Valkyria Chronicles (2008)

Valkyria Chronicles tries to be a lot of different things.

It has RPG-like mechanics, turn-based battles that also use First Person shooter perspectives, tanks, XCOM squad leveling, a JRPG-like story, and visual novel storytelling.

If those sound like they aren't elements that work together that is because they don't quite meld together.

I liked the art direction of the game, it has a storybook-ish style, and the visual novel dialogue segments were well done. Even the outfits and different areas look unique and interesting.

The gameplay is where it started to show some cracks. I enjoyed it sometimes, and othertimes I found it seemed to want to be deeper. Your squad characters have different traits, which might make them unique, but these traits largely didn't impact how I used them. Instead, the class of the character was the bigger factor, and every character of the same class has the same abilities and is on the same level.

Because of this, minus our main cast, I just saw my squad as "Scout 1," or "Scout 2" rather than the person the game wanted to portray them as.

The game has a reactive fire mechanic that I think worked pretty well. Enemies will shoot at you once you get in sight and range, and your soldiers will do the same. This means the gameplay has a pacing of moving forward, using certain classes to dig out entrenched enemies, and then setting up defensive firing lines. While at times a little janky, I think this worked really well and made for engaging gameplay.

Unfortunately, the other major factor in gameplay, the first-person shooting, I thought added unnecessary steps to the combat. In general, you will always want to aim for the enemies' weak points if you can. This usually meant painstakingly lining up headshots, but the soldier could still often miss despite you lining it up. I wish it was just a select target, give me a percentage to hit, with maybe a crit chance, and be done with it. First person gave the illusion of guiding the shot, while just bogging gameplay down.

The story and characters might be where the game lost me the most though. I appreciate what it is trying to do. And for a JRPG game, it's a surprisingly grounded story.

But the tone is all over the place. Extremely light and jovial 90% of the time, but with random tone shifts when it wants to address darker content. This didn't quite work for me. I also felt like many of the motivations for characters were just sort of phoned in, or character conflicts resolved in shallow ways.

And some of the conflicts are just ignored till they crop up again (looking at your Princess & Prime Minister).

Welkin, our main character, has a very odd philosophy on power and winning this conflict. He never quite seems to grasp or understand the stakes of the fight, or how close his country came to being wiped out. But he also ignores the many ways Squad 7 uses its own power to quash enemy movements and soldiers.

I think this is made worse by the tone shifts the game has, bouncing between joking and jovial despite the horror happening, to sudden character injuries, but none of it feels permanent or dangerous; until it is.

Overall, I can see why this game has fans, it tries for a very ambitious vision and does some things right. However, it didn't win me over and I am glad to be moving onto something else.

Beautiful game with a good story, despite being a fantasy game it touches on some very human and real points of the war, but even with these positive points, it totally lacks in its Gameplay.

This game is difficult, very difficult, but more than difficult, it is also very frustrating. It's a cheap difficulty where events pop up out of nowhere during missions without the player having a chance to defend themselves. The game cheats all the time on the player, other tactical games have objectives that change mid-mission, but they give you an opportunity to reorganize and defend yourself, but not here, here they decide to sprout strong units on in your units backs and annihilate you. The game punishes the player for no reason all the time, the challenge is not in you being "strategic", but in you learning where all the units are located and having a previous knowledge of what will happen in the missions.

And it even discourages strategy, placing a Rank based on the time you spend getting through missions, which is totally counter-intuitive for this game genre.

Many missions have the objective of "Get to certain places or dominate certain bases" and on these occasions you can simply break the game, abusing orders, putting several Buffs on a single character (Scouts) and making him run towards the objective, making him invincible and ignoring nearly 99% of the quest content. Everything is just... so unbalanced and you can barely call this game "Tactical".

I've seen people walk away from the game because of Gameplay, and I don't blame them, it's a shame they won't be able to see and appreciate such a beautiful story. At the end of the day, I will always have these shared emotions about the game.

It's a franchise that needs to radically change, all the problems of this first game remain until the last of the franchise.

Valkyria Chronicles is a pretty old game, dating to the PS3 era, and only recently ported to the PC. It is perhaps because of its relative age and the fact that it’s a ported game that Valkyria Chronicles’ mechanics feel clunky and unbalanced. Yet, the overall experience is weirdly addictive in a Civilisations-style, just-one-more-turn kind of way.

At its core, Valkyria Chronicles is an XCOM-esque, tactical turn-based RPG. In it, you control a squad of troops and spend action points to move your units around the battlefield and engage the enemy to fulfill a variety of objectives. The game is essentially a long single-player campaign set in a fictionalised, fantasy version of Europe, spread out over a number of “episodes”, each with its own mission or two. The game puts you in the position of a young tank commander, Welkin Gunther, defending his small homeland of Gallia from the depredations of a large, land-hungry Empire. The story campaign itself is doggedly mediocre, however, a cliche-riddled, utterly predictable medley of common anime tropes and maudlin platitudes about the horrors of war. Attempts at high drama and tragedy occur, but they feel marched out as part of a checklist of emotionally-charged scenarios that befit the game’s subject matter. The characters are cardboard: the protagonists boring do-gooders and the villains bombastic prattlers in the most unironic sense. It’s a by-the-numbers attempt at storytelling that feels backward and simplistic when compared to the more sophisticated forms of video game narratives of today.

