Radiata Stories makes up for its flaws by being a charming and funny adventure.
The Bad: Overly simple combat; story progression is odd and slow; some of the story elements are kind of stupid; nowhere near as deep as other RPGs.
Radiata Stories (rah-dee-AH-tah) is a fun little Action-RPG from Tri-Ace, the makers of the fairly popular Star Ocean series. Unlike Star Ocean, though, Radiata Stories succeeds largely because it's infectiously fun and funny in a quirky way. It isn't Final Fantasy, Xenosaga, or Elder Scrolls, but it holds its own by bringing plenty of fun things to do to a rather fun quest.
In Radiata Stories, the main character is Jack Russell, the son of a long-dead legendary soldier. Unlike his father, Jack is whiny, selfish, pompous, and haughty. One day, he is forced by his older sister to go and try out to be a Radiata Knight, so he goes fully expecting to breeze his way in. He is hastily beaten by another hopeful - a girl, no less. However, for some reason the leaders of the knights decide he has lots of potential, so they allow him to become a knight. He is placed on the Rose Cochon brigade, and a lot of funny things happen along their travels involving dwarfs, elves, twisted men, and plot twists.
Radiata's core gameplay works well, but isn't particularly interesting. There's non-random encounters that are nonetheless nearly unavoidable, and the battles are largely of the button-mashing variety. There's some variety from special moves and such, but ultimately it's the most boring part of the game. The best part about it is that there's loads of recruitable teammates (think Suikoden, only better and more) but they're not directly controllable.
Progression in Radiata Stories is really odd. Instead of advancing by completing certain tasks or moving on in the story, you must sleep to move the game along. This allows for lots of exploration and recruiting, but it's a pretty odd way to do it. The production values for Radiata Stories are surprisingly good. The graphics are clean and have a nice style to them, and the soundtrack is excellent. The voice acting is usually quite good too, with some exceptions. The game also supports progressive scan and widescreen.
At its best, Radiata Stories is an excellent adventure with lots of charm and a solid storyline, as well as multiple endings and incentives to play again and again. For anybody looking for something good to tide them over to the next big RPG, there's no better place to look than Radiata.