I finally finished Radiant Historia today. I got the semi-best ending, I believe. When all the ending scenes were played out, I only had 232/236 of all events complete so I must be missing a sidequest or two. Note that you don’t have to finish all the events to get the best ending, just certain important ones. Right now I’m torn between going back and getting the True Ending or just not bothering. The ending sequence I got was a decent ending to the game, I could accept it.It was also really, really long and filled to the brim with Deus ex Machina, but in a game with rampant time and dimension travel, I’m not going to quibble over minor points.
In the meantime, this is a good time to talk about my party. There’s a total of 7 playable characters, but you can only use 3 of them in battle at one time. Luckily this is one of those games where just about anyone will do, but certain characters will still make things much easier for you than others. Plus some characters are better for boss battles while others are better for ordinary battles. Not to mention they learn new battle abilities as they go along, so each character goes up and down in the usefulness ranking as the game goes along. And then on top of all that, there’s things like character availability to consider, so there’s a lot to think about. Without further ado, the playable characters of Radiant Historia, starting with my final party. This post will contain minor spoilers.
Stock – The hero of the game. You can’t take him out of the party so you’d better get used to him. If I had to describe him in a phrase it would be “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” He learns some attack magic, some healing magic and lots of physical attacks. He also has all of the grid-moving attacks except Pull. Unfortunately his phys attack is lower than Gafka’s and (probably) Roche’s, and his magic stat falls behind all the girls’, so he’s not quite as strong as you might expect. Early to mid-game he’ll be your main tank and attacker but by the end of the game he was largely playing the “pusher”, shoving enemies onto Ath’s area traps. He’s a solid all-round member of the team though, no question about that.
Ath – My beloved Ath. Isn’t she cute?! Her bad points first: low defence, low HP for much of the game very weak physical attack, no grid-moving attacks, no direct magic attack until very late in the game, rather useless in boss battles that fill the whole enemy grid. Her high points? First and most importantly, disgustingly powerful area traps. I discussed the battle system a while back, if you need a reference. See those blue spots? Ath can set traps on one or two of them for the enemies to step on. They won’t willingly step on them, which is where Stock comes in handy to knock them right onto the sweet spots. I took 2200hp off a late-game boss in one attack, and that was without using any magic boosting items! And for some reason many, many bosses are weak against poison so I just set a poison trap to begin with and watch it sap their lives as I pound away on them. And she can steal their items too! Ah, sweet Ath, what would I do without you? But as I said, she’s useless against bosses that fill the whole screen, because then there’s no space for her to set her traps. Such bosses are rare, but they’re usually pretty tough.
Other reasons why Ath pwns so hard: her crazy speed. She’ll be getting two or three turns in a row by the end of the game, even without any speed boosting accessories (which I foolishly equipped on Gafka and Roche. Next time I’ll go for speed overkill with Ath, nyeh heh heh). Stock is the only other character who regularly gets more than one attack in a row. More turns equals more opportunities to set traps, mug enemies and help your party. This is where I should mention that she’s the best healer in the game, learning Super Heal and Area G Heal very early on. And did I mention that she’s CUTE?!
Elca – Officially her name is Eruca I think, but somehow that sounds like a skin disease or something so I call her Elca. Elca is an awesome addition to your party once she starts learning her more powerful abilities. She has two that hit every enemy on the battlefield for a goodly (and often godly) amount of damage, which is fantastic for random battles. You can wipe the whole field clean in one turn in many cases. She also has one called Divine Light, which makes a party member invulnerable for two turns. There are items that duplicate that, but they’re rare, and Elca takes only 10MP to do it. Plus she learns the standard G Frost, AND she has the highest magic attack in the game. She also learns the Trans-Turn ability, which means she can give her turn to another character on the rare occasion that you can’t find anything to do with her.
I’d almost rank her higher than Ath except for several serious flaws. First, she only joins halfway through the game, and on one route only at that. Secondly she’s missing a lot of the time, especially for many crucial battles in the late game. These two factors combined will leave her underleveled compared to your other characters. At the end of that game Stock was 70, Ath was 68 and Elca was 59. Thirdly her HP is ATROCIOUS, under 500 when characters like Gafka were kicking it around the 800s at the same level. Her defense isn’t much to speak of either, and forget about using physical attacks with her. Fourthly, as a story character she annoyed me a lot. Her good points more than make up for the above though, so she was an indispensable member of my team when she was around.
Gafka – That’s Tank McTank to you, bub! Highest HP and strongest physical attacker in the game. Slow as molasses, which sometimes makes chaining hard, but nothing that can’t be worked around. I especially liked his final attack that gathers every enemy in the screen in the middle so that other characters can whale on them and racket up the hit combos. This one time I got a turn with Gafka followed by two turns from Ath, a turn from Stock and some other stuff I forget but anyway, I smacked a dying boss and his cronies into the middle, used Ath’s Dancing Death repeatedly and racked up a Lvl 41 combo (“Brilliant!”) by the end. Sweet!
Since Gafka hits so hard and so late, I often adopted the strategy of having Ath steal from the enemy on her first turn, Stock steal again on his turn and then Gafka put the enemies out of their misery. Much like Elca and Roche, Gafka has poor availability (not as bad as theirs, though), but he’s strong enough that he can hold his own very quickly. His defence is not that good, but since his HP is so high you usually won’t notice it. His MP is terrible, but magic-refilling items are a dime a dozen in this game so no biggie. If I hadn’t taken Elca into the final battle I would have taken Gafka instead.
Rainey – She’s a useful physical attacker in the beginning and gets powerful magic attacks (all the G magic) really quickly. She also joins your party right at the beginning and is available almost constantly. Unfortunately, through no fault of her own she is quickly outclassed by the characters above in every significant respect. For some screen-filling boss battles I restarted and switched Ath out for her, but after a while I didn’t bother any more. You won’t go wrong using her, but she doesn’t have much apart from that G magic. A solid dependable team member nevertheless.
Roche – I’m certain he’s strong. He’s gotta be strong, given how important he is to the story. Plus he has high HP and attack stats, always a plus. But! His availability is even worse than Elca’s! By the end of the game he was only level 55 because I couldn’t bear to bench better characters for this slow upstart. To be honest I have no idea what most of Roche’s attacks do, and while his HP and attack are high, all his other stats are pretty terrible. I found him a dreadfully boring character storyline-wise as well, so that didn’t help.
Marco – As with Rainey he has the best availability in the game. He also has a gentle personality and he’s sorta kinda cute, isn’t he? Unfortunately his physical attack is crap, his defence is crap and his magical attacks are almost non-existent. He’s a support character, but there’s nothing he does that other characters don’t do better. Stock can Resurrect before he can and Ath learns Area G heal long before he does. He does have some good buffs, but battles where buffs can make or break you are usually so tough that Marco would just get in the way regardless. His main use would be healing and then using Trans-Turn to pass his turns to an actual damage dealer, but even then you’d still have to try and keep him alive. That’s why he’s at the bottom of the list, poor thing.
And there you have my character ranking. As I said at the top you can use just about anyone and get away with it in this game. I’m pretty sure I could have taken the final boss down with Stock, Roche and Marco so this is all very much my own opinion. If you haven’t played Radiant Historia for yourself yet, you’ll get to try it out when Atlus brings it to the West in February. Look forward to it!
