Riviera: The
Promised Land
Release date: July 2005
Review written 10/10/05
System: Game Boy Advance or
newer
Developed by Sting
Published by Atlus USA
Riviera: The Promised Land is probably this year's major Game Boy
Advance RPG. It is a unique title that, in one mark of a good game,
both fits within numerous conventions and innovates. People expecting a
standard console RPG experience won't get it here, and this is probably
for the better. Trying to do new things and succeeding is somewhat rare
in videogames.
Gameplay: Riviera is, at its core, a traditional console RPG, complete
with turn-based, menu-driven battles and an epic plot. However, the
differences from normal become quickly apparent. First, there is no
direct movement of your character in this game. Instead, you move
between screens, like some kinds of old PC-style RPGs or adventure
games. The character is in the center of the screen and arrows
displayed on the screen show which ways you can go. If that was all
there was to it, however, it'd be too simple. And indeed, it is not.
There is also, of course, looking at your surroundings. In normal
console-style RPGs the challenge comes from dealing with all the
(usually random) battles you must fight to get between places, or with
the confusing level designs you can get lost in. With only set battles,
not random ones, the fact that the game has an onscreen map of the area
you are in always on the screen, and the simplified movement system,
this game minimizes that -- there is an important exception of some
puzzles (some of which are truly challenging, but even these could
definitely be solved with some logic and a piece of paper to write down
the pertinent information on), but the game minimizes it just the same.
So instead, the challenge is not finding the items. Pressing 'A' will
switch between movement and observation mode, where pressing a
direction will intereact with the onscreen trigger point (so, like with
movement, you are limited to four points per screen).
This is not to say that there is no challenge in interacting with those
points, however. To activate a point and see what happens there,
whether it's a conversation or an item, you need Trigger Points, or TP.
These are gotten in battlehe game has a points and rating system.
Depending on how well you do in combat, you will get a rating from C to
S. The higher the rating, the more TP you get... This means that
sometimes you will see chests or items you wish you could get but
cannot because you didn't do well enough on the battles before it in
that level. It's an interesting solution to the question 'what do you
do when you make the exploration so simple?', and it works well.
There are three kinds of triggers. The first require no TP to use and
are mostly people in the town and triggers you have already activated.
The second are normal triggers that give a conversation or an item. The
third will, in the course of the conversation, set off a minigame, or
rather, a timing challenge. Shenmue-like, you must do things like
pressing A at a specific time, or copying a complex button combonation
quickly, or tapping a button some number of times within a short time.
These are challenging and are very frequent. Some are for the
ubiquitous traps on chests, but others are at story-relevant points.
Sometimes, it isn't your choice to take one path or another --
sometimes failing at a minigame will force you onto one you did not
expect. It helps liven up the game and keeps your reflexes quick... and
also increases user interation in a game otherwise lacking anything
that requires reflexes. Of course it's best to play it through and
resist the urge to retry things until you "get them right", but I
wasn't able to every time... sometimes, though. It's definitely
different, to be able to fail and keep going, and sometimes actually
take a different route thorough that part of the game...
The battles themselves are equally unique within what is expected.
While they are not random -- they occur at specific screens and are set
up with dialogue -- they are typical in the sense that they have no
movement and you just choose from options on a list. Even here though,
things are not quite as you expect. Before combat, you choose which
party members to use -- you get five in the party, but can bring only
three -- and then which items. You see, you may only bring four items
into combat. Your inventory holds 16 (also an issue, as you constantly
have to choose whether to keep some new weapon or item or drop it, as
that 16 fills up fast and once you have something you keep it until
it's used up), but you may only take four. Also, like in Fire Emblem,
all weapons have durability -- so once you use that sword fourty times
it breaks. Before I got the game, I heard about this and imagined that
limiting you to four items in battle would be a major problem -- only
four weapons in each battle? How boring! However, there are several
mitigating factors. The main one is the fact that no two characters do
quite the same thing with each weapon. In fact, every character has a
slightly different action with every item (or at least, every weapon;
many items do have the same effect on multiple characters). Fia, for
instance, heals with rods while Cierra does magic attacks and Serene
does nothing useful. You see, each character is ranked in each weapon
type. This means that instead of having four weapons, you really have
twelve, assuming a party of three. There are even more, including the
special attacks.
That ranking also directly effects the other part of the combat system:
the special attacks. With every weapon type the character in question
is ranked with (they will have one rank 3 weapon, 2 rank 2's, and 3
rank 1's), that character gets a special attack of that magnitude -- so
each character only gets level three specials, the strongest ones, with
their 'signature' weapon type. But how are these special moves
activated? Well first, the special move has to be unlocked. Each time
you get a new weapon, you need to use it enough to unlock its special
move for that character. Also, in battle, in another interesting design
decision, and perhaps one taken from fighting games, Riviera has power
meters. Each time you hit or get hit, your meter rises, and gradually
fills. Each time you use a special move, that many levels of the meter
get drained. The enemies have a meter too; it only has two levels, but
functions the same. When their meter fills, some enemy will use a
special. So between having to carefully select your party and your
items, and the interesting, unique power-meter system in combat,
Riviera's combat is quite unique and engaging.
