Another one ticked off the bucket list. Been meaning to play Riviera for a while, as this was quite a hit amongst JRPG fans when it first came out in the west, though it didn’t reach Europe and Australia until the PSP version.

The story was ok, and the characters were fine too, I just know that I won’t remember much about them in a few months time - honestly they were quite forgettable. The emotions they tried to convey with Ledah towards the end was pretty laughable: We’ll stop you Ledah! Blargh, a more evil person (almost) killed him! You must stop the more evil guy… Hey Ledah’s actually not so bad! (…what?)

Fia is the best waifu:

You can select three characters and four items prior to a battle. This wouldn’t be so bad if you were able to swap out items on the fly, perhaps for strategic purposes… but you can’t! If you picked disadvantageous items for a particular battle, you’re pretty much screwed and need to just reload your last save. The battles are actually quite fun, especially with the three levels of special attacks you can use, but the item limitations made things more annoying than it should be. Oh and it’s a Game Over if you run out of items to use. ¯\(ツ)/¯

The chiptune soundtrack was great, glad the playlist can be found on youtube. The assortment of battle music in particular were catchy and great to listen to.

It was disappointing that the extra content aren’t unlocked automatically after beating the game. You actually had to acquire certain items during your playthrough in order to unlock them, with most of the items being easily missable. Another questionable game design decision.

For a relatively short portable game (around 20 hours), Riviera was fine, it just didn’t live up to my own expectations, as I was thinking this game to be one of the top JRPGs on GBA.