VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 4: Radie

Sometimes to get a jump on the blog writing I'll start a post before I'm done with a route. It's usually to get some initial thoughts down or to make sure I don't forget something important. It might also contain why a particular character ended up in the play order they did. Occasionally this results in some tweaking as I finish the route and new facts come to light, but Radie had given me a number of false starts and it's because the character I loved was not the one I romanced.

My impression of Radie kept changing from the common route to the first half of his route, to the second half, all the way up until the end. He occupies an unusual space in Tifalia's life since he's not human and has been with her since childhood. He's close enough to be considered family, but because he looks like a cute and cuddly fey beast most of the time (and Tifalia doesn't know any better until midway through Chapter 1 of the story) it's hard to say exactly what family role he occupies. He looks after her like a guardian, but his size and cuddliness suggests more of a pet.

And before I go much further, please realize that Radie's route, though available at the start, contains a fair amount of backstory that isn't covered on other routes and I'll be spoiling that here. While his route doesn't spoil other routes, since they all operate fairly independently of each other, you might be unable to keep that backstory knowledge out of the back of your mind while playing, and for me personally I might have ended up annoyed with Radie for the bulk of the game.

---

You see, I rather liked furball Radie in comparison to his human form. Though Tifalia initially says human Radie is just the same as furball Radie as she attempts to resume a normal relationship with him (after suddenly discovering her cute fuzzball can turn into adult human man), she later walks this back after more Radie-specific scenes the player has to choose along the common route. And it's true. Even though it's the same character and it's the same voice actor whether he's portraying the grown man or the squeaky fey beast, human Radie lacks much of the behavior of furball Radie.

It's not just the fact he says it would be weird to be acting cute while in the shape of a human man. His sense of humor is gone too. I rather loved furball Radie's smarmy grin and how he could defuse a situation with some self-deprecating humor. Human Radie has no such grin.

Their facial expressions rarely have direct equivalents even though they're drawn by the same artist, with Radie's furball default being open-eyed and slightly turned up, but his human one looks hangdog with his head down and his eyes narrowed like he's sleepy or trying to be mysterious. Human Radie never talks about getting drunk or his amazing dancing. He doesn't rag on his fellow members of CIRCUS. He feels like he's just there to talk business and anything else would be too awkward. Human Radie never made me laugh.

And what was worse, was that after playing far enough I concluded that the furball Radie personality was an affectation created to cheer up Tifalia when she was a child grieving over the loss of her parents. At the time he was trapped in his fey beast form so what else was he going to do to make a kid smile but dance around and act cute?

I can see why he would drop it after he decides it's no longer necessary to maintain, but it's strange that he would suddenly lose all his furball habits after years of exercising them the instant he stands on two legs. And it would have been hilarious watching him brag as a human about having the fluffiest tail and the most exquisite toe beans, and that would feel like Radie.

But I can see why it's not, because that's not the story the writers wanted to tell.

Radie, whose real name is Ralida, is not a fey beast at all, and his human form is his original one. Radie is also a golem, which I didn't expect, largely because the worldbuilding had given no indication that golems exist in this setting.

He was created a thousand years ago by the Great Spirit Celius as one of his experiments to see if he could craft a human heart. Ralida was then sent into the world to observe humanity and obtain a heart. He was also given his fey beast form to disguise the fact he doesn't age since fey beasts are naturally long lived. And when Celius realized a time was coming for him and his fellow Great Spirits to leave, he took half the mana stored in the Caritas Wand and implanted it in Radie, to keep him going for as long as the mission took.

So Radie wandered around for centuries until eventually meeting Tifalia and her parents, after which he moved in with them. It seems they liked how well he got along with them (since they tend to drive off non-science types) and also liked how well he got along with Tifalia, which gave them a convenient babysitter.

I think that if her parents hadn't gotten messed up (we find out in this route that they didn't actually die), Radie would have become an uncle figure and not the older brother figure Tifalia's father suggests after they restore him. Raijel and Meira look like they're in their twenties because that's the age they were when they were frozen, so the idea that Raijel says he viewed Radie like a son feels bizarre since they met while Radie was traveling independently. Radie looks and acts like a fellow twenty-something adult, and Raijel knows Radie's history as a thousand year old golem. I viewed Raijel and Meira's trip to the dragon island to help Radie as a task they were doing for a friend, and not for a surrogate son. A human-shaped Radie would always have been an adult to young Tifalia, and with him not changing while she grew, it would have been obvious that he was a lot older than her.

