When the game was first announced, I was sold after watching the first trailer. However, when it was released here, I couldn’t find it anywhere in stores. After spending quite some time trying to find a copy, I finally managed to get my hand on this rare drop. As I played my way through the game, I was happy to realize that Valkyria Chronicles was keeping up to my expectations and worth the hard time trying to find it. Let’s get started with the review.

Story

In 1935, two countries (in an alternate-reality Europe) fight over Ragnite, a precious energy generating mineral. In their greed for power, the gigantic military power known as The Empire set their sight on a small neutral country named Gallia. Welkin Gunther, 22 years old and son of the late Hero from the first Europe war, Belgen Gunther, left university to help his sister Isara evacuate from his hometown Bhrul where the outbreak of war is about to turn it into a battlefield. There he meet with Alicia Melchiott, a 19 years old baker apprentice and a captain of Bhrul’s town watch. After withstanding the first wave of Imperial attacks and witnessing the horrors of war, the two of them join the ranks of the Gallian’s militia. Following in his father’s footstep, Welkin now leads the newly formed Squad 7 against the Empire in order to protect what he holds dear. Nowadays, I don’t expect much from a game’s story because it’s often disappointing. However, I was surprised to find out that Valkyria Chronicles is an exception. The story is entertaining and even if sometime it’s predictable, you can still get surprised by unexpected turns of events. I almost found myself shedding a tear of both sadness and joy during my first gameplay. So yeah, the story is great.

Gameplay

Valkyria Chronicle is mixing some elements coming from strategy games, turn-based tactical RPG games and third-person action games. When a mission start, you are asked to choose some characters to send into battle. You are then given Command Points (CP) each turn, and the quantity depends on the stage and the quantity of officers you deployed. Each action requires the consumption of your CP. Using a foot soldier consumes one CP and using your tank takes two of those away. You may also use your CP to give various orders that goes from boosting your characters’ Defense to requesting artillery support to blow up the enemy camp. Selecting a member of your troops will send you into action mode. Now that you can move around, you are also open to enemy’s interception fire, so stay behind cover as much as you can. Using R1 will toggle the shooting mode and stop time. Meanwhile, the X button is for special actions such as covering behind sandbags or climbing a ladder. When you’re done, using the O button will send you back to strategy mode. Now you may either use your remaining CP or save them for your next turn using O button again. To win the scenario, you have to capture the enemy’s main camp, unless stated otherwise. At the end of the mission, you are awarded experience points and money depending on the ranking you get and the number of tanks and officers you killed.

After you complete the first few missions, you gain access to the headquarter. There, you can go to the Command Room and select your first crew. You unlock two new random characters by chapters until you have 45 of them. Five others are unlocked by various events. Those characters are divided into 5 different classes; lancers will take cares of enemy tanks with their anti-tank weaponry, while shocktroopers will charge the front line with assault weapons. Snipers will clear foot-troopers from afar while your scout explore areas ahead and engineers, unfit for direct combat will repair your tank, clear minefields and distribute ammunition if needed. The experience points are spent in the Training Field and used to upgrade an entire class instead of specific characters and the money is used to upgrade your weapon and tanks at the R&D Facility. Later in the game, the Headquarter gives you access to the Audience Hall, where you can receive medals for heroic acts as clearing a mission without any casualties or killing over 500 enemies.

What is making each character in your team unique is their hidden potentials. Those are pretty varied and can vary from pollen allergy, to sadist, to big sister. All characters have their ups and downs you’ll need to work with to figure who fits each situation. Note that each character have only one life, so if you let someone fall in combat and don’t rescue them by sending a character to check them to call the medic, don’t expect to see them back again.

Although pretty good, the gameplay has some minor flaws, yet nothing I’d consider anywhere near game breaking. For example, no matter how many allies falls in combat, as long as you finish the mission with the smallest number of turns possible, you will get the best rank possible. Opposedly, if you don’t rush, kill every single enemies and make sure no ones dies, you will get a pretty low ranking. This doesn’t make much sense to me and often turns decoy tactics into suicide tactics. The other flaw would be the computer AI. Once you find a working strategy, you can be sure it’s always gonna work to the point that it makes it look more like a puzzle game than a strategy game. But still, I’m on my third playthrough now and still having fun trying to find other working strategies.

Once you beat the game, you gain access to the new game+ which allow you to keep your level and money and also unlock the Hard Mode for skirmish.

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Since Valkryst isn’t going to finish this review anytime soon, I (David) took it upon myself to finish this.

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Looks and sounds

The artistic crayon cell-shading style, or CANVAS engine I think they called it is beautifully rendered by the PS3.  If the genre isn’t your type of game, you at least owe yourself watching someone else play this game.  This isn’t Gears of War or Killzone 2, both which aims for realism, but this isn’t either a simple “anime-looking” game.

Speaking of which, while Valkryst seems to have prefered the english voice cast, something rare even for him.  I couldn’t even dare put it on anything else then Japanese audio, as a lot of my favorite seiyuu (japanese for voice actors) are playing some of the key characters in the story.

Final thoughts

With skirmish battles with different level of difficulties, medals to collect and a New Game+ mode, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy with this game for a long time.  The story, while not the most original (it seems to parallel a lot with real world history), it is engaging enough to keep the dedicated player going.  While I personnally didn’t complete the game yet, as I can’t get into wanting to do the next mission, since most of them require some fair investment of time,Valk got around beating it at least twice I believe and really enjoyed it.  As for me, I’ll need to find enough time to sit in those long missions.

I still suggest you buy this game if you have a PS3 and love strategy rpgs and third person shooters.   If you’re into strategy rpgs and less shooters, it’s still a good investment.  If it’s the other way around and you’re a shooter fan and not much of a strategy rpg fan, rent it, and then you’ll know if you want to buy it or not.

 

Valkryst Games, Review