All this talk about combat naturally brings up a major issue in any
RPG: levelling up. Remember how you unlock special moves by using
weapons enough, sort of like Final Fantasy Tactics? Well, that's the
level up system. Each time a character unlocks a new special move on an
item, they gain a "level" (though it is not called such). When combined
with the abovementioned fact that all weapons have a durability, this
could be a concern... well, they have a solution. Practice battles. On
one of the pause menus, you can choose to fight a battle against a
selection of enemy groups you defeated in the previous level. In
practice mode, durability does not decrease. You don't get points or TP
for practice battles either... However, the experience with the weapon
is still recorded, so each time you get a new weapon, the best thing to
do is immediately fight practice battles until all of your characters
who can have gotten their special moves (and levelups!) off of it. This
also has the effect of lenghtening the otherwise fairly short levels,
and game.
Oh yes, one more thing, death and healing. Lose a character and there
is no penalty, they just come back. Win a battle and all characters get
their health filled up -- there is no carryover of low health to the
next battle. And with the power bar powering the special ability
system, you also don't need to worry about running out of "mana".
Similarly, lose a battle and you simply get a chance to retry it -- and
it's made a bit easier. This serves to keep the game fun, while not
making it too easy, due to the good job of balancing it all the
devlopers have done.
Singleplayer/Story: Riviera is broken into seven levels. Each one takes
maybe four or five hours. They are broken up into many stages, and you
can save each time you reach a new stage -- during a stage you just get
an interrupt save option. So, it is a bit short. It tries to make up
for that with the branching level design that forces you forward,
making you responsible for your actions (so you can't just go back and
get those other items on that other path without reloading an old save
game) and with the replay value.
Riviera's story is mostly fairly typical anime or console RPG stuff.
You are, shockingly, a male warrior-type character named Ein (the
"young male warrior hero" of 99.98% of RPGs). Ein is a type of being
called a Grim Angel, tasked by the Gods to judge and protect Asgard,
the land of the gods. He, another Grim Angel, Ledah ("older,
mysterious, attractive male warrior"), and Ein's familiar, a flying cat
that can talk named Rose (yup... the story is pretty standard anime
stuff, for sure... which is mostly good, in my opinion. Others may
disagree, of course, but I would definitely say that it works quite
well. There is a lot of story, too, for a game of this length, sort of
like Fire Emblem...), go to Riviera, a land where an ancient evil has
been sealed away that is on the verge of escaping, with the task of
destroying the place. Of course, things don't quite turn out that way.
Ein and his friend Ledah seperate from your friend and travel to
Riviera and set out on an epic adventure. There, you meet your new
travelling companions, four young female characters, Lina, Fia, Serene,
and Cierra. of course, this being anime, all four like Ein and,
depending on your choices in conversation points throughout the game
(and on how often you use them in battle -- they get more attraction
for winning battles, and less each time they die in combat), you
hopefully will get a high enough attraction with one of the female
characters to get one of their endings. Including the bad ending and
the various good ones, there are a total of six. When you add to that
the multiple routes through levels, the sidequests which require items
from specific levels (which, of course, you cannot return to once
completed), and the special items to find that unlock the sections of
the bonus menu (sound test, bonus (but dissapointing) boss battle,
display of the cinema scenes, character images, etc), there is
definitely more than enough replay value to keep you going past the 25
or 35 hours it will take to beat the first time.
Multiplayer: None.
Graphics: The graphics in Riviera are very, very good. The backgrounds
are very well drawn, something very important for a game mostly about
looking at static images. The character artwork and cutscenes, anime
style, are also fantastic. The ingame character artwork is more
standard console RPG stuff, with small, stylized characters, but they
look great and have a lot of animation (even if they don't move much),
so that works very well too. This game is one of the titles that shows
why it's somewhat unfortunate that the GBA has so many Super Nintendo
ports: the GBA is capable of so much more than the SNES was!
Sound/Music: The sound and music are equally fantastic. The game has a
significant amount of speech for each character, with voices for
special attacks, victory in battle, exclamations while adventuring,
etc, and a good, solid RPG musical score. This is about as good as the
GBA gets audio-wise.
Final Notes: Riviera is a very good, and original, game. It's a console
RPG without random battles... without money or buying items... without
complex level designs that are easy to get lost in... without a
traditional level-up structure based on how many enemies you kill...
and yet, it is a console RPG with complex, challenging puzzles that
make you think back to the PC or SNES days of writing down what goes
where or what was said in order to figure out the puzzle... with as
many practice battles against past foes as you want... with a complex
branching mission path that virtually requires replay to see
everything... with timing events... and with characters and as story
you'll become interested in, even if it is somewhat cliche.
So, as you can see, Riviera is a mass of contradictions. It both
streamlines and rolls back the clock. Reviews are somewhat mixed -- if
"sevens through nines" is mixed -- however, and that is probably
because of how different it is. Some people will like the unique
elements of the game more than others. Some surely wouldn't like how
different this is from normal RPGs in so many ways, but I loved it. If
you're looking for flaws, there aren't many that matter. About all I
can think of is that the ending is somewhat dissapointing (though there
are six of them, providing replay value), but maybe that's as much
because I was loving the game and wanted it to go on longer as
anything... I guess that's where that replay value comes in... I am
sure this is a game I will play more.
Gameplay: 9/10
Singleplayer:
9/10
Multiplayer:
N/A
Sound: 10/10
Graphics:
10/10
final score: 94%
(not an average).