The main crux of Radie's story is that after seeing his human form, Tifalia starts falling in love with him. She eats herself up inside when he doesn't seem to notice her feelings, and becomes increasingly despondent when she straight up confesses and he fails to reciprocate (which is funny because in other routes he spends time sighing about the fact she's in love with someone else).

Much like with Paschalia's route, I felt more for Radie than her. Radie explains that he's not interested, but that he'll always be there for her and she doesn't have to worry that he'll fall for anyone else. Once I found out that he's a golem, his behavior earlier in the route made sense, though at the time I thought it would have been nice if he was simply uninterested in romance.

Tifalia puts on a stiff upper lip though, and the group goes touring for the first half of his route, like they would at the start of any other. But that comes crashing to a halt at the halfway point.

The game gets a little unclear at this point, since this is when they discover Tifalia's parents are still alive and in suspended animation. Radie is able to use the half-powered Caritas Wand to free them since together he's able to use its full power, and the next day he disappears from camp, only to be later found with amnesia.

On the one hand, some of the dialogue makes it sound like this happened to Radie because he used his wand and his magic combined, but then he was fine for almost a full day afterward. On the other hand, Alest says someone broke into the Sage Tower to use the wand, which sounds like something Radie might have done, but then no one ever follows up this line of investigation. So all we know is that somehow Radie lost his memory, the mana that was supposed to keep him alive in absence of his master is now back in the wand, and somehow Radie still exists despite it.

This second half of the route was rather trying. Aside from having the main love interest act like an emotionless robot in almost every scene, we see absolutely nothing of the cute furball that danced his way into our hearts at the beginning of the game.

Regardless of how he lost his memories, memory-less human Radie is able to gradually get them back through the healing power of the Flora, which CIRCUS produces as it tours the country to continue their ongoing mission to restore Prince Colivus as well. Though viewing his memories is like watching a movie about another person, Radie eventually realizes that his old self had all but accomplished his mission to obtain a human heart when he finally was accepted into a family as one of their own.

Apparently Celius was very particular as to how he wanted this realization to happen so it takes a CIRCUS performance of the Escholtian version of Pinnochio for new Radie to realize what he wants. At the end of the story, the doll (played by Tifalia) becomes a real human after making a wish to her creator and new Radie pretty much decides that's exactly it.

And I mean exactly. He literally calls out to Celius asking to be made human, and the spirit actually answers from wherever the hell he'd gotten off to, transforming Radie into a real boy who can live happily ever after with Tifalia. (And he gets all his memories and emotions back.)

I'll be frank. I didn't like this route. It was my least favorite despite the fact I love furball Radie to bits. But human Radie is a different person. He doesn't make me laugh. He displays none of the traits I found attractive in furball Radie. And the way Tifalia comes on to him so strong makes it feel like she was blasted more by his good looks than anything else because her changing feelings gave me whiplash.

By the end of the route I wasn't even sure I wanted old human Radie back since I was getting used to new human Radie who was clearly more introspective and willing to learn than the old version (though what I really wanted was the drunk furball and I felt severely shortchanged). I did like how Tifalia left it up to emotionless Radie about whether he wanted to bring back his old memories. A part of me thinks it would have been better if he hadn't gotten them back, as the emotionless Radie came to appreciate what he'd lost, but the restored Radie behaves as though he never left.

Personally I wanted a mix of the furball and the human for his route (drunk or not), for it to be clear that Radie was both, in the way fey beasts are. And when he's made mortal, it's clarified that he's actually turned into a fey beast, so he still has the potential to live a stupid long time.

Which, by the way, turns out to have been the reason he turned Tifalia down. He knew he was going to outlive his acquired family and was trying to let her down gently by suggesting she fall in love with someone else. Being a golem he was going to outlive damn well everybody, but even when she believed he was just a fey beast, he still could have given her the longevity excuse.

And it's not really that good of an excuse. While he should have told her, if she's fine with it and he's fine with it (because I think as the surviving partner it would have been far harder for him to live without her than her being old while he looks young), then I don't see the problem. So this entire route ended up being a lot of people trying to solve romantic problems by not talking to each other, which I'm a little tired of.

I still like furball Radie, and I'm thankful he's been the default for most of the game and on other routes, but human Radie probably would have been lurking in the back of my mind annoying me as I played the other routes so I'm glad I tackled this one second to last.