide out and discuss what to do about Eruca's offer. Stocke, while hesitant, knows that much of what Eruca says is the truth, as it corroborates many of the things Teo and Lippti have told him. Although he pretends to be considering it, his mind is quickly made up. Marco, being the most rational of the trio, takes to the histories instead, researching the facts of Eruca's story and coming to the conclusion to trust her based on that. Raynie, though, is adamantly against trusting Eruca. She sees the act as traitorous no matter the reason, they are soldiers, and soldiers who go against command are the worst offenders to her. Alistel is her home, and to betray it, even for good reasons, is inconceivably. For the first time, our party is at odds, as Raynie tries to reconcile the idea that obeying orders may not be best for Alistel.
A lot happens after that but I don't want these diary updates to just become plot summaries. I really only did the whole thing because of how many relevant, interesting ideas are talked about. Needless to say, I'm really enjoying the plot to this game a whole lot. I'm the weirdo who likes excessive politicking in stories, Final Fantasy XII is, at the time of writing this, my second favorite Final Fantasy game and a big reason for that is that it's such a political drama. I also love how it's so clearly a story about human-led climate change but adapted to a fantasy setting. It's very well done, I like this game a whole lot if you couldn't tell, I'm sad it took me this long to play it all the way through. I really would've been so annoying about this game if I had played it when I bought it, I have a habit of becoming a cheerleader for the most random games and I would not have stopped until everyone in my life was sick of hearing about Radiant Historia.
To no one's surprise though, Eruca does join our party in this section as the seventh and seemingly final party member, though she's only the fifth in the timeline where she joins in. Eruca is the party's true mage, she has very high damage output and high MP at the cost of being the most fragile member of the party thus far. I thought Raynie and Aht were kind of fragile, with both party members taking 1,5x the damage any of our other party members do. But Eruca takes like 3x the damage most of the party does, she has comically low defense. This is made even more true by the fact that Eruca has entirely unique armor, rather than equipping standard mail armor like most of the party or Beastkind capes like Stocke and Aht, Eruca equips dresses which massively buff her magic stats but severely limit her defensive options. This makes for a very traditional mage. Oh also she has a gun. This is how Eruca fights, she wields a pistol in battle through which she can channel her magic. I want to be clear, only her special abilities require her to fire the gun. If she does a melee attack, she just pistol whips the opponent. Eruca is hilarious, what a good bit.
Something I do want to criticize the game for is how it handles party members leaving and rejoining the party all the time. Since you are constantly jumping between timelines where certain party members are present and others aren't, as well as just having long periods of time where party members are fully absent from your party regardless, there are extended sequences where certain party members are just not available to battle. So you would think that maybe, just maybe, when that party member rejoins your party they would be immediately set to a certain level to make sure they keep up. You would be wrong. At least in the DS version of Radiant Historia, party members that are not currently in your party do not gain experience, party members do gain experience if they're in your party but not fighting but it's halved so it's not super helpful. But if a party member is in your party in another timeline or they're absent from your party, they are not gaining experience. However when you return to them, they will be at exactly the same level they were at.
Take for instance Rosch who, after we accidentally kill him yet again in the other timeline(long story, it has to do with everything that's happening with Eruca), we encourage to take back up arms and rejoin our party. He rejoins at level 23 because that's the last level he was at when he left, Stocke is level 40 currently. Again, like, levels don't matter a ton in this game, while we do have stats that are important, smart playing will close any gap you have. The issue is moreso that because you spend so much time without certain party members, it becomes this problem where when you get back to a party member who has been absent for quite some time, you now have to make space for them specifically so they have the chance to catch up. And then because you have these long stretches of having to play catch-up with certain party members, others get sidelined so you can never truly experiment with your strategy and find out how every combo of party members works together. It's frustrating to say the least, hopefully we're coming to a point where the party will be homogenous across both timelines so this problem doesn't exist anymore.
Forgive me if I've mentioned this already, I doubt I have because I did a search for relevant words related to what I'm going to talk about. There are so many ominous NPCs in this game that ask Stocke very pointed, philosophical questions about time. It's like they're possessed, they will say something along the lines of "who writes history" and then when Stocke will be like "what", they'll say something about him not being ready for them yet. And then they'll snap out of whatever that was and then just talk to Stocke normally. But what's even weirder is that all these NPCs mention the same figure, a mysterious martial arts master that either they have learned from or want to learn from. I'm curious where this is heading, it's such a weird element that I'm wondering if it'll eventually lead to a quest chain or a superboss or something of that sort. I still have a lot of game to do, for the record, I think I am only now about halfway (I've reached Chapter 4 in both stories, I think there are 7 Chapters). It's just something that's gotten my curiosity going, y'know?
I've been seeing more and more sidequests that have endings locked to them. In one we can tell Eruca to forgo her duty as a princess and stand with her people, causing her to die but her sacrifice gives the Granorg people a point to rally behind. In another we hand over the instructions on how to grow a plant to a botanist who uses this knowledge to power the Alistel military might. The plant produces fruit that contain within them the life force of the planet and that life force is how they power their mechanical forces, ergo growing this plant is essentially having a constant fuel source for the mechanized forces. The other ending to that sidequest is very nice, for the record, the plant can grow in the desert so, if we find a way to stop the desertification we could start a reforestation effort, allowing the plant to take root and then gradually return the plains to usable farmland. The funniest sidequest ending though is the one for a sidequest where you're intended to sneak into Granorg and assassinate Dias, one of the country's two generals. The assassination goes wrong in both routes, but in one of the routes, Dias offers you a job, a way to get close to the royal family and Princess Eruca, a necessary matter for the future. This ending has Stocke turn into the continent's most brutal and infamous assassin, and then when you get to Historia, as you do with all the bad endings, Teo and Lippti discuss what went wrong there. But this time they're just like "...what did you think you were doing? That was obviously a bad plan!"
12/3/25
It's very funny the place I'm at narratively in the game right now. So, I was only able to move the Rosch portion of the story forward a very small amount before getting roadblocked. Seemingly, this roadblock will be in place for a while, Stocke says himself he has never heard of the place we need to go to remove it and he's nowhere near Forgia, the country we have to go to in order to remove it. If I'm correct, I'll probably have to essentially beat the Specint story before we can go back to the Rosch story. But where we currently are in the narrative is that the Rosch storyline, the story originally about joining the military and making a concentrated effort on taking down Granorg, is the one fighting Alistel, while the Specint storyline is the storyline where we're making a military effort against Granorg. Funny how that works out.
So nothing really happens in the brief time you spend back in the Rosch storyline. Rosch returns to the battlefield and secures a major victory for the Alistel resistance only to discover that their allies in the West, the mercenary army of Cygnus, has been entirely wiped out by a mysterious weapon Alistel has. Their options are few and morale has sunk, with many of their allies in Celestia determining that the best course of action is to exile the humans and strengthen their borders. They have a single path forward: Gafka's people. The Gutrals, the race of Ape-Men in the jungles to the South, would provide the backup needed to make a final assault on Alistel. The issue is that Gafka is in exile and so is not fit to face the Gutrals. Moreover, the Gutrals' hatred of humans is even greater than the Satyros'. The Gutrals have spent their existence being manipulated into serving as foot soldiers for the human armies and, as such, have written off humans completely. With no options available to us, we must find a way to convince them in the other timeline.
