History, Time and the Past in Radiant Historia

Radiant Historia (Atlus/Headlock 2010) is a JRPG focusing on themes of time travel, history and the past, released initially for the Nintendo DS and reissued with some additional content, as Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology (Atlus/Headlock 2017) for the 3DS.As the espionage agent Stocke, players navigate two parallel timelines -a "standard" history and an "alternate" history -and the strange extradimensional realm of Historia, attempting to configure the "true history" and save the world from being engulfed in sand.In this paper, I explore how ostensibly 'non-historical' games like Radiant Historia can play with ideas of history, time and the past much more freely than more traditionally historical games.Through textual analysis of both versions of the game, I show how arguments about all three ideas are made through game structure and language, particularly in dialogue between Stocke and Lippti and Teo, the denizens of Historia, and between Stocke and the time-travelling princess and selfproclaimed historian Nemesia.I argue that Radiant Historia is a historiographical game, firstly because it reflects particular ways of thinking about history, and secondly because to play the game is to undertake the act of writing history, articulated in part through the metaphor of time-travel.This paper will be of interest to researchers concerned with Historical Game Studies, with (historical) time and temporality in games, and with the capacity of games to trouble disciplinary frameworks beyond game studies.Attention to historical representation in games has been widespread, connected with significant ongoing work in the field of Historical Game Studies.This scholarship not only explores historical content (e.g.Grufstedt 2022; Donald and Reid 2023), including paratextual materials (e.g.Wright 2022) and historical mods (e.g.Houghton 2022), it also explores historical thinking or historical processes.This is visible, for example, in Chapman's use of Braudel's conception of historical materialism in respect of the Civilization series (2016, 239), or Cruz Martnez's (2019) focus on the potential of video games as deconstructionist history.However, Historical Game Studies has tended emphasise games that seek to represent the past of the 'real world' in some manner, with a few exceptions (e.g.