Kenri reviews Riviera: The Promised Land!
The thing that stands out to me about Riviera is how extremely good it is - and by this I mean that it's just good, but not great. The gameplay is just good. The story is just good. The presentation is just good. The music (a few tracks aside) is just good. The characters are just good. Most games that I can say are just good are just good because they play everything very safely; they don't try anything new, don't take any risks, and thus fail to elevate themselves above goodness and into the lofty realms of greatness and beyond. Riviera is odd because it's not safe. At all. No part of it is safe except perhaps the story.
The gameplay starts out with a huge risk by taking the scale of a JRPG and condensing and destructing it into its base elements. At no point can you actually move your character directly. All points of interests can be seen at a glance, and you can choose which direction to move in and what things to examine based on that. Even more so, the game divides itself into honest to god chapters; there is no backtracking, no wandering around because you don't know where to go, no cryptic hints about how you must find a blue flower growing on the mountain shrouded in mists. At first it can feel horribly restrictive, but after playing a chapter or two you begin to realize that you're not really missing out on anything. Riviera says, "This is a handheld game. I will treat it as such. You don't have time to dick around with stuff that doesn't lead to anything." JRPGs get mocked by people who don't like them for doing this; Riviera realizes that the people who like JRPGs must like JRPGs, and thus it turns the features of a JRPG up to eleven. Don't like that? Then why are you playing this game?
Even during battles, this philosophy rings true. How do your characters get more powerful? Not by grinding, really - this is a handheld game and you don't have time for grinding. No, you get more powerful by learning Over Skills. And you learn Over Skills by using items. Which items? Oh, the items that a given character is skilled at using. Most JRPGs go: fight normally -> get EXP -> eventually level up -> get new stats -> maybe get a new skill -> go back to step one. Riviera once again condenses this into a more fluid motion: fight normally -> get new skills -> increase your stats. People who play JRPGs have been conditioned to just accept how leveling works; Riviera challenges that and makes you ask, "Why have I been putting up with this?"
You can even get random battles on command. On command! All battles occur at scripted locations with scripted enemies, and if that's not enough, you can just go to the pause menu and order a random encounter. Why don't more games do this? It seems like something would be useful!
In many JRPGs, items are largely unimportant. Equipment serves as a means to increase your stats, but that's all it does. Other items can be safely ignored most of the time. Not so here. Riviera is item based, which means that your success or failure will depend on which items you acquire. And of all the items you acquire, you can only take four into battle with you. All others are permanently off limits for that battle. Suddenly, items go from irrelevant trinkets that you horde just in case you might ever need them, at which point you can pull them out on demand, to the single most important part of each and every fight you get into. To prevent you from abusing this system, all items - with the exception of the hero's signature sword - will break eventually. So you must make tough decisions: do you carry around that item with five uses left, or discard it for a less powerful weapon with 40 uses? Is that extremely powerful, but single-use, weapon worth taking into a boss battle, knowing that after using it once, you'll be limited to only three items? To supplement this system, weapons become rapidly obsolete after one chapter or so; your inventory is constantly in flux and you are constantly using new items and thus learning new skills.
Speaking of living or dying by your items, once in battle you can't choose what enemies your characters target. Instead, you select where your characters are located on the battlefield. This, and a given item's preset range, determine which enemy you will be attacking. If you want to hit someone else, you use a different item. This adds a much needed tactical element to what would otherwise be a standard turn-based battle system. If you want to hit enemies far away, use a bow. If you want to hit all the enemies in the front row, use a scythe. And moreover, items differ based on the character using them. While main character Ein might use a lance to attempt to hit every enemy twice, primary archer Lina will instead throw the lance at the enemy farthest from her. It takes an element you've been conditioned to accept and fixes it: different items feel legitimately different, instead of just offering a different stat spreads.
This approach does have some downsides, though. The ease of learning new skills and thus increasing your stats will lead to you feeling overleveled starting mid-Chapter 2 and continuing until about 30 minutes from the end of the game. The game's tactical battle system is easily exploited, and non-boss encounters are very easy regardless. To be fair, the game grades you after every battle, and thus the main challenge seems to not be whether you'll win, but by how much: S-ranks give you better (and often exclusive) item drops and give you more Turn Points to spend examining things. Furthermore, the game's chapter-based approach prevents any backtracking. If you miss an item, it stays missed for the entire game. And, to make matters worse, it is frequently difficult (read: impossible without a guide) to figure out how to get a given item you're missing. Likewise, the game's condensed form makes it quite short, with an average first playthrough taking only a bit over 20 hours. Luckily, the game is meant to be played multiple times, and the six different endings (based on which of the party members has the most affection for you) provide extra incentive to see Riviera through multiple times.