So, last time I mentioned I didn't just want these posts to be plot synopses, even though that's often what they are anyways because after you get past the first chunk of a long game, the plot is most of what there is to comment on. So to fill in, we rescued Eruca from her stepmother who, to flush her and the rest of the Resistance out, set fire to her own kingdom. From there we attempt to move into Cygnus, a land that protects drifters as it is made up of people who originally lost their homes, either to desertification or to the war between Alistel and Granorg. The princess then reveals to Stocke that her persistence in seeking him out was due to a bizarre connection: Stocke looks a lot like her brother, a brother who was executed by their father out of fear that his popularity far outweighed their father's. This is when Rosch originally entered the picture, sent to fulfill Stocke's original mission of assassinating Eruca by Hugo himself. Back in Alistel, Hugo kidnapped Sonja to get Rosch to obey, and the fallout is Rosch being killed for like the third or fourth time in this game. However, due to our meddling in the other timeline, Rosch's strong will is restored and now, in this timeline, he took Sonja, Raul, and his squad, and moved into an alliance with Celestia in an attempt to dethrone Hugo. Raul's plan in this timeline is simple: Rosch and his men will take the Alistel front while Stocke will go to Cygnus and enlist their aid to instill Eruca on the throne.
But, we hit a snag in this quest. As we sleep, a gas falls upon our party and they are all knocked unconscious. When Stocke awakens, he's in a jail cell, his friends nowhere to be found and his only companion being a young boy he had met earlier who is a messenger for the Granorg resistance. It is not long before we discover why we are here, a man named Eli had found the party and had sold them all as slaves. Stocke is the last one he has kept around as he requires him for a test of strength: Eli has a gladiator that is being examined by a mysterious man named Hedge to go serve in the court of Cygnus. Stocke must fight him so that the gladiator looks good. To no one's surprise, Stocke wins the fight and is sold instead to the royal court of Cygnus, along with the young boy who will be his "keeper" and "that Beastkind girl". That's right, it's the prerequisite tournament saga that every RPG has.
Hedge brings Stocke before the king of Cygnus himself, King Garland. Garland is seeking warriors to be able to compete in gladiatorial games on his behalf, games hoping to please his longtime acquaintance in the hopes of forming a political alliance. However, Garland despises the prospect of his gladiators being slaves, and so battles Stocke to see what kind of man he is. After the battle, Garland orders Stocke to be freed, putting him up at the inn in Cygnus and stating that he is now a guest of the King, so long as he keeps his word to fight for him. Not long after this, Stocke reunites with Aht, who had been sold to the local bartender as a serving girl, and the two of them start on a new goal: figuring out where Princess Eruca is.
After participating in the tournament and defeating the brother of the local informant, the duo discovers that Eruca is being held captive in Cygnus proper. She had been sold to the King to become a "servant" due to her beauty and was being held there until the acquaintance left. Stocke and Aht meet with the princess and begin plotting her escape, before Raynie and Marco arrive, having escaped their own captivity in the nearby desert town of Skalla. The group is concerned about ruining the good will Stocke has accrued with King Garland, but good fortune strikes when the town becomes invaded by monstrous desert arachnids known as Hell Spiders. While Garland holds the front, Stocke manages to defeat the spider that makes its way into the city, earning Garland's favor. Garland then decides to forge an alliance with Eruca, as she is Stocke's friend and therefore his friend, and have the soldiers of Cygnus make a move on the Kingdom of Granorg. And as luck would have it, Garland is able to bring an interesting proposition to the table already: his acquaintance and possible political ally is none other than Dias, the field leader of the Granorg troops. If they act quickly, they can set a trap for the man out in the desert wastes, where his personal guard will be caught within a sandstorm, allowing the sand-prepped desert troops to already gain a decisive victory against their newfound foe.
Aht has definitely had some sort of vision of Stocke that she refuses to share. After we rescue Aht from being a barkeep, Aht suddenly gets very cagey about the prospect of their journey continuing. She begs Stocke to run away from her, to find her uncle Vanoss, rejoin their performing troupe, and live out the rest of their lives together. Stocke is, of course, confused at this change of personality from the normally idealistic little girl. Aht understands that their mission will save the world from the desertification, at least for a little while. But she is unwilling to entertain that prospect even for a second. The way she's treating Stocke, it's as if he's already a dead man walking. I think Aht is seeing that whatever ritual Eruca needs to undertake will spell Stocke's demise and, as such, is being selfish. She is, after all, a little girl, even one of such spiritual importance is bound to be a little selfish once in a while. Cute little aside, by the way, Aht in this section revealed to Stocke that she can see Teo and Lippti and Stocke treats the whole thing like a big brother telling his little sister she has to keep a secret. Adorable.
There was surprisingly a lot of Raynie and Marco focus in this section. I feel like I have talked about Raynie and Marco getting little character bits before, last section literally had the group at odds with itself for the first time because of their different ideologies. Raynie and Marco though do spend most of the game just as Stocke's loyal sidekicks, they became fast friends with him at the beginning and now stay by his side through thick and thin. If I may, the character work in Radiant Historia can be a little shallow and one note but that's not unexpected for a lot of JRPGs, a lot of them do kind of revolve around pretty static characters and are more about the quest and the world. Anyways, in this section we find out Raynie is FROM Cygnus. Well, not really, the majority of people aren't truly from Cygnus. When Raynie was a little girl, she was orphaned and homeless by the war between Granorg and Alistel, moving with large caravans of adults who would, inevitably oust her because a child was just a mouth to feed. This happened until Raynie ended up in Cygnus.
Cygnus is a land that welcomes those who have lost their homes. A place for them to restart. They care for anyone who has been displaced by the war or by the desertification, with their only rule being "if you can work, you must work". It was the first place that didn't turn Raynie away, a place that made her feel valuable. And so, Stocke choosing to potentially sacrifice himself to save Cygnus during the Hell Spider attack means a lot to her. In hindsight, Raynie being from Cygnus explains a lot about her. She has the same sense of honor that Garland does. When it became clear that her companions were intending on betraying Alistel, she held firm to it, saying that it was their home, it was a place they owed everything. Raynie's loyalty is to those who protect the things she holds dear, and she will be an enemy to the enemies of those she is loyal too. But now, with this saving of Cygnus, that loyalty firmly belongs to Stocke. Any doubt Raynie had is gone, she will follow Stocke to hell and back.
Marco, meanwhile, has an entire sidequest built around him. When we arrive at the bar where Aht was serving earlier in the chapter, we run into an old friend of Marco's from when Marco was a mercenary. This girl, Mimel, is someone very special to Marco, maybe even a crush of his. We come to find out pretty quickly that Marco saved Mimel's life, she was a mercenary in the same group as him and Raynie and was one of the only members to survive their final mission. Mimel did not get out as lucky as Marco and Raynie did, however, as her legs were badly damaged. Marco agreed to work for Heiss initially with the condition that he find Mimel a job in Alistel, putting her up as a waitress at a restaurant. Unfortunately, Mimel is also here to spy on King Garland.
