Radical Dreamers: Le Trésor Interdit (1996)

Radical Dreamers, for SNES

Rating: 6.0/10; Above average

Radical Dreamers is a choose your own adventure style text adventure, with some graphics and sound effects thrown in. It is a hard game to rate because it is not like other SNES games, and I have no idea how it compares to other text adventures. Still, it is worth experiencing for anyone who likes Chrono Trigger.

The writing is very well done (though I did see some spelling and grammar mistakes in the optional newgame+ stuff) and is by far the best part of the game. Apart from that, you select from a list of options to do or say, some of which may have bad consequences. The only “stats” in the game are your health and how much the girl likes you; the ending changes a bit based on how much she likes you, and if you lose your health the game ends. Unfortunately, the game chooses not to display these stats, rather giving a text description of it after each random battle. While knowing about your health is important, do you really need to know how much she likes you after every battle? That got old fast.

There is combat and random battles. Some is scripted with certain correct choices, and other times it is all random. The part that I did not like was the hidden time limit for battle choices, which have you be indecisive if you fail to pick an option quickly enough. Of course standing around in combat is generally worse than taking an action and possibly failing.

I liked how the direction text options change as you explore, showing what is down that path after you have already been there. For example, what starts off as “go right”, will change to “go right towards the bedroom”. Lastly, sometimes the contrast between the text and background made it hard to read. There is a reason that text balloons exist, something this game had not learned.