There are certainly some areas where the game outright fails, but they're all minor nitpicks. The number of common enemies is severely lacking, so you will be fighting palette swaps of the same fifteen or so enemies over and over and over... Similarly, area backgrounds tend to repeat fairly often within a single chapter. NPC sprites are decidely lacking in animations - it's a bit odd to visit the blacksmith to have a Rusty Sword repaired and hear the "clang clang clang" of his hammer hitting an anvil while he just stands there in front of you, never so much as moving. I can't even bring myself to hate the much reviled 15-item inventory limit. It would feel like hating Fire Emblem's permanent death mechanic; as a player, one dislikes it because it inconveniences them, but from a design standpoint, it adds so much to the game in terms of creating tension and forcing difficult decisions that there's no question the game would be worse if it was removed. As a player, I will curse this mechanic whenever I play the game. In the context of a review like this, I get to gush about how much the mechanic contributes to the game. Funny how that works.
Outside of battle, most everything that requires success/failure will thrust a short minigame upon you. Disarm a trapped chest by inputting a button sequence within a time limit. Pull a sword put of the ground by mashing A fifteen times in a few seconds. Leap to a ledge by timing your jump correctly. The same handful of simple minigames are reused throughout the game, but they still manage to add something. In most games, you would simply open a chest, or add the sword to your inventory, or jump to the ledge. The combat in Riviera is not particularly difficult; I welcome these small, frequent challenges. And if you fail - and failure is always an option, as simplistic as the minigames are - you will often find that whatever you missed becomes permanently inaccessible. That chest will explode, or the sword will break, or you'll miss your jump and fall to a lower route. The game's narrative is extremely linear, but there's a decent amount of nonlinearity once these minigames are brought in. Sometimes you'll even find that, if you succeed, you miss out on something - you need to fail to pull a sword out of the ground in order to get the sword's hilt, which is needed for 100% completion. Not that the average person should even entertain the idea of 100% completing this game. Between the event items (many of which are borderline impossible to find without a guide), battle items (same, but you also must use the item with every character for extra data), CGs (same), and the multiple endings, fully completing the game is not a task for the faint of heart.
That's the gameplay. Does the story take just as many risks? ...Not quite. You play as the Grim Angel Ein, who has been tasked with activating the Retribution, a mysterious power that will save the gods' domain of Asgard by destroying Riviera. During his first mission, Ein begins to show concern about this plan; surely Asgard needs to be saved, but the sprites who live on Riviera are entirely innocent, and activating the Retribution would mean the death of them all. Ein is reprimanded for his doubts by his boss, the Magus Hector, and by his partner Ledah, but his hesitation is detected by Ursula - a guardian of Riviera and enemy of the Magi - who removes Ein's memory and sends him to Riviera, so that he may see firsthand what the Retribution would destroy. What follows is a mostly standard save-the-world plot; Ein's uncertainly about where his loyalties lie is swept away for most of the game as he attempts to save both Asgard and Riviera without the Retribution, and several entire chapters can be summarized as "the party wanders around until they find a boss and kill it". Thankfully, there are a number of genuinely surprising twists and turns to keep the whole thing entertaining, but that's it. It never becomes anything more than entertaining, and the setting was strong enough to make that possible if more effort had been given to it.
Overall, if you're looking for a JRPG that will try a number of different things, look no further. Many of its ideas are not fully realized - they all work, but the kind of "work" that really means "I'd love to see how they improve this in a sequel" - and the game is too short for it any real gameplay evolution to occur. If you're looking for a JRPG that will absolutely blow you away, this probably isn't the best option - but it might still be worth a shot. If you're not a fan of JRPGs at all, it's doubtful Riviera will change your mind. That said, for what it is, it's definitely enjoyable - and a true sequel that keeps and improves on its unique mechanics while eliminating its few flaws could be one of the most outstanding games in the genre. Well beyond being "just" good.
"For Riviera!"
Kenri of the Yuri is just this guy who writes silly things, sometimes. He is profoundly embarrassed about a good 60-70% of the stuff he's written. You might know him better as your friendly neighborhood Level 43: Editor. View his or her author page or author profile.
Rated 9 out of 10 by 1 users.