Stocke receives a tip from his friend in the Resistance, a friend who seems to want to get in Garland's good graces. He's heard tell that there's a spy in Cygnus, that without Granorg's backing, the other countries are starting to place spies in the desert kingdom. And through a bit of time travel, Stocke discovers Mimel is a spy. This is one of those sidequests that has a bad ending and the bad ending really tells you how much Marco cares for Mimel. Spies in this world are not put to death if caught. No, to be put to death would be a kindness. They are tortured and broken, often until they take their own lives. Stocke in the bad ending chooses to turn Mimel end and, as such, Marco grows to hate him, betraying the party at a crucial moment, as he seeks to exact his revenge for what happened with Mimel. If you choose to let her go, however, we discover Mimel has been infected by the Black Chronicle wielder, who immediately removes this loose thread from their tapestry. But not before Mimel says just enough. Not before she implies that it is Heiss who sent her, once again implicating Heiss as the Black Chronicle wielder.
12/4/25
I think I accidentally proved free will is a myth in this section. So, there's an ongoing sidequest about a Granorg soldier who is madly in love with Aht's cousin, an incredibly beautiful Satyros dancer who works in her father's troupe. Liese, the cousin, loves him back but feels that the long history of bad blood between the two races will inevitably drive them apart and as such is determined to let him down gently. In this section we discover that when Liese finally left Granorg after the fire, the soldier followed her, meeting his own death in the jungles of Forgia. On his person was a letter, wedding vows written in perfect Satyros script. Liese's heart breaks at this, realizing that the man genuinely loved her enough to learn her own language. You can then go back in time to before Liese rejected him initially and show her this letter, though Liese is still hesitant to pursue this relationship due to the bad blood between humans and Satyros. Stocke is given the option to either let her be or encourage her to pursue this after all.
If you let her be, though, you get a bad ending! Everything still plays out like it does in the timeline that Liese rejected him originally, but now you see an alternate future where the Granorg army discovers that one of their own died in Forgia and blame the Gutrals. This leads to Granorg declaring war on the Beastkind and, eventually, the combined forces of Granorg and Alistel committing a continent wide genocide of Beastkind, pushing them all the way back to a small force in Celestia. Mind, this bad ending is dependent on the idea that Granorg AND Alistel survive the war, which our current campaign is hoping to prevent, but still. A little messed up that you have to encourage Liese to pursue this relationship despite her reservations in order for the future to not be totally destroyed. For what it's worth, when you go back to the point where Liese did choose him, he has now joined her father's traveling troupe as a sword dancer and the two seem overjoyed to be together. Love wins, I guess. Free will might lose out but love wins, lol.
As I approach the end of the Specint story, I am really just suspecting that the Rosch Brigade storyline was the one the writers cared about. Like, judging by my walkthrough, I will finish the Specint storyline in the next play session, and honestly it feels like nothing is happening in this story. Like all I did in this previous play session, and admittedly I am doing every sidequest so a lot of my time is being ate up doing that, but I moved out of Cygnus to the desert town of Skalla, met a contact Eruca had for the Gutral, and then moved into Gutral territory to start the quest to gain their trust. And like, we still don't have Rosch or Gafka in the Specint timeline and I imagine we never will at this rate because I strongly suspect that after we gain the Gutrals' respect, our next goal is to march on Protea. Like the Specint storyline is meant to be the "normal history", this is the timeline that would've naturally played out without the White Chronicle's interference, and don't get me wrong I like the story. It's a good JRPG story. But it's just so much less interesting than the other storyline in my opinion.
I guess one very big revelation did happen in the storyline in this part. So, we finally find out what the ritual Eruca needs to perform entails. The ritual normally requires two members of the Granorg royal family to perform because one of them must be sacrificed. What happens is that the performer of the ritual sacrifices the sacrifice by draining all the lifeforce from their body and returning it to the Earth. They then give the sacrifice half their soul to continue living on, producing more lifeforce to give back to the Earth until one day, many years later, the two halves of the soul become whole again, allowing the performer to ascend to the throne and killing the sacrifice. This brings up a very important question: how does Eruca intend on doing the ritual by herself? There is no other member of the royal family alive capable of performing the ritual, Protea is a commoner, her brother, Ernst is dead, and her father got assassinated.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Eruca, probably rightfully assumes, that Stocke IS Ernst. That the ritual was performed and that, for some reason, Heiss absconded with the sacrifice before it could be completed, wiping his memory in the process. This would explain why Aht wanted to keep Stocke from finding Eruca back in Cygnus, that Aht suspects the truth about Stocke and, being a shaman, is aware of the ritual. And she wants to protect Stocke more than anything, even tailing Stocke, Raynie and Marco as they attempt to leave Cygnus to quietly slip into Granorg and assassinate Protea. When the conversation gets to "how Eruca intends to perform the ritual", in fact, Aht is very quick to change the subject, to the point where Eruca goes "Aht... do you know?" I'm pretty interested to find out who Heiss actually is with this information, it seems likely he is a member of the Granorg royal family himself who maybe left before he could complete his own ritual because he refused to accept his own demise. And that maybe why he absconded with Ernst, so that the ritual could not be performed and the planet would confront its fate, once again implicating Heiss as the Black Chronicle wielder.
Speaking of Aht and Eruca, by the way, good lord are they overperforming in battle at this point. So, we're kind of entering that late stage JRPG thing where our best party members just all have field nukes and man that's true of Aht and Eruca here. Aht has a lot cost high damage attack which hits in a cross pattern, potentially taking out 5 enemies at a time. Aht has a lot of interesting attacks which hit in large patterns but they've always balanced by the fact that Aht has a really low attack stat, the lowest of the entire party, so these are normally just utility options to keep combos going as all you need to maintain a combo is for any enemy that was previously hit to be hit again. But this attack that hits in a cross pattern is a magic attack, and Aht's magic stat is insane, it's part of her gimmick. Before this all she could use it for is setting traps which dealt crazy damage because they were considered magic, but now having a direct offensive option makes her a monster in battle. Oh and this move launches any launchable opponents into the air, and the way launching into the air works is that if you combo onto an opponent while they're in the air, they will also take fall damage when they land back on the ground.
Eruca, similarly, has just so many screen nukes at this point. She is the only party member, in fact, who literally has a screen nuke, having an attack which currently deals ~200 HP to every square on the opponent's field. She also has powerful moves the attack rows, columns, and her own cross shaped attacks. As is often the case in RPGs like this, the dedicated mage becomes your win button in the endgame. And because of how these moves often take out multiple enemies at a time, it makes combo-ing so easy now, so the bonuses you're getting off each battle are insane. The only caveat with Eruca is that she is such a MP drain, her normal screen nuke tools cost minimum 15 and usually 20. Eruca needs to heal every few fights because of how much MP she costs. But also, at this point any first strike means a full enemy board wipe before they get to act because you get four turns before they get one, so really having to use some healing items every few battles is a small price to pay.