And it’s a shame, because orthogonal to the plot, the game’s worldbuilding and background history is actually quite well-done. The alternate world Europa feels both fresh and grounded in plausibility, and the flavour text scattered around the game adds a layer of interest to the macro-developments in the story. The game’s world is compelling enough for me to kind of want to see it used as a setting to tell better stories.

Valkyria Chronicle’s game mechanics also suffer from uneven execution. The game is fun, no doubt, but it’s fun in ways that are often frustrating in that could have been executed much better. There are two main design decisions that I think cripple the game’s overall quality. The first is the mission performance ranking system that is based purely on speed of mission accomplishment, and the second is an AI that feels deliberately nerfed.

The first decision grades the player’s performance in a mission based only on how many turns it took them to accomplish the objective. This creates a distortionary effect on the player’s gameplay decisions, causing the player to prioritize rushing over more tactical forms of gameplay. It also doesn’t reward players who choose to take their time and clear the map of enemies, or players who play cautiously to ensure that their squadmates don’t die, which I would’ve liked to have had as viable alternative strategies to fit different play-styles. It doesn’t help that the better you do in these rankings, the more money and experience points you have to improve your units and purchase better equipment for them, so it’s not like it’s just something you do for bragging rights – it actually has implications for your progress in the game.

The time-sensitive nature of reward also encourages another un-fun practice – save-scumming. That’s because many game elements are chance-based: accuracy, likelihood of evasion, etc. To get a good grade means that everything must occur perfectly – there must be no misses, no false moves. So, before you have your sniper take that shot, you save; then if he misses, you re-load and try again. Sometimes, this can be necessary to minimise frustration even when not trying for a good score – like in the final battle, where you must take down (regenerating) secondary targets every turn to grind at the final boss, except those targets are tiny and can only be taken down by lancers with poor accuracy that can miss even when they’re right next to the target. In those circumstances, save-scumming is less frustrating than playing it clean and having all your lancers miss and restarting the whole, tedious mission if something goes wrong.

The second, and possibly also somewhat more immersion-breaking aspect of gameplay, is the way in which the game seems to try to establish balance through intentionally making its AI less-than-brilliant. There were a lot of times when the AI could have pressed their advantage and killed me, but chose instead to do something else, often completely useless. Overpowered enemy tanks with infinite ammo could just roll up to mine and destroy it in a few hits if they so chose, but instead they choose to dither around and hit multiple targets. This is one way to achieve game balance, but it’s not a good one, because of two things: it denies the game a sense of legitimate challenge, and it takes you out of the story. The game’s battle scenarios give the player a sense of awe through spectacle – you fight giant city-sized tanks, mysterious invincible warriors, hordes of faceless gooks – but in order that these outsize threats don’t decimate your squad at first turn’s end with their inherent natural advantages, their AI needs to be barely functional. And it takes you out of the story, because the enemy’s brilliant commanders and Machiavellian plotters are revealed to actually just be battlefield dunces, which you can easily manipulate by capitalising on their peculiar limitations. I would have liked to see game balance established in a more adept way than just having an AI disparity, like limiting the enemy’s number of action points – which actually would also make the game go a lot faster.

All that said, however, I did enjoy Valkyria Chronicles for the gameplay and the worldbuilding, if not for its hackneyed story. There’s just something so innately appealing about the turn-based battle process that manages to overcome the design flaws and insipid plot and turn the overall experience into one that feels satisfying and addictive to pursue, for the most part. I think Valkyria Chronicles exemplifies the march of game design – in many ways, it hails from an era of games that were clunky but fun, their flaws and frustrations part of the holistic experience, a game that didn’t quite respect the player’s time but showed them loads of fun as long as players didn’t mind going along for the ride.

I give this game: 3.5 out of 5 Ruhms

Valkyria Chronicles is one of the best SRPGs ever made, even it being 11 years old it still manages to be fresh and a nice change of pace compared to other games of the genre.

You play as Welkin, a nature loving student who gets thrust into the horrors of war alongside your adoptive sister, Isara, and Alicia, a friend you have made before the war with the Empire tears your hometown of Bruhl apart. Along with the rest of Squad 7, your team must actively put a stop to the threat of the empire, along with growing with your friends and discovering that your people are not the only ones that have been devastated with this conflict.

Combat is simple, you have four units; scouts who can move around the map the most and provide reconnaissance for the rest of your squad. Lancers, anti tank units that can take down the strongest and most challenging enemies in the game with proper aim and positioning, but can go down easily, shocktroopers, who can lay waste to enemy personnel but is easily felled by snipers, who are also a class on your team, and mechanics, who serve to refill the ammo of your squadmates and repair the two tanks that are on your team. If the Edelwiess, the tank housing Welkin gets destroyed by combat or friendly fire, or the enemy squad takes your camp, it's an instant game over.

