Riviera ~ The Promised Land

Riviera ~ The Promised Land
RPG - Gameboy Advance
Battery Backup - 3 saves, 1 quicksave
1 player

While developer Sting has experience with RPG-like games, they have never made a traditional jRPG - until Riviera. But for a jRPG, Riviera is as non-traditional as they come. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate. Opinions for Riviera span the spectrum. Some find it incredibly dull and limiting. Others enjoy the streamlined structure and the strategic battles. They will all agree on one thing though. The game is slow. I found it to be all of those things. A mish-mash of different ideas, Riviera tries but succeeds in part.

Let's talk streamlining. Riviera feels almost SRPG-like in structure because of the lack of free movement. In both towns and dungeons, you move one room at a time. In each "room", you can look at the surroundings, interact with objects, talk to people or move to the next room via menus or controller inputs. You do not physically move your character around with the D-pad like other traditional jRPGs. It's more comparable to old games like Deja Vu/Uninvited/Shadowgate. But unlike those games, whenever you investigate objects, it will cost you Trigger Points (TP). If you don't have any TP, you can't open the treasure chests you find or discover any special items. TP is acquired through high scoring battles or clearing a previous chapter with a high score. This adds a cap to what you're able to investigate so you have to weigh your options. But, if you do well in your fights, you'll never really be short of TP. You'll also encounter various QTEs. Chests will have traps on them or you'll need to jump over large gaps or whatever the situation, so you'll be challenged to enter button combinations in a short time interval or to time button-presses to navigate these parts. This just adds some variety to these segments.

The battles also keep with the theme of choosing wisely. Every weapon has a limited number of uses, and you can only carry 15 different items at any given time. This makes those treasure chests you find all the more valuable. But it's not as bad as it sounds. Chests are pretty frequent and enemies will also drop weapons. It's just that the 15-item carrying capacity forces you to balance out your arsenal. What's neat is that although every character can pretty much use every weapon/item, the actual attacks and effects are character-specific. Weapon attacks can be multi-hit, can have elemental properties, can target specific enemies, or can allow you to do an OverDrive attack. Overdrive attacks function much like the special attack meter in Street Fighter. Whenever you hit an enemy, or they hit you, your overdrive meter rises from level 0-3. Overdrive attacks generally dish out more damage and can be fight-winners. They can also vary on how much of the Overdrive meter is required for usage. Since only 3 party members and 4 weapons/items can be selected per battle, this causes you to weigh out what you think is needed for each fight. Luckily, it's not a blind guess because you are given information on the strengths/weaknesses of each enemy during party and item selection. So there's a bit of pre-battle strategy to consider. But it doesn't stop there.

The actual battles themselves are also very strategic. While you're monitoring your own OverDrive bar, your opponent has a Rage bar. It functions very similarly to yours, but there are some differences. The Rage bar is raised whenever you hit the enemy. But the Rage bar drops between turns. Whenever the rage bar is below the Rage level, your opponents will do normal attacks. When it is above the Rage level, they will do special attacks. And if it hits the Max level, they will do their ultimate attacks. A Max attack will drain the Rage bar back to its lowest point. Killing an enemy will raise the rage bar's lowest point, so it may not be possible to drop the Rage bar to zero. In effect, fights become balancing acts where you may opt to heal your fully-healed character in order to waste your turn. Why? Because you want to drop the enemy's Rage bar. Attacking would only piss off the enemies more and bring them closer to unleashing a huge barrage of attacks against you. Or maybe the best strategy would be to attack the enemy with everything you've got and hope they die before they do their Max move. There are many possibilities. It's a unique fighting system, and it's fun too.

Each battle has a place in the story. There are no random battles. I really like that each battle felt like its own challenge, and strayed from the monotony of most RPGs. Leveling up your characters is based on weapon usage. As mentioned earlier, some weapons allow their user to do OverDrive specials. But to obtain these specials in the first place, you must use that weapon with each specific character an X amount of times. When you fulfill that requirement, you not only gain the OverDrive special, but the character also levels up. So using different items is encouraged by this system. To help you with this process, you can enter a Practice battle anytime. The beauty of practice battles is that using weapons/items does not decrease their quantity. So everytime you come across a new weapon or item, you can use practice battles to acquire those OverDrive attacks and level up your characters without fear of wasting resources. It's a neat system, because it protects against level grinding. Your characters can only level up to a specific point determined by the items you collect.

All of this adds up to a very interesting game. You can see that Riviera is based around the concept of limitation. You always make some decisions in the game at the expense of other options. You can't keep all the items you come across. You can't examine every nook and cranny. On the other hand, it does challenge you to make decisions that would benefit your playing style. And in that sense, it works quite well. There is a loss of freedom compared to other games, but the game is built around that. I still would prefer the traditional exploration of jRPGs rather than room-navigation, but it works for what it is. The fights sometimes do get to be cumbersome because of the slow pace, but it's in the strategy that I enjoy Riviera the most. The OverDrive and Rage gauges turn a fairly normal RPG system into an insane see-saw balancing act that you need to make work for you. I haven't even begun to mention the incredible portrait and cutscene art, the interesting puzzles that you actually have to scribble on paper to figure out, the convenience of being able to quicksave even during a battle, or the character-specific endings, but this 20-ish hour adventure has a lot going for it. Riviera probably isn't for everyone, but I cannot wait to see what else Sting has up its sleeve.