A great little RPG that did not get the attention it deserves.
GAMEPLAY - RS is an action-RPG where you control your character in real-time battles. Basically you are hacking at the enemies, though there is some strategy involved, as you can get behind enemies to deal damage when they are blocking from the front. Your character has a special attack, known as a volty, which requires volty points. You acquire volty points from both attacking and by being attacked. Every time you use a volty attack it takes away volty points, so you generally save up the points for tougher battles. You can have up to three additional party members, but for the most part you can't control them, other than issuing attack formations and giving a specific command, such as "heal character". I never bothered with the formations, and "heal character" was the only order I ever gave to another character. Your party's AI seemed to be quite competent. There were a variety of dungeons to trek through but they stayed pretty straightforward, and avoided frustrating puzzles or dead ends. Overall I found the gameplay to be enjoyable.
GRAPHICS - RS uses a nice cel-shaded look that is very colorful. There is a decent variety of places to explore, and they were well detailed. The battle scenes were a bit duller as far as the backgrounds, which tended to be rather generic and not detailed, but how much time are you going to spend looking at background details when you are in a real time battle? The characters were very nicely detailed, and this was important because you end up meeting MANY different characters, as I will explain later. A nice touch is that your character will show whichever weapons and armor you equip him with, even during the cutscenes. The game stuck with the in game engine during cutscenes, and this was fine as it all had a nice look. Admittedly there were not any memorable special effects to go along with magic attacks. I guess the best word to use for the graphics is "pleasant" - not mind blowing but very nice to look at.
SOUND - RS has a decent amount of speech, and it was all done very well. As I mentioned, you'll meet many different characters and they all have their own individual voices to give them personality. The music was like the graphics - not particularly memorable, but a nice variety and pleasant.
VALUE - RS provides a decent amount of gaming time. A nice feature is that at a certain point in the game you have to decide which side you are going to take in an upcoming war. As long as you keep that save point you can go back and replay the last part of the game from the other side's perspective, which is quite different. For the most part I tried to get in as many sidequests as I could, and after playing both sides I put in about 45 hours, not bad. Also, after completing the main quest there is an optional quest to go against the bosses from the game, as well as starting the game over with your strong character that you have at the end of the original game. SUMMARY - One of the features that attracted me to the game was the ability to recruit many different characters - possibly up to 177! This was a feature I really enjoyed in Suikoden 3, and it was great in RS as well. Other features that I really appreciate was the sense of humor and the internal clock, where it changes from day to night and it effects the world around you. When it gets late people go to bed, and if you want to talk to them you might have to wait until the next morning, just like in real life. And when they are awake they don't stand in place, waiting for you to talk to them. They go about their tasks, living their lives, and you have to make a point of getting their attention. The story is not completely unique, just your average young guy who dreams about being a heroic knight and eventually finds himself caught up in world-changing events. But, though the story won't rock you, you'll still want to play it out because you will enjoy both the protagonist and the other characters, as they are very well fleshed out and interesting. I highly recommend this game to RPG fans, it should not be missed.