I like that as we move further on in the game, we have the option to go back and "correct" various points in the timeline. Like there are various different inconsequential points where time technically diverges but in a way that does not matter for the true goal of the game. If you do or do not come back and fix the timeline, it won't change anything in a way that matters, you know. But you can still go back to these points and maybe save people who would normally die, or stop someone from betraying you that normally would. In this session, for instance, I obtained a blade known as the "Sand Sword", a blade made by a specialized blacksmith in the Desert Town of Skalla. We have no use for the Sand Sword, but a member of the Resistance who was in desperate need of a sword earlier on did ask for the Sand Sword. That member of the Resistance is now dead, his blade gave out on him as he tried to carve a path for the Princess to escape Granorg in the midst of the fire, and he died on the steps to the castle. But now you can go back, give him a Sand Sword, and he will survive the fires in Granorg, allowing him to show up later on to save the life of another member of the Resistance who would normally die.
I finally figured out what was happening with those ominous NPCs I keep running into. At the bottom of a well outside of Cygnus sits a man named Sword. Sword is an apprentice of the martial arts master Vainqueur, a warrior who wishes to meet Stocke, Eruca, and Aht to train them. But first, they must travel the land in both the present and the past to find the master's other apprentices, answer their riddles, and find where they hid their marks of apprenticeship. These are the ominous NPCs I keep meeting across my journey, their bizarre questions being prompts for Stocke to answer to prove he is worthy. Once they return, Sword finally introduces them to Vainqueur who is, surprisingly, a goblin. Vainqueur desire is to unlock the full potential of the trio, asking them to scour the world for various "Pacts" that, when returned to him, unlock many broken skills for the already broken party members. Eruca's full screen attack is one of Vainqueur's teachings, as is a very handy move for Stocke where he pushes an entire row back. Every party member, it seems, has a questline like this, "find x and return it to y to unlock new, powerful stuff for said party member", it's rather nice.
12/7/25
I knew I was probably finishing the Specint storyline in the next play session but man did it feel like that story wrapped up quickly. So, we enter the Gutral temple to take on the ritual to gain their trust. This is like the first proper dungeon we've had in a long time, it feels like. And something I have to say here is that I wonder how much this game would benefit from a full on remake. I enjoy Radiant Historia a lot, don't get me wrong, for a while I was even holding off on solidifying spots on my Top Ten list for this year because I thought it had a pretty good shot at making it on there. But I feel like its scope was definitely held back by the fact that it is a DS game. The Holff Ruins, the dungeon where we find the item needed to gain the Gutrals' trust, is kind of just three hallways, two of them immediately ending in dead ends. I know this game probably had some space issues, it's one of the convenient things about its time travel narrative in theory, that they get to reuse so many locations. But it's difficult not to become disappointed by how many areas in this game are only a handful of screens long, especially as you revisit them over and over.
The Black Chronicle wielder makes their first actual physical appearance at the end of the Holff Ruins. We don't get any reveal of who they are, mind, but for most of the game the wielder of the Black Chronicle has been operating in the shadows, only directly interfering when their identity is threatened to be revealed by hitting a killswitch on those they've infected. But now, clearly desperate to stop the party as their influence on the Specint timeline is all but dissipating, they alter events so a Gutral warrior infected by their meddling appears as the boss of the Ruins. This is not actually the goal, of course, a singular Gutral warrior, even one enhanced by the power of the Black Chronicle, is nothing for our party at this point. Side note, the beings that are infected with the Black Chronicle are called "Shadows" and something cute about them is that it always adds a fire weakness to the enemy even when there wasn't one normally, Anyways, what the Black Chronicle wielder is actually doing is buying time for the temple's guardian, a monstrous spider that has the ability to kill your party members in a single swing, to arrive; hoping to finally bury Stocke and crew in the temple so that the true timeline will never come to pass.
Fortunately, this gambit does not pay off, and Stocke and crew make it out of the Ruins no problem. They meet the Gutral chieftan, Bergas, outside of the ruins and discuss what their next movement should be. And this is where the story just kind of stops. There is an ending you can obtain by telling the chief that the party will go on ahead to the capital city and try to face down the Granorg army, leading to their deaths as they get caught in an ambush, but your other option is to be instantly transported to Granorg for the final assault. We don't even get to meet the Gutral army we have recruited to the cause of rescuing Granorg. I've mentioned it before but it does just kinda feel like the "Standard History" got the less focus of the two. It feels a bit like they decided on these two storylines and then really liked writing one of them more than the other. It's a little sad, I wish that the Specint storyline was as compelling as the Rosch Brigade storyline.
I mentioned last time about "fixing" the timeline, saving the lives of Resistance members who would normally die if you didn't take certain actions. Well it turns out that this is where that's important. When you approach Granorg, you see that the Granorg army has secured the outer gate, with a sizable force awaiting the opposing armies. Said force then gets decimated because the Resistance, now with all of its leaders still alive and still loyal to the cause, stages an attack from inside, flanking the Granorg army from behind with explosives and freeing the path for Eruca to enter the city. From there, Stocke and crew will infiltrate the city, carving a direct path to Queen Protea, while the combined forces of Forgia and Cygnus will place the city under siege, ensuring the remaining Granorg army will be unable to flee. The battle is a swift and decisive victory, with Protea's own generals abandoning her as they choose to flee instead. With no more allies, and the party pressuring her, Protea yields, allowing Eruca to ascend to her rightful place as Queen of Granorg and to begin the preparations for the ritual. With that, the Specint story ends for now.
Back at the Rosch Brigade storyline, now that we have gained the trust of the Gutrals in the other timeline, we can move into Forgia and ask for their assistance. To catch you back up, Alistel in this timeline is winning the war instead of it being kind of a stalemate, and is using their favorable position to commit genocide. They want to start a holy crusade across the continent, either killing or converting all the nations that were neutral in the war between Alistel and Granorg. Two of the nations, Celestia and Cygnus, have formed an alliance against this threat, however a powerful weapon in Alistel's control has wiped out the majority of the Cygnus mercenary army before it could launch its assault on Alistel. With Cygnus now licking its wounds and Celestia being ill-prepared for a full invasion, our heroes turn to Forgia to bolster their forces for a swift assault on Alistel before they can rearm their weapon.
I'm happy we got a little time with the original trio in this part of the story. Unfortunately it feels so often like Raynie and Marco keep getting sidelined as we go further into the story, either because the plot doesn't really involve them or because gameplaywise they take a backseat. When we get to Forgia, we are tasked with proving that we're trustworthy by freeing some Gutrals that the Alistel army is holding imprisoned in the nearby human town of Skalla. This mission is, effectively, a original trio mission, as Rosch, Gafka and Aht are used as a distraction, starting a riot among the natives, while Stocke, Raynie and Marco disguise themselves as Alistel soldiers and order a fake retreat out of Skalla to attempt to siege the town again. This bit kind of re-establishes why the original trio works so well, Stocke's reserved, stoic nature, Raynie's energetic, bombastic personality, and Marco's shy, analytical nature all play off each other very well. These three feel like they've been friends forever, it's wild to think that in-canon they met like a month ago, they're super fast friends. The siege, of course, never coming and forcing the Alistean soldiers fleeing Skalla to consider what punishment awaits them as deserters. With that out of the way, we have gained the Gutral trust, and can now work on an aggressive push against Alistel.
