When I was a child and a teenager, it was common for my brother and I to spend a whole summer with my cousins. Most days we either go to their house, or they come to our house. One Summer however, my brother spent it in our cousins' house while I spent (most of) it alone at home.
I don't remember if it was that specific summer, but I remember being alone when I played this game: Riviera.
It was a time I used to go to Retro ROMs websites and download a game once in a while. The internet was so slow, it took forever to download simple ROMs, so every time I successfully downloaded something, it was a precious experience.
Playing cracked games was a normal thing in my country. I didn't even hear the term "piracy," which described what I was doing. I was blissfully unaware of the (lack of) legality of downloading ROMs online.
Still, one of the games I downloaded was Riviera The Promised Land for the GBA. It was one of the bigger games. It's uncompressed size was 32MB. Unusual compared to most GBA games I played before, and it set my expectations a bit higher.
Playing it, I was fascinated by the art style. When characters talked, their portraits took a good portion of the screen. They were beautiful and detailed for a GBA game. The visual presentation as a whole was distinct and left a lasting impression.
Riviera had a simple but fun battle system. You must equip items before each battle for your character to use. Items can break, and there's a limit on how many items you can have at a time, so you had to strategize the items. I remember loving this battle system.
Another aspect I remember of the game is the exploration. You don't move your character through each screen. Each screen lets you choose between interacting with something around you, or to go somewhere else.
It's a minimalistic system that I kept considering for my own ideaas for video games, those childish game plans that I took way too seriously back then.
The game is very linear, but there's also so much to do around every story beat. Most screens had optional content that was not required to progress the story. Though these optional interactions consumed points to access and it's hard to do all of them in one playthrough.
Also, there are a lot of Quick Time Events... I was bad at them, so I dunno if I'll be good at them when I play it again.
Finally, and most importantly, the relationship system!
Riviera was my first introduction to a Love Meter system in RPGs. Throughout the game, you get to choose between options that make the four girls around Ein like him more. Some of the options increase your relationship with a girl, while decreasing your relationship with another. This system decides the game's ending, and which character Ein ends up with.
I loved all the characters, or so I remember and I remember loving the Love system!
Riviera: The Promised Land released recently on PC. Since I got far into it but never finished it back then, I would love to play this game again and see all the endings.
I already put Riviera on my Wishlist. (I have games in my backlog to finish before I decide to buy it.) Hopefully, we'll see it on a big sale soon!
- All images are screenshots from the Steam page of the recently released PC version.