Slightly off-topic, yeah yeah yeah, but some of the posts in this thread I think are representative of the general attitude toward Radical Dreamers, an unflattering attitude to be specific, and I think an unwarranted one at that. RD demands a great deal more from the imagination than your typical mainstream RPG, yes, and some of the scenarios are just plain silly, and of course the game isn't long or involved enough to rank on the same tier of investment as its predecessor, but these so-called disadvantages are about as substantial as a cloud of smoke.
First and foremost--this is always the crucial starting point when judging a game--you have to look at how RD was directed, and I'd say it was directed spectacularly. The direction is what brought this game together into a coherent whole. If you dissect RD into its individual pieces you'll find much less than you were expecting. Truly, this is a tiny game. But these tiny elements are brought together for a much larger holistic effect. All it requires is some call and answer between game and player. You, as the player, must commit yourself. This is a door you have to choose to enter; not a vortex that's going to suck you in (like CT would). The music is absolutely perfect; the game loses its charm entirely if you don't listen to the music. The mood is very carefully crafted on a minimal budget; if you play in the midst of external distractions like yelling voices all the way down to the subtle stuff like a sunny room, you can ruin the entire experience. The characterizations are profoundly well done. When I played RD for the first time I got an excellent sense of the characters involved with only a very small amount of text, music, and graphics. I remember thinking to myself how closely this felt to a real fantasy novel in the style of Zelazny or (sci-fi great) Heinlein. And the plot was intelligent. It was not predictable--I had to keep thinking through the first scenario and several of the later ones. (I then made the foolish mistake of looking at a walkthrough to see which ones I had missed, thereby spoiling everything for me.) RD stands out as an escapee from the prison of formulaic RPG conventions that forces game developers to make games that appeal to what everyone thinks an RPG ought to be rather than appeal to the human imagination.
So that's it, really. What this game asks of you is your imagination, most of all. It won't give you an adventure. But, with your help, RD allows you to make of it something very engaging. It also requests your intelligence, your familiarity with classical literary concepts and styles, and your knowledge of history and world cultures. I would not have enjoyed the game as much as I did without some grounding in each of those.
Meanwhile, academic minds can debate the merits of this game from different points of view, but simply dismissing Radical Dreamers out of hand as a substance-poor text adventure does nothing but show off the ignorance of the critic.
