RPGFan recently had the opportunity to talk to Chief Producer Yoshinori Yamagishi, Assistant Producer Hajime Kojima, and Localization Director Kai Gushima, members of tri-Ace, regarding their newest title, Radiata Stories for the PlayStation 2. The game revolves around the hero, Jack, a young wannabe knight in the kingdom of Radiata, and Ridley, a young princess of Silverlake, in a world where a shaky truce between human and non-human is about to be shattered.

Radiata Stories builds off the core engine of Star Ocean 3 with players only able to control one character in battle (in this case, Jack). Other characters are controlled by the computer.

However, despite using core concepts from SO3, Radiata Stories branches out to include many new aspects, such as combination attacks and formations, which allows the player more agency during battles than they may have had in Star Ocean 3.

There is also the feature of having 150 playable characters in the game. When asked about how characterization would be handled, Yamagishi told us that, while they decided to have a large number of playable characters, they wanted to avoid the feeling that what made one character different from another was having a different outfit or skintone. While only about 20 characters are integral to the story, tri-Ace made sure that all 150 were given personalities, appearances, and techniques that set them appart from the others. With over 300 NPCs in the game, each with their own schedules based on the PS2's internal clock, this was a daunting task, and much work has gone into accurately translating text for those characters so that they come across as true to their Japanese originals as possible.

Radiata Stories, which was recently released in Japan, has been announced as coming to North America in Fall 2005.