VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 2: Zafora

I caught what seems to have been a cold that knocked me out on Sunday last week, which ordinarily would have been the day I prepared my post, so this is coming a little late. I'm definitely feeling better now, though I'm not over it entirely and I might not be for a while. This has been my first illness since my cancer treatment left me somewhat immunocompromised, so I don't have a good idea of how long it'll take me to fully get over other than it's longer than it used to be.

That said, back to my next post on Radiant Tale. Beware of spoilers ahead!

After my premature common route ending due to spreading my affection points across too many characters, I knew I wanted to choose between Zafora and Ion. The random Paschalia scenes I got didn't leave me feeling like I knew the character any better, and Zafora and Ion both had intriguing story hooks between Zafora trying to reclaim his father's title and Ion's past as a slave gladiator. I thought I might play through some of Ion's early scenes and then double back to Zafora if he ended up interesting me more, but after I finished my first city exploration with Ion on my second playthrough I knew.

I had to play Zafora. Not resolving his story was bugging the heck out of me, so I left the Ion save alone for a later playthrough and replayed through the common route more cautiously on a new save. This time I made different choices where I'd messed up before (which made up for all those times I accidentally wound up with Paschalia scenes), and finally was rewarded with the last chapter of the common route segueing into the Zafora specific route.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2023

Radiant Tale came to my attention for its bright fantasy setting, even though I was less keen on the circus motif. Oddly though, it is a motif rather than a genuine circus. In a rather Japanese fashion, the key members of the cast are part of a performance troupe called CIRCUS (where "Circus" is quite obviously said in English and the name is stylized in all caps for the English translation) and they have a large tent they perform in, but after the first chapter they're more of a theater production than a circus. The troupe is touring the kingdom in order to bring joy to the nation's major cities and cause the healing Chloris flowers to bloom in order to restore the magically stricken prince.

While I can't say this is a game with no evil or no bad guys, and multiple routes have a sense of life and death drama, it is definitely optimistic and the kind of world where the characters really can make things better for people purely by giving a performance that speaks to them.

Radiant Tale could easily have gone the route of having a generic medieval fantasy world found in a lot of anime these days, but I found I loved the worldbuilding in this one. In fact, while some otome games' glossaries feel rather superfluous, Radiant Tale's lore is not window dressing. It's stuffed with detail, and while you might wonder why you need to learn that mages are able to cast magic because they've formed a contract with an elemental spirit, it's all setup for when that knowledge is necessary. Though it can be overwhelming at first, the story is good enough to ensure you remember the important bits even if you're the type to ignore every codex entry that pops up for further reading.

This game is a recent release as of this writing, so please be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

Time Flies and the End of 2023 is Careening Towards Me

I often joke about how at the rate time moves my life will be over before I know it. It's hard to believe it's October already, so we're in the final quarter of 2023.

Most people probably save their retrospectives for December with their end of the year posts, and I usually do my own in January (largely because I don't post more often than once a week and I won't know what last minute books, games, and anime I'll squeeze in the last minute of December). So what October means for me is a general sense of running out of time.

How much did I write this year? Am I ready for another round of NaNoWriMo in November? Did I make any progress on my gaming backlog? Fall is the rush to squeeze in everything I've been putting off all year. I'm not one to make new year's resolutions in January so much as try to complete all of them in the rush to December.

Usually something gets missed. I keep trying new ways to track and manage my time, and I like my current time tracker, so when I wonder "Where did Friday go?" I can actually say "Yes, there was a doctor's appointment, I went grocery shopping afterward, I fell asleep the rest of the afternoon, chatted with gaming friends in the evening, and then played video games until bedtime." So I know what I'm doing. Managing it is still work in progress.

It's interesting being able to see where my time is going, and being able to skip month to month or days at a glance (I'm using a tabbed spreadsheet). Sometimes I use it for something completely unrelated to time management such as "When did I have my last MRI?" since I know I'll find it in there.

But still, time waits for no one and 2023 is already on its way out.

I expect to do NaNoWriMo in November, and I'm mentioning it now because I expect to start my VN Talk series for Radiant Tale next Monday and I'd like it to run uninterrupted for the six weeks it'll take to finish, which will take us midway into November, and a little late to be making NaNo announcements. I really enjoyed this game, it was my single must-play of the year, and though it has its share of things I'm going to complain about, I want to say that the reason I tend to point out the various things that didn't work for me in these various story-based "Talk" posts, is because I like these kinds of games and I wish they had done better. I only ever cover games I like enough to complete.

I'm not sure what will come after Radiant Tale on this blog, but I would like to finish at least one more otome visual novel and one RPG period before the end of the year, though depending on the kind of RPG it might not be post-worthy material. Etrian Odyssey III keeps giving me funny looks and it always bothers me when a game I'm partially through (and still plan to finish) comes out with an HD remake because my playthrough has taken that long.