There was a very sad sidequest I covered in this section. So, way earlier in the game we found out that Aht's predecessor in the role of Shaman, a young woman named Isla, had ran away from her duty one day. The reason being that the role of a Shaman is to help guide souls trapped on Earth for whatever reason into the afterlife. It's an important role to the Satyros people and, honestly, to all people on the continent. It appears to be the purpose of Aht originally traveling with her uncle's troupe in the first place, from there she could find trapped souls and free them. Isla, however, became too attached to someone, someone she loved dearly. Instead of allowing the soul to rest, she captured the soul and ran off with it, casting herself to the winds where no one could find her. We finally discover, in this section, where Isla has been hiding and have the option to send the soul she is keeping captive.
The thing is, Aht is a small child. This is a decision that is so far beyond what she's equipped to do. So she leaves it to Stocke. Aht looks up to Stocke a great deal, after all, what he says will have a great impact on her. If Stocke chooses to allow Isla to run off, it tells Aht that this is an noble action, that when you truly care for someone, that overwrites your duty. And so Aht does the same in turn, imprisoning Stocke within a paradise realm until the war is over. Her doing this, however, causes the end of the world, as the desertification expands without Stocke being able to stop it and ultimately she dies before she can let Stocke out of this paradise realm. Even Teo and Lippti have trouble reaching him there. It's hard to blame her, though, Aht is just a little girl who is hyper aware of her favorite person's oncoming demise. She doesn't understand concepts like "the greater good" yet, she's like 8.
I appreciate that the structure of the game is such that you are strongly encouraged not to return to the Rosch Brigade storyline until Stocke is so far ahead that he can easily carry Rosch and Gafka as they play catchup. One of the key issues with this game is that if you do not have party members in the other timeline, they are just not gaining experience from any fights you're participating in. So party members like Rosch and Gafka are often 10-20 levels behind the rest of the party. I think Rosch was almost 30 levels behind when I got back to this storyline, actually. But by the time you return to this story, you are level 50-something, you are fighting enemies that are in the high 40s to low 50s. As such, because of how generous the first strike/positional combat system IS in this game, smart play means lower leveled party members can pretty reliably take down higher leveled goons. So Rosch and Gafka can pretty easily catch up, leveling up basically every 2-3 battles without having to worry about taking too much abuse. Unfortunately, this does mean the entire party is taking a backseat at this point while these two close that gap.
Speaking of Rosch, something I do think is sad is that the war with Alistel does not have a conclusion in the Specint storyline. I understand that the way this game's understanding of time travel works is that if the Rosch side is able to successfully defeat Hugo in their timeline; that will ripple into the other timeline and the combined forces of the Alistel defectors and Celestia will defeat Hugo there. But it is unfortunate that they introduced this element halfway through the Specint storyline that Alistel is preparing for their own crusade after the war ends and Rosch standing firm against them with a small force of rebels and Satyros. I think this especially causes the ending of the Specint storyline to feel lacking. Maybe it's because I did this one first, I think you could in theory finish them in the other order too as soon as you receive the Beast Mark. But the Specint storyline doesn't really have a final boss. You don't fight Protea, you fight a boss fight consisting of four enemies, two being stronger and two being weak mid game minibosses. So it has no final boss for its part of the story and doesn't conclude all the plotlines in it, kind of leaving the ending feeling a bit empty until you do this other storyline.
I imagine I'll beat the game next time I sit down to play it. In the walkthrough I'm using, I'm currently in part 56 of 66, though the length of parts is absolutely fluid (part 53 was a hallway). I've been really enjoying Radiant Historia. It certainly has its problems, obviously, but this is one of the better JRPGs I've played in my life. I really like the combat, the core concept is super unique and interesting, and even though the cast can be underdeveloped and kind of play into JRPG tropes, I really like them. That being said... this isn't a Radiant Historia specific problem, just the problem with playing long games in general, I'm pretty ready to be done with Radiant Historia. It's a great game but I'm feeling that "I've been playing this game for 30 hours and I want it to be over" burnout I feel from a lot of RPGs nowadays. I'm curious to see what the end game will be like, that's usually when JRPGs provide the bulk of the plot so maybe I might have two more play sessions. We'll see.
12/13/25
I unfortunately did not get as much done in this play session as I wanted to. I was really hoping I could finish the game, I even got done with stuff early so I could have time to do so. But things never quite work out like you plan them, huh? So I ended up getting through most of the rest of the Rosch Brigade storyline last night before I had to stop. I was also hoping to get more done the night before but I ended up getting too invested in watching the Game Awards with friends and kind of dropped my plan to "watch the show and play Radiant Historia during". I'll fully admit, I'm pretty disappointed in how long it's taken me to get through Radiant Historia. Idk, it always feels like I need to dedicate a solid play session to it instead of just picking it up for an hour here, an hour there, and there are so many nights where I will get done with my after dinner routine and realize it's already like 9:30 and go "...guess I'm working on other things tonight". Despite what it may have seemed like, I am actually working on a lot of posts for the blog, it's just you know. Finding the focus to finish one, lol.
So, we found out what Hugo's mysterious superweapon actually is. He, in a complete show of arrogance, calls it the "Divine Judgement" as he fully believes himself to be a god. What it is actually, is that his head scientist has found a way to effectively reverse the power of the ritual needed to stop the desertification to instead drain people's life force and turn them to sand. He then is able to direct it at a specific, large area to turn everyone in that area to sand, wiping out entire armies at once. The only thing is that the weapon takes a long time to arm and fire, with his head scientist advising him to only use it sparingly, and that his use of it multiple times in such a short period of time has rendered the weapon ineffective. So that's our ultimate plan to move into Granorg, where Hugo and the force of the Alistel army now resides to protect their superweapon, get to the weapon, and disable it. Which means, finally, the whole party is together as Eruca joins the fray in this timeline, being the only one who can tamper with the ritual components as the last known member of the royal bloodline.
This chapter also has us capturing the Sand Fortress! I love this stupid Sand Fortress so much, Like it's this super important military installation on the border between Granorg and Alistel that is obviously very important to the war, but also, nobody holds it for more than a few days. Both for lore reasons and I presume because it's convenient for game design, every big military battle takes place in the Sand Fortress. It's so funny. I figured this would set up a big final conflict with our old friend Viola, a woman who would never betray Alistel because of her hardline beliefs in the Prophet Noah. She, however, has been moved to Granorg to support Hugo's forces directly, a sign of Hugo's own desperation as he has historically tried to keep Viola as far away from him as possible due to her popularity with the people. So instead we just fight an Alistel war machine, an upgraded version of their bulkier mechanized units built more for mobility.
