a young boy created to be a living wmd is brought out of storage in order to preemptively destroy an entire world that the heavens have deemed to be a threat. every time he tries to air his suspicions that maybe this plan ain't it chief, yknow, perhaps genocide is a little cringe, his coworkers slap a hand over his mouth lest he be deep-sixed as a traitor by their authoritarian boss. luckily for the boy, he is snatched away from his cohort, bonked on the head, and dumped into the laps of local girls. granted the freedom to become his own person and make his own choices, the boy decides to pursue what he believes is right... while getting up to all sorts of goofy hijinks with the local girls along the way.

riviera is one of those rare games that truly has something for everybody: there's lots of lighthearted comedy for players who want a laugh, but the overall plot arc is serious, and the deep lore is both quite dark and completely unhinged. one playthrough is fairly short, but the game has about six times as much replay value. gameplay mechanics are easy enough for a casual player to make it through without worries but have enough depth that the real truck freaks have plenty to gnaw on. there are cute girls for the cute girl enjoyers, cute boys for the cute boy enjoyers... and a marriage of point and click style exploration with turn-based battles, inventory management, and quick time events that could only have come from the mind of director ito shinichi.

PLUS this edition of riviera has got a lot of quality of life changes that improve the experience overall. grinding taking too long? annoyed at having to reroll chests over and over to get that last dang item? the boost menu is here to save you. want to compare line reads between the original voiceovers and the atlus usa dub? there is a whole new button to change voice language on the fly AND you can replay lines in either audio in the shiny new backlog. AND steam functionality makes it really easy to change the overall game language if you happen to be multilingual and aren't in the mood for atlus' gag translation.

TL;DR if you have yet to experience riviera......... you should buy it, you Will find something to enjoy.


MORE DETAILED FEATURES GUIDE FOR FOLKS WHO'VE PLAYED PREVIOUS RIVIERA ITERATIONS:

the steam port is based on the psp special edition, which is the version of the game that the PAL region got. this means that the bonus chapter has cgs, you can save anytime you like rather than only between areas, and that the fanservice events have inexplicable swimsuits rather than nudity per decree of CERO. the sort of boobie devotee for whom this is a dealbreaker may be better served trying to find a copy of the north american psp release rather than complaining.

so, what else is new? this riviera rerelease features the easy/normal/hard/nightmare difficulties first introduced in knights in the nightmare, but it's also got four different play modes you can freely choose from (though two of those must be unlocked) that can do things like change your overall inventory capacity, restrict available save points to between areas a la the standard psp release and previous, and allow you to bench ein/ecthel instead of being forced to deploy him in every battle.

i mentioned the boost features above, but once you've beaten the game once you also have the option to skip battles if you're willing to accept the lowest score and therefore not receive any item drops. this can be useful if you don't really care about your score/already have 100% items and are just trying to collect endings. furthermore the configurations menu lets you choose whether you want to listen to the wsc, gba, or psp editions of the bgm (or remixes of the wsc tracks), pick between gba and psp sfx, and even turn off the cat noises.

additionally delicious is the fact that you can new game plus and choose what things you want to carry over from your chosen file; you can keep your stats and your inventory AND allow your characters to relearn all their skills if you love to be op, or eschew one or more of these for a challenge.

oh and did i mention that the art that's used for the steam trading cards was only ever used for an obscure limited edition collectable and has never been released in full, let alone digitally???????????

literally the ONLY thing that prevents me from calling the steam port the single most perfect iteration of riviera to ever exist, no notes, is the fact that sting did not have some of the illustration assets available at large sizes and had to blow them up and then smooth them out to make them fit chungo hd resolution. this is USUALLY less noticeable than it was for the recent blaze union port because of tobe sunaho's less ornate shading style, but if you're a returning fan you Will notice, and there are a few cgs where the forced resizing is so obvious even a new player will be able to see it.

this doesn't cause any problems with the gameplay of course, but tobe's lovely artwork and sixty squillion cgs are one of the selling points of riviera for me personally and so i would've liked for sting to use a smaller screen resolution for the steam release if possible. they didn't really have a choice for consoles, and recreating the new ui at a smaller scale for this release alone would have taken extra effort, so i can understand why they didn't, but it takes what would have been a 100/100 rerelease and knocked it down to a 95. alas.

this is absolutely the easiest way to get your hands on riviera through official channels nowadays though, so even with my singular gripe i still recommend that you buy it. then stream it to your friends. stream it to your followers. stream it to your enemies even. haul them into the dept heaven quicksand do it do it. incentivize sting to release even MORE games to this platform. the future of rereleases is in our hands!!!!!!!!!!