So this comes with a decent amount of shame and I will be totally honest, when it comes to JRPGs, especially those on the original NES, I am sadly quite ignorant. Beyond Final Fantasy, I draw a bit of a blank. Actually, if I am in the process of honesty, as much as I say that I enjoy JRPGs, I have a shocking lack of them in my gaming repertoire. Now, perhaps I could be forgiven because when it comes to Retro games, I didn’t quite have the luxury of picking up games that would have caught my interest, mostly because I was 2 years old when the SNES was released in the UK. 8-bit and 16-bit JRPGs would have be beyond my comprehension, possibly outside the realms of my patience as well. This latter point is actually important, trust me.
So enough about myself and let’s actually talk a little bit about the game. Radia Senki is a JRPG that was released in Japan only, in November 1991, a full year after the SNES was released in Japan, and a few months after it was released in North America. Apparently a prototype was apparently made for an English release, but I can imagine that it would probably have been quite a gamble to try to release a JRPG on a console on the previous generation when the focus probably would have been to get push SNES games and sales. That being said, I am shocked how many games were still being released on the NES after the release of SNES. Despite not being released outside of Japan, there exists a fan translation for the game, so it is fully playable in English. I will say right off the bat, this one is worth giving a look at as it, especially for JRPG Fans.
Radia Senki follows the adventure of a player-named protagonist, who awakes in strange world. They seem to have been struck down with a well-trodden case of amnesia! He is found by Darus, a wondering mage. They witness something crashing in the mountains nearby, upon investigating they discover the crashed… Plane? (The technology is a little weird in this game), inside the plane is Princess Lefis. Graciously, she doesn’t have amnesia, and she sets out the plot for the player. Her step-brother is looking to take over the world by collecting macguffins to open the sacred Radia Tower. So your quest is to stop him and save the world, hopefully regaining your lost memories along the way. It is quite funny though, you get to name your character, with a 4 character limit, and Lefis comments that the player inputted name means “Guardian of Light”. Anyway, a long the way, you recruit a mismatch group of party members and go on a globetrotting journey to stop a megalomaniac from doing something stupid. I don’t want to get into too many details about the plot as I think it is worth experiencing.
But, do you know what is worth going into some details about, the combat. For an NES game, I am surprised that they went with a real-time combat system. The best way for me to explain how it works, is that when you have a random encounter, the gameplay becomes reminiscent of Zelda. You control the protagonist and can move freely, in four directions, and attack with a sword. Your allies are controlled by the computer and will act in accordance to 4 different strategies you can set. Fight, Rush, Defend and Move. Fight sets them to move around and attack whatever enemy they please, whilst Rush lets you set a target and they focus on that enemy. Defend sets them to avoid getting range of enemy attacks. Move allows you set a tile for them to move to. Most of the times you will keep them set to Fight and let them get on with things, because what I will say about the battles in this game, they can be incredibly slow, everyone moves around the battlefield as if they are hip deep in water. That’s quite hyperbolic, I didn’t find that the encounters in the game that bad, but the encounter rate? Oh, that’s a different matter. There are times when you can make a decent distance across a map, whilst other times you will barely move a space before being dragged into another battle, usually one with the same encounter composition. That composition point is important, trust me.
Beyond running around the battlefield swinging a sword or letting your allies attack, you also have spells. Well, the player character doesn’t your party members do. Spells are learnt by finding scrolls in chests and other environmental items, like bookcases, pots, etc. My advice is, bump into every object in the game, as you will want those scrolls. Spells operate on a “per rest” basis, similar to Final Fantasy 1, graciously, any bed you see in the game can be used to rest, heal and save, so you don’t even need to find an Inn to rest up in. Heck, even the inns don’t charge you to sleep in a bed. So, here is the rub though with the spells. Beyond a few, Healus, Swapra and Escapus, you will have NO clue what the spells actually do, a lot of them do damage, but the game doesn’t really give any feedback on the damage your spells are doing. The worst part is, you can’t use spells against bosses! Except Healus. Healus is an amazing spell, as it will heal your entire party to full health. Beyond the spells and beds to heal, you do get potions and herbs… Or you can just eat meat you get as a reward for killing some enemies. Considering that meat restores 8 HP, and late game your HP caps at about 255, trying to heal using meat would be a potentially traumatic experience for the person needing healing, it makes me think of some of those Skyrim or Zelda jokes about pausing time and huffing down kilos of food.
Talking about the meat situation actually does brings me ‘neatly’ into inventory in this game, first of all, inventory is neatly organised into 3 different sections, medic, tool and prize, medic holding all your healing items, tool being usable items and key items and prize are items that are dropped by enemies, either meat, tusks or bones. Now, tool items suffer from the same issue that spells do, you have no real idea what the items do, I assume they are explained in the game’s instruction manual. What is odd though, the prize items do give you a tool tip for what they do. Meat, heals as mentions, tusks do something I forgot about and bones cause enemies to flee, for some reason. What is annoying is that nothing else has these tool tips and you’ll either have to experiment with things, this is particularly frustrating when dealing with the tool items, as there are some incredibly useful items, like the orb of life, which fully heals and restores all magic points, but the game doesn’t tell you that. Another annoying inventory quirk, prize items stack up to 99 (Except the Gadora Thorns, where you can only have three of those), medical items stack to 9, and tools aren’t stackable, but you can have 18 items in total in that section of your inventory. But, you might be asking, where does your gear go? Well each party member has an inventory of 6 gear items, so weapons, armours, accessories. Sometimes knowing what people can wear is obvious and some need a bit of trial and error, annoyingly, if you have a weapon equipped, you need to unequip it to equip the newer one. It’s a little clunky, and for some of the accessories it is guess work to know which slot that accessory might be in.
All in all, Radia Senki is actually quite an enjoyable game, whilst it has some pinch points and the combat can feel a little slow at times, but the forced engagement that the real time battles do bring about can keep you on your toes. Mostly because unless you are in an area where you are overlevelled, the player character will be the most competent fighter. Whilst your allies do fight and will do an admirable job, they lack the aggression that the player character will have. Don’t expect your companions to spam their attacks like you would. It should also be noted, that there is no indication of how much damage is done, no little numbers or anything. This means it is somewhat difficult to feel your characters get stronger, unless you are counting the hits you have done on certain enemies. Likewise, for enemies, it can be hard to know how hard they are hitting you and your party, and some enemies hit for A LOT of damage. Late game, the game likes to throw these heavy hitters at you in large numbers. As mentioned earlier, the encounter rate can mean that you fight the same set of enemies multiple times in one area, meaning you might have to deal with some of those incredibly threatening enemies in a series of endurance waves.
Honestly though, I think if JRPGs are your cup of tea, and you can get past some of the quirks, this is actually a really fun game to play. This is the kind of game that I feel deserves some kind of modern day revival, a few Quality of Life fixes would do wonders for this game because as it stands it really is a bit of a gem of a JRPG on the NES.
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