We do end up going toe to toe with Viola in this section, however. Viola is the last line of defense at Granorg Palace, she is there to ensure that Hugo's flight from Granorg is unimpeded. We must defeat her to restore Eruca to the throne before we can refocus our efforts back on Hugo. It's a sad confrontation, Viola was our friend, our ally, and she knows this is wrong. Knows Hugo has corrupted the prophet's words, has used them to commit heresy. But she needs to stand against the Rebel army, needs to stand for the people of Alistel, despite her knowledge of the truth. To Viola, if she lays down her weapons, if she surrenders without fight, then the ideas she fought for die. The Prophet's words would mean nothing, the rallying cry of the Alistean people, a people who fought for independence against a monarchy and fought a decades long war to keep it, would be supplanted by the words of the heretic who claimed to speak for the Prophet. And so, despite the pleading of her former comrades, she must stand in service of the heretic. So that the Prophet's legacy will live through her.
Speaking of the Prophet, it turns out he was fake! So what had happened is that about half a decade ago, Noah fell ill. That was when Hugo, being the highest ranking member of the Alistel military and effectively it's leader, became the "Voice of the Prophet", his original goal being to simply communicate the words of the Prophet. Unbeknownst to the people of Alistel, the Prophet died, an action that Hugo covered up to gain absolute power. Since then, "Noah" has been a dummy, staged so that when people see him, he is not fully visible and that Hugo is capable of standing in front of him. This was perfectly fine in the city of Alistel, where the palace of the Prophet was very vertical and had a lot of high balconies for the Prophet to appear on. But when Hugo moved into Granorg, "Noah" had to move with him, and the first time the Prophet was to appear, the illusion was shattered. The Granorg Palace doesn't have balconies, and so the unruly people of Alistel, wanting to finally meet their Prophet, manage to overwhelm Hugo and get close to the Prophet. They, of course, react in horror when they find out that the person from who Hugo justified his tyranny and genocide was little more than a scarecrow.
It's also really telling what happens when the Alistel citizens move into Granorg. Tensions are very high, as the Alisteans begin to treat the native Granorgites as second class citizens. They spend all day proselytizing about the Prophet Noah out in public, shouting at the citizens of Granorg to repent. The Alistel army watches the Granorgites like a hawk, ready to intervene at any show of disruption from them. Hugo has ordered the local merchants, including those who provide food to the people, to sell to Alisteans first, meaning the natives are starving. Alistel has started conscription, forcing the Granorgites to bear arms in Hugo's "Holy Crusade", a daunting task for the people of Granorg as, you know, Hugo turns entire battlefields to sand. It's a depressing sight, the people of Granorg were ruled by one despot and now they have another, someone who is even worse than Protea ever was. And the Granorg military has fully supported Hugo, with both Dias and Selvan, the two leaders of Granorg, pledging their full support to Hugo's crusade.
This section had a pretty interesting sidequest. So, throughout the game, there were various decision points that, strangely, did not immediately result in a bad ending depending on what you chose. These decisions were actually leading up to a Raynie focused sidequest that becomes accessible during this part of the game. Marco notices that Raynie is behaving strangely, as they prepare to move out to combat Alistel, she is hesitant. He asks Stocke to investigate why and Raynie tells Stocke in no uncertain terms that she has fallen in love with him. That her mind is struggling to focus on the battle because she can't stop imagining the world after, a world of peace where maybe there's a chance for them. And she asks Stocke if maybe the war isn't important, maybe the two of them should run off together and try to find a different way to prevent the end of the world. Stocke can accept this outcome and get one of the saddest bad endings in the game, an ending where he chooses love in the hope that he can find another way, but an ending where the calamity becomes an inevitability regardless. Raynie and him must remain unrequited, with only the vague promise of considering this future when this is all over. A promise that is unlikely to be fulfilled, as all signs point to Stocke's demise.
I'm pretty sure Aht just hates Eruca at this point. It's very clear that Aht knows something about the future, the future that Eruca wants to bring about. As an aside, Eruca not only knows about the White Chronicle, but also knows Stocke is the wielder of it. Meaning that the trio of them are bound together in yet another way. Anyways, Aht is trying her hardest to ensure that Stocke and Eruca never get a moment of peace as she is unable to accept what will happen to Stocke at the journey's end. When the two of them are alone, Aht chases after them to interrupt their moment. She talks over Eruca at strategy meetings, attempting to convince the party that the best course of action is to keep Stocke in reserve. Aht totally knows whatever fate awaits Stocke will see Stocke dying at the end of this and she is desperate to prevent this action, poor kid. I can imagine Aht being a lot of people's least favorite character because it's like "this is the end of the world at stake and she keeps being selfish about everything" but she is a very small child who, even if her job is literally to ferry the souls of the dead, clearly still doesn't understand mortality.
Gafka is pretty quickly joining the pantheon of busted party members in the late game. Gafka started out being kind of mediocre to bad, he has so few skills and is really just a giant beatstick to throw at enemies as needed. But as you complete his questline and level him up more, Gafka becomes one of the best combo extenders in the game. Gafka has a lot of moves that impact entire rows and columns, but more importantly unlike other party members, these moves also push enemies into each other, setting up combo potential. Gafka also has a lot of multihit moves, his first move he gets off his sidequest, Musou, is a 10 hit move. Musou is very effective not just for high damage but for inflating your combo meter for maximum EXP and money bonuses. The caveat with Musou is that it only hits the opponent in the center square, the most inconvenient square to force enemies on in the grid, but bosses usually start on the center square. So Gafka just wrecks through bosses, this is actually an important strat vs. Viola. Viola has a natural aura that regenerates on her turn that makes her immune to the first five hits she would take. Musou is a ten hit move. It destroys Viola so quickly. Gafka having the potential to be the strongest party member is even part of his questline, you can undergo a ritual to have Gafka become a "Beast God". Him becoming a Beast God is actually the bad ending, Gafka loses himself completely to the animalistic power and ravages the continent in an unstoppable fury, but like, that's the kind of power Gafka CAN wield. The good ending grants him an incredibly powerful weapon, for what it's worth, which is effectively his ultimate weapon I'm pretty sure.
This does, however, point out an issue in the party balancing of this game. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, Radiant Historia's party balancing is terrible. I've mentioned previously about how I haven't been using Raynie and Marco that much in the late game and a pretty large reason for that is that so many of my party members are having to play catchup due to being in the timeline where they weren't available for so long. But also it's just that... they're not as good as some of the others. Raynie has the unique tools at her disposal that she not only has access to all elemental magic at the ready (Stocke only has access to Fire, Eruca only has access to Ice, and Aht can only lay magical traps) but also has access to Lightning magic that no other party member does. While in theory this makes her a powerful aggressive mage, exploiting enemies' elemental weaknesses, Eruca is just so much stronger AND has more natural MP, meaning that even if her magics don't exploit many weaknesses they also tend to overpower this fact.
