Last night, Atlus teased us with this image.
I became rather excited at the prospect of a new Radiant Historia game. A remake on Vita? 3DS? Switch? And then the realities of the present day kicked in and I realized it was probably going to be a smartphone port. Soul effectively crushed.
Thankfully, Atlus pulled through. Radiant Historia is getting a 3DS remake with a new scenario and calling it Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology.
The original version of Radiant Historia was a DS RPG that dealt with time travel. You play as Stocke and, after a mission goes horribly wrong and you’re on the brink of death, are given the ability to travel back in time to certain anchor points to try to change history. There’s no way of doing everything in one shot either. You will fail. You will bump into timelines that have nothing but a terrible outcome, but that was the interesting part of Radiant Historia. You could see the branching paths of the timeline that you had opened up. It was necessary to go through some of the failure state timelines to get information to advance the story further. Your actions would have consequences that would be unforeseeable until you played them. It played with the reality of time travel by making sure you realized that even the smallest differences could have huge ramifications.
It’s battle system played more like a puzzle game in a sense. Certain attacks allow you to move the enemies around on the battle grid. You can change your attack order to stack turns, allowing you to take advantage of the enemies you’ve repositioned and hit multiple enemies multiple times in the same go. Your ability to figure out the best way to do this has more impact on how battles turn out. After some time it does become a bit easy to figure out, but it alleviates the almost completely passive approach to getting through the lesser enemies that a lot of turn based RPG’s suffer from.
And one of my favorite bits about Radiant Historia is the soundtrack, which was composed by Yoko Shimomura. She’s someone whose work you’re probably more familiar with than you realize when you see everything she’s done in her nearly 30 years of composing video game music. Below are a few of my favorite tracks from the soundtrack.
Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology is set to release in Japan on June 29th. No release outside of Japan has been announced at the time, but with the localization largely already handled, I think it’s safe bet we’ll be seeing it. The original DS version sold beyond Atlus’ expectations, enough so that it ended up getting another print run. Hopefully that’s something that’s taken into account when deciding on whether or not to release the remake of this largely overlooked gem out to the rest of the world.
