Atlus has made a niche for themselves by publishing games that some may consider risky ventures. Case in point is their latest offering, Riviera: The Promised Land, a teen rated RPG on the Game Boy Advance. Riviera is also not a port, or a sequel/prequel to anything already on the market. Thus further separating itself from the majority of software released on the Game Boy Advance.

Riviera’s story is surprisingly intricate, and deals with subjects that I never thought a Game Boy Advance game would. Such as love, murder, and betrayal; you know the usual RPG fare. But the real surprise for me was how much innuendo they managed to pack into this game. To give you some semblance of an idea, a female vampire offered to ‘spank’ a member of my party. Not that I am complaining, but I am sure this is how Riviera: The Promised Land earned its Teen rating from the ESRB.

The Design
The design of Riviera is a blend of several different genres. For one, most of your weapons, and items have limited amount of durability, somewhat like Fire Emblem. You also have moments in the game where you will have to do a series of button presses before a timer runs out. If you fail in these trials you will likely forgo specific items, or paths that can be taken. These trials are sometimes called ‘timed events’, and can be found in such classics as Shenmue, Die Hard Arcade, and the legendary Dragon’s Lair.

The interface in Riviera is menu driven. Everything is controlled with this interface; even your party’s movement. Actions are separated into two categories: Look, and Move. You can easily toggle between these two by pressing the A button. Each direction of the plus pad is relegated to a different action that can be taken in either of these two modes.

The "move" action simply chooses your current path. Using the "Look" action is far more interesting. With the Look command players can examine certain objects, or even open a treasure chest. But you can’t go around looking at just anything. That would make the game far to easy, and way too convenient. So every time you use this command it takes TP, or trigger points. Run out of trigger points, and you can’t access this command. The way you earn TP is by defeating enemies, but more on that later.

The Battle System
Battles are also handled in a very unique way. Even though your party will likely contain more than three characters, no more than three characters can do battle at a time. You also have to choose between two different formations for your party. These vary between an all out weapon based attack stance, or a magic based formation. Before your fight begins, you must choose only 4 items or weapons to bring with you into battle. This combined with the fact that most of your weapons and items have a limited use puts a huge emphasis on strategy, and ramps up the difficulty.

The way the designers evened out the gameplay was to include a practice mode. This mode allows you to fight enemies and gain experience at any time during the adventure. You can access this mode as many times as you like, and best of all, your items and weapons don’t use up any hit points during this mode. So this allowed me to experiment with different weapons and items to find out what works best for each character.

After you gain enough experience you can unlock an Over Drive Skill for weapons when used by certain characters. These Skills can only be used when the Over Skill gauge fills due to you taking or dishing out damage during battles. This is just the standard power move that almost all RPGs have. There really isn’t much more to the battle system than this, but with all the complexity in Riviera already, I welcome a more standard approach to the battle system.

One thing players don’t have to worry about with Riviera is inventory management. Why? With just around 15 slots available for weapons, armor, and items I don’t think you will be too worried about organization. I can understand the small inventory to a point. Given that most items have such a limited amount of use; I ended up throwing away at least 60% of items that were found on my journey just because I didn’t have room for them in my inventory.

Riviera does force players down a certain path, there is no question of that. When a campaign is over, that particular chapter is closed. There is no backtracking in Riviera: The Promised Land. This sits in stark contrast to almost all role-playing games. Though how you interact with the various characters does influence the game’s direction, and ultimately its’ ending. Don’t misunderstand, this interacting is more often just complementing, or flirting with the right person or persons. Opting to go with a simplified design, I feel, was the best choice considering the platform.

There is something to be said for a game that is as beautiful as Riviera is. Sure, some of the levels and locales are recycled a bit, but everything in this game is beautiful, from the hand drawn graphics to the lush backgrounds. Simply put, Riviera is one of the best looking games this year for Game Boy Advance.

Role playing games have never been my favorite genre of choice, but I do enjoy the better ones. For me, most suffer from being far too repetitive for my tastes. Thank goodness Riviera takes a fresh approach by mixing numerous gameplay elements found in other games in this genre. It’s almost like Fire Emblem, Lunar, Ogre Battle, and Dragon Warrior all decided to have an orgy, and Rivera is the product of their cross platform love. The most amazing thing is those different aspects blend seamlessly into a great gaming experience. Atlus has given us Game Boy Advance players a reason to rejoice with Riviera: The Promised Land.