Marco, meanwhile, is kind of meant to be the resident support unit, giving lots of buffs and healing the party. The issue is that if you have a base understand of the mechanics of the game, you usually don't need to heal. The first strike mechanic is so powerful that it completely invalidates a party member, with you very frequently being able to take out a whole board of your opponents before they can move. Moreover, Marco's support buffs are just equivalent to items you're able to get in shops, meaning that everyone can use their turns to do what Marco can do. Rosch also suffers from being invalidated in a lot of ways, not only because he's so often out of the party but because his big thing is being able to attack rows and columns easier, an ability that becomes less and less necessary as time goes on and everyone gets this capability. It's unfortunate that the early game party members end up kind of mechanically behind as the game goes on. This is also one of those games where the protagonist is never allowed to leave the party, so you're not really able to experiment with every possible party to figure out who really supports who. Stocke is always in the lead and as such your strategies will always, in some way, be built around him. I like this game a lot still but between how much less interesting the plot has been as we go on and how weird the balance is, it's getting kind of wonky in the late game.
12/15/25
I was originally going to come back to y'all like "so, didn't beat the game again, oopsie" because the final stuff with Hugo ended up taking way longer than I thought it was going to. But I decided to just not update last night since all I effectively did was "find Hugo and beat him". Contrary to what I thought, Radiant Historia's final chapter(s) are actually pretty breezy? There are a couple kind of long dungeons I guess but it's not the "backloading the game with another 10 hours of story" I expected it to be from my previous experiences with JRPGs. I probably could've finished this all in one night if I hadn't been doing every sidequest. But it was important that I did, this game's "true ending" requires you to do most if not all of the sidequests and I really enjoyed getting to see all the ending scenes based on what I did. Who would've ever imagined that the most important sidequest in the game is the one where we teach a guy how to grow coconuts!?
So in the last bit storywise, Eruca ascends to the throne after we defeat Viola, ending the Alistean occupancy of Granorg. This led Hugo to flee back to Alistel, where he stands with a small force of 500 men hoping that Granorg will simply see him as so little of a threat that they ignore him until he can redouble his efforts. Unfortunately for him, his last remaining allies (the Granorg strategist Selvan and Heiss), both abandon him in his last hours, leaving him desperate and alone, knowing that Stocke and company are likely to descend on him at any moment. With no other way forward, he calls upon his chief scientist and retreats to the underground Mecha lab for one final play, a play to put the power of his ultimate weapon into his own body. As our party infiltrates Alistel, Hugo steps out of his machine, no longer simply a man, but something more, something that can control time itself.
After Stocke finds his way through the underground lab, he confronts Hugo only to find the confrontation suspiciously easy. Hugo goes down without much of a fight, him rambling and raving about how he now truly hears the Prophet from beyond the grave and seeming uninterested in fighting the group. But then we get a display of his power, him reversing every cut we gave him, literally returning to the moment before the fight. He has drained the magic from his blade, a mystical sword originally belonging to the Satyros known as "Historica", and now he contains that magic within him. The magic of the Celestial tree itself. To stop him, we must restore the blade, going back to before the war even started and alerting the Satyros general, Elm, of what happened to the original wielder of the blade, a close friend and potential lover of herself, and ask for her assistance.
Restoring the blade's magic and returning it to the point in time where we face Hugo breaks the spell, and this time we defeat him for good. As he dies, he believes he sees the visage of the Prophet, a man he believes he loyally served throughout his life. The party is frustrated by this outcome, speaking on how this monster died happy, believing he was the hero and being granted what he felt was eternal paradise. But they take solace in the fact that history will remember him for what he truly was, a genocidal maniac who tried to take over the world and eradicate its peoples. The prophet's words will live on through those who truly followed him, and Hugo will be a footnote in the history of the now unified continent. And so they leave him, laying in the underground lab. There will be no burial for the tyrant. No honor given. He shall simply disappear into the sands of history.
Which brings us to our final chapter, the true villain of the game. Yeah it's Heiss. Heiss has been the Black Chronicle's wielder all along. This is a very choreographed reveal, as I've sad in the past, it was so choreographed that I expected some big twist where it wasn't Heiss this entire time. In this case I should've just taken the game's story at face value, I guess. Heiss breaks into the ritual hall, the massive labyrinth under the castle in Granorg where members of the royal family are sacrificed, and shuts off the power of Flux, the power that controls time itself that the royal lineage uses to perform the ritual. Stocke and crew are called to the castle to assist Eruca in finding him, and when they do, he issues a challenge to Stocke. He will be awaiting him at the ruins of the Empire, the last place on the map that we have never been to. There, he will reveal the truth to Stocke, a truth that he believes will permanently turn the warrior against Eruca and to his side. He disappears, knowing Stocke must follow if he wishes to restore the powers of Flux. With that, the part (minus Eruca) sets off for the Imperial Ruins.
I want to take a step aside here to once again compliment the OST by the one, the only, the greatest to ever do it, Yoko Shimomura. Genuinely speaking, Radiant Historia is a top 5 Shimomura score and, honestly, may be my favorite period. There are a lot of tracks I loved in the interim since I last talked about the OST, but I didn't talk about them because after the halfway point of this story there aren't really new tracks. In between the last time I talked about it and this one, I think two other tracks were heard because it's a pretty small soundtrack. You can tell the budget for this game was a little tight. But the final dungeon theme, Memories of the World, is superb. It's a beautiful composition for starters, just absolutely gorgeous. But it's also so sad and melancholic, you know. The final dungeon is the ruins of a lost empire, one whose greed and arrogance caused not just their death but the deaths of the world itself. And the song captures it perfectly. While also being so urgent, reflecting that you're chasing down Heiss and need to keep moving, you can't linger on what is happening, on the tragedy of it all. It also has some motifs from the final boss theme, which is always good. Just a great track, love Memories of the World.
We track Heiss to the Imperial Ruins where we finally meet the "wielder of the Black Chronicle" we have been seeing across the journey. It turns out, it's King Victor, Eruca and Ernst's father and the tyrant king whose arrogance caused much of the problems facing the current world. Heiss used the power of the Black Chronicle to resurrect him as a puppet, something Aht picks up on immediately, that this man has no soul. After a conflict with Victor, who quickly gets destroyed as Heiss no longer has any use for him, our party is taunted by the man, prodding them to venture deeper for the truth. As they go on, Heiss reveals his true identity, the actual reason he hates the ritual, the reason why Stocke, a person everyone notes as looking identical to Eruca's brother, came to be. Stocke IS Ernst, to no one's surprise, Heiss kidnapped him and brainwashed him into believing he was someone else.
Heiss reveals that he is King Victor's brother, and he himself was intended to be the sacrifice for the ritual. King Victor has always been a bit conceited, believing that his ability to perform the ritual was grounds for being a tyrant. Eruca talks about him as if he was even worse than Protea. Heiss, being raised with his brother, developed a very different outlook on the ritual. To him, the ritual is pointless. Humanity is delaying the inevitable, letting people sacrifice themselves for very little gain to pat themselves on the back for doing anything at all. The Sacrifices have lived meaningless lives to fade into the tomes of history so that humanity can extend itself for another generation, and people are so comfortable with this idea that they are apathetic to finding an actual solution.