The real twist in Valkyria comes in the execution of the gameplay. Instead of pointing your characters on where to go, you can control them freely on the map. There's a meter that dictates how much your character can move, and it's a battle of efficiency to figure out the best course of action that puts your units in a advantageous position which does not result in them getting intercepted by the enemy. Depending on the unit that you pick, some units can move farther than others, with scouts being the best movement-wise, and snipers being the worst.

Along the maps there are tons of places to take cover, sandbags, destroyed ruins of buildings, and even the natural terrain and tanks are perfect to take cover with. Depending on the type of terrain you're near, you can use it to your advantage. For example, positioning your snipers nears nests can enable them to climb them and shoot from across the map with precision. Laying units in tall grass can hide them and can make them invisible to passing foes, or provides reduced damage when found. Squad actions take command points, which means you can use the same units over and over, however their movement meter will be more and more stunted to avoid exploitation.

You can also take over enemy encampments, which then serve as a center where you can make units retreat and call in reinforcements when you're running low on units. Make sure you're defending them properly however, because the enemy can take them back.

There are also special enemies that should be priority number one on a map if you can discern them, these are commanders. If you kill them, it knocks one point off of their command points permanently, which makes them move less in the battle overall.

Welkin can also provide orders from his tanks, which can change the stats of the squad and save them in life threatening scenarios. You'll be using them quite often but make sure to keep an eye on the command meter since orders use them too.

When an ally falls during combat, there is a 3 turn limit to get to them with any unit and send a medic. If you do not make it there in time, the unit dies and you can't use them again. Some units which are important to the story, like Alicia and the central members of Squad 7, are commanders as described above, which makes them retreat and not die, but at the cost of a diminished command meter since they hold points.

That said, while the game is simple, and the maps provide unique challenges every chapter, sometimes the difficulty spikes can be absolutely insane. For example, I was stuck on Chapter 17's battle for a good 3 weeks, and managed the finish the game easily when that was beat.

Additionally, to counter that you can go train your troops with XP and money gained during the battles, which allow you to make them elite troops with more damage and abilities. You can spend the money in the R&D department to upgrade weapons and tanks, and you can also spend money on newspaper articles which unlock additional side stories that you can play through for extra goodies. Along with that are skirmishes which can absolutely be exploited to hell to make your units walking tanks. While the game may be difficult at times, it provides more than enough to make sure you can see the story to it's conclusion.

Speaking about the story, you'll come to love the world of Valkyria Chronicles, the characters go through significant character development, and it feels like you grow with the squad the more and more you play with them. The ending to the story was simply perfect, and was the main factor that I plowed through this game with.

The game will take you a bit to go through properly. I cleared the game within 27 hours, however you can easily hit 30+ if you want to do everything.

This is an easy recommendation, and it's pretty cheap on Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Live, and Nintendo eShop. Play it ASAP.

I'm torn, y'all.

Valkyria Chronicles makes a hell of a first impression. It's absolutely beautiful. Its presentation - that of a war told through history books - is absurdly clever and interesting. It combines real time and turn based, tactical and strategic, JRPG and RTS. It practically creates a new genre out of thin air.

So what's the problem? Everything else.

Most games require you to master its systems to really appreciate its depth. In VC1, it's the exact opposite. The more you learn its systems the more you realize that it encourages - and at times demands - bizarre and counter-intuitive strategies.

Should you move your army up toward the object as a group? No. Should you try to take advantage of the map and spend movement points setting up ambushes and flanking attacks? No.

Almost every strategy that requires use of multiple units just makes the game needlessly harder. Instead you're pushed to realize that most maps can be completed by rushing a handful (sometimes only 1 or 2) scouts toward the objective. That's it. Leave everyone else at chilling at base camp - they aren't necessary.

There's also this weird design pitfall where your 'rank' - aka how much you earn in experience and money - is tied solely on how fast you beat a mission. If you don't do great in a mission - and you can't replay them - then you could easily find yourself in a negative feedback loop where you keep doing bad because you can't afford to improve your characters which in turn makes you to do even worse in future missions.

The story takes a similar arc. At first the idea of 'fantasy World War 2' is novel - after all, most fantasy hangs out in 'fantasy war of the roses' territory. But the WW2 analogy becomes increasingly stretched and then outright embarrassing as the game goes on. The game can't decide if it wants to be lighthearted or serious, and it's doing itself no favors by riding the fence.

Worst of all, the game can be very... very... slow. Some chapters require you to watch half a dozen or more fairly boring scenes of story setup before getting to a single battle map. The dialogue writing isn't great - not bad, just not interesting - and the voice actors all sound like they're talking in a coffee shop rather than a military barracks.

I don't know. I've complained a lot, but there are so many good things as well. The feeling of a soldier getting a clutch headshot and taking an objective out from behind a wall of oblivious tanks feels so damn good. There are also a lot of innovative ideas for a game made in 2008 - like how you level up classes instead of individual units, or how you can equip special weapons that can greatly alter the play style of a soldier.

But then you'll run into a mission where you need to destroy an armored train and get ruthlessly punished for trying any other tactic than "rush a single scout to deal with it", and you'll get bummed out all over again.

I'm not sure if VC is a good game. At the very least I don't think it'll be the one to tell me.