Riviera: The Promised Land

Screenshots

Notes

Riviera: The Promised Land is a JRPG in the "Dept. Heaven" series. This is a loosely connected series of games that all have unique twists on the mechanics of JRPGs and strategy/tactics games, and a norse-mythology inspired setting. Riviera was the first one released, but Yggdra Union for GBA is also in the series. It took me a long time to get through this one because, although it wasn't obviously bad in any specific area, I just felt unmotivated to play it. I only realised later this was probably due to the speed issues I'll get to later.


Riviera has some interesting and unique mechanics. In battle, characters don't have their own skills/spells that they know. Instead, everything is tied to items. For example, one character might be able to cast a particular spell if they have specific staff. There is no traditional exp/levelling either. Instead if a character can use an item, they will be able to "master" the item with repeated use. This will award them a stat boost at the end of the battle as well as unlock a powerful "overdrive" ability with that item in future battles. Items have limited durability, which means managing their use is vital.


This is an interesting system, but it's a little undermined by the practise mode, which lets you fight random battles where items don't lose durability. This means you can effectively grind stat increases without worrying about managing item breakage. I think the game could have been more interesting if they left that out.

The other unique gameplay feature is how movement through levels works. Rather than manually walking around like you would in Final Fantasy for example, instead you pick from options on each screen. For example you might be able to move west to another screen, or examine a treasure chest, doing each with one click.

You also have limited TP (time points) with which to do things, meaning you may not be able to do everything in a level. TP are earned by scoring well in battles. This is again a little undermined by the fact that if you're playing reasonably well in battles you get enough TP to explore every option. The other problem with this system is that it can feel a little random. Some options that require TP will be nothing but a single line of dialog, while others might reveal a hidden item, with no way to distinguish them except trial and error.

The game has serious problems though. The main one is the extremely slow pace of everything in the game. There are repetitive animations accompanying every action, some of which you'll see many times throughout the game. Battles take a long time with lots of flashy animations which, again, you'll end up seeing a lot through out the game. I found myself leaning on the "speed up emulation" key a lot to avoid frustration.

There's quite a lot of reuse and repetition in the game. The same room background is regularly reused multiple times, with (maybe) some objects shifted around so you can tell them apart. Interations and dialog are often samey and sometimes copy and pasted even when it makes no sense. In general I felt like the individual chapters all dragged on a little too long, and that the game should have wrapped up one chapter earlier than it did.

I also didn't think much of the story and characters. The story has some interesting ideas, where both the angels/gods and demons are really the bad guys, with the mortals caught in the middle, but it felt a bit formulaic. The supporting party characters seemed very one dimensional, with only one character trait each, no development through the game and no exploration of their back stories.


Overall I applaud the game for experimenting and breaking away from some of the trappings of the genre, but the game falls over as it just isn't that fun or compelling with major pacing issues.