So Heiss abandoned his role, took the Black Chronicle and tried to find a better way. Instead, all he found was chaos and destruction, the inevitability of humanity's demise. So he returns to his own time, bitter and jaded, hoping to find an end to the ritual. To his horror, he instead finds his brother in the process of sacrificing his own children to the ritual. Heiss, now an old man from how long he's been searching for a solution, takes Ernst, who he always had a close relationship with and whose ideals in many respects match his own, erases his memories, and decides to raise him to see the world as he does. Heiss has been rigging things from the start to put Stocke in the right places to see humanity's cruelty, its destruction, its apathy, for himself. Heiss granting Stocke the White Chronicle and assigning him to Raynie and Marco, a duo that he has found are necessary for Stocke awakening his true potential, was no mere accident. Heiss believed, by granting Ernst time travel, he would see things as Heiss saw them.
Stocke does not dismiss Heiss' ideology outright. Humanity IS cruel, and they can be apathetic. Hugo's holy Crusade, the duplicity of Dias and Selvan, Protea's tyranny, being sold into slavery, the Beastkind's contempt. Everyone is always fighting, always dying, and in service of "saving the world". But Heiss' folly was that he did not try to convince Ernst, a person already receptive to his ideals. He created a new person, who could be defined by new thoughts, new opinions, new ideals. Stocke has seen the cruelty of man, but he also has seen its kindness. He has unified the peoples of this continent together, had them put aside centuries old conflicts for the purpose of the greater good. He has made unbreakable bonds, bonds that transcend time and space, bonds so powerful that they work retroactively. He agrees that the ritual may not save the world forever, that the royal family has been complicit and complacent in the desertification, unambitious in finding a real solution. But unlike Heiss, Stocke believes this is a world worth saving, and so chooses to still sacrifice himself for a world that he believes will learn how to save itself. Which leads us to the final confrontation between these two men, the ideals of them determining what will happen. And because this is a JRPG, Heiss absorbs a bunch of souls and becomes a time god that we have to fight in a big multiphase fight.
To no one's surprise, Aht knew the whole time who Stocke actually was. Her being a shaman caused her to pick up on the fact that Stocke only had half a soul immediately, a thing which causes her to be immediately fascinated by him. It can then be posited that when she met Eruca, she pieced together what was going on, as Eruca would have the other half of that soul. Aht is the last dissenting voice in the party as we reach the endgame, being unable to accept that her hero's fate is inevitable. That he cannot run away from his duty, that to save the world is to sacrifice himself. When Stocke leaves the alternate history, the Rosch Brigade timeline, for the last time, she's furious at Rosch, Raynie, and Marco, asking them how they could let him go like that. To which they say, they had to. Stocke would never have been okay with letting the world be destroyed on his behalf. And that they know that somehow, some way, he will return to them.
Heiss reveals in this section that he was responsible for murdering Raynie and Marco's entire group. Raynie pieced it together very quickly when Heiss revealed his manipulation, that her belief that one of the creatures specifically attacked the mine instead of them so only they would survive was confirmed in this moment. She, as you can imagine, doesn't handle this well. Raynie is someone whose loyalty is absolute, the idea that she was betraying Heiss and Alistel almost caused her to quit the team in one timeline. Raynie's loyalty to the people who gave her a home is so strong that Stocke only fully wins it back by choosing to stand for Cygnus, saving a place that is important to Raynie. Finding out that the people who took her in, the exact person who gave her a new purpose in life, used her as a tool to get his adoptive child to reach a conclusion finally solidifies to Raynie that her only home, truly, is with Stocke. It makes me kind of sad that Raynie is probably the worst party member in the game gameplaywise, because man do I wish it were justifiable to have her at the end.
The final boss area is an interesting take on a boss rush. Radiant Historia does not have many named bosses, I'm not sure if you've picked up on that. Basically all the bosses are just combinations combinations of normal grunts, which is kind of interesting. It feels more in line with a proper war storyline to have most of the bosses be inconsequential. You never actually face Dias nor Selvan, the two Granorg generals, as they both get assassinated and absorbed by Heiss to make himself stronger. So what the final boss area does is take you back to four of the most significant named bosses and have you fight them. The logic being that Heiss has made a mess of the timeline one last time, creating tiny pocket branches that require Stocke to battle against friend and foe alike. Heiss even takes over Viola, corrupting her into the Dark Valkyrie and forcing Stocke to kill his friend and former commander one last time, as she begs him to free her from Heiss' influence. It's a pretty unique lore bit to add to a boss rush, instead of just the usual "oh these people have been resurrected as dark copies".
The intended use for the Chronicles is also very interesting. Teo and Lippti reveal in this section, now that Stocke's journey is almost over and they can tell him without worry what impact it will have on the timeline, what the Chronicles are meant to be used for. The Chronicles are not meant to oppose each other, they're not two equal forces, one of good and one of evil. They're meant to be given to the royals of Granorg, one to the sacrifice and one to the one who remains. The White Chronicle's purpose is to allow the sacrifice to view the goodness in the world, relive their entire life and know what they are sacrificing themselves for. The Black Chronicle, meanwhile, is meant to be given to the one who isn't sacrificed, to look upon the sorrow, to mourn those who have been sacrificed and ensure their sacrifice is never forgotten. It's an important balance to maintaining the ritual, one that ensures no royal of Granorg will ever forget what is important. King Victor never saw either Chronicle, being too blinded by his own arrogance to bother with joy or sorrow. If he was a kinder man, a more measured man, then maybe none of this would've happened.
The ending of the game does that really wonderful thing where we get a whole bunch of "where are they now sequences", showing the longterm impact of Stocke's sacrifice. It's a nice little bit to tie it together, that by completing every sidequest you see the world not healed but healing. The races of the world openly interacting. People mourning, but also celebrating. Marriages happening, new life being formed. People you thought were going to die having hope for the future. It's a bittersweet end, as people reflect on what they lost, who they lost, while thinking about what they've gained. They linger on the history, but look to the future. And it ends with Raynie, Raynie who is still waiting. In a callback to an earlier point in the story, a point you have probably revisited dozens of times as you complete this game, she's waiting outside the tavern. Because if both Raynie and Marco were inside, Stocke couldn't find them. He promised he'd return to her. He promised that when the war was done, they could have a future. And who knows, maybe he'll find a way to fulfill that promise.
I really enjoyed Radiant Historia. I'm a bit sad it actually took me this long to get to it, like I said I've had this game since it was new and just never got around to it. Is it one of the best games of all time? Heck no. It has severe balancing issues, the individual storylines don't resolve in ways that feel natural, it has wonky pacing at times. But it is a super unique, incredibly fun little RPG. I think it's one of Yoko Shimomura's best works, I think it's one of Atlus' best works. It's sad that it's not more available. From what I understand about Perfect Chronology, the remaster that, should this game be made available in more modern hardware, would likely be the version, it's kind of a betrayal of this game's vibe too. It kind of takes out the nuance in a lot of ways, depicts a more good vs. evil story where people are evil because the evil being told them to be. It'd be sad if this version stops existing long term, though I know a lot of people just believe more content equals better game and don't really mind it. I really liked this though, it was the last hanging thread in my original DS library and what a way to go out. 8.4/10
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