Underwhelmed, after all the praise

I got a PS3 to play some things I missed and I started with Valkyria Chronicles, because I generally like JRPGs and I like tactical action and the setting seemed novel. I think that the gameplay is totally decent and fun, but everything around it is basically bullshit. I'm about 14 missions in - the story couldn't be more predictable if it tried and the most interesting characters are the ones it doesn't develop (probably because the lack of development means you can hold out some hope the writers wouldn't screw it up by turning them into a stereotype, though most of the time, they already have.) You'd think that in a game about fake-Belgium they could at least have the sense to let you lose your country to invasion in the beginning.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad game. Obviously the gameplay is where its heart is, and that part is good, but it'd be nice if I wasn't indifferent to literally every cutscene. (Well, maybe not that one with Rosie singing, that was kind of nice.) I'd probably give it 3 stars.

Pretty much. It's truly a shame because I too really enjoy the gameplay, but the story and its characters are gaaaaarbaaaaaage. Everything is so woefully predictable and is swarming in all the JRPG cliches. A lot of the characters are one-dimensional plot devices and/or caricatures at that, like Welkin's best friend (whatever his name is, can't remember) who literally does nothing but spout exposition all the time. Like, that's basically all he is, an exposition dispenser. Or the upper-class general character voiced by John DiMaggio with the evil gentlemen moustache who--surprise!--is a selfish coward who cares about no-one but himself. And then there's that shitting mechanic who constantly keeps calling you 'bro' all the time and... *shivers*.

Really wish it was more like XCOM in that its story was just something to serve the gameplay, as the story frankly only got in the way of things. I was always excited to check out a new mission, and I enjoy all of the upgrading systems and managing your troops inventory ect, but the story in-between meant I had to be in an especially tolerant mood for me to be able to play it for long stretches.

Yeah, I pretty much agree. I was enjoying the gameplay for the most part but oh god that story. I never did finish it.

I don't like the story, either, but less for the anime cliches and more for the following reasons:

• The oddly pro-Nazi themes. Let me ask you this: which race would you rather be? The Valkyria or the Darcsen? One of them is called the Darcsen, for god's sake! Evilbad would be more elegantly subtle!
• The generally bad writing. What's worse than the story forcing some bullshit emotional bond where it already had a decent emotional investment in the first place? A race of warrior women (just women, for some reason) who gained super powers by huffing magic gas fumes for 1000 years.

I thought the writing was fantastic and the characters were all incredibly likable - some of my favorite characters ever. The fact that your literally fighting for their lives in the missions made them even more precious.

I guess they had to keep a lot of the characters very straight because they were essentially game-anizing the nazi holocaust and if you give the wrong message then you could land yourself in a heap of trouble. I thought they approached it pretty respectfully though.

I for one agree. Didn't find the story interesting at all even though it seems like it should be in my wheelhouse. And for me, the gameplay crux (moving and aiming attacks in third person) was virtually pointless and added nothing. It is just inferior, busy work, and less precise and tactical compared to a game like XCOM or Silent Storm or Jagged Alliance. There's nothing to the aiming.

I love SRPGs and this one didn't do much for me at all.

But if you want to really hate a story from the jump, try the PSP sequel out. Makes this look like a masterpiece.

Did you see the labor camps in this game?

I barely remember the plot (the game is 6 years old this month), so I cannot comment on that part. The micro managing of the squad combined with the pre-strategy phase of placing units and then the actual battle was incredibly fun and really only seen in games like Fire Emblem.

I don't think any of the praise of the game was for the story. It got its praise for its art style and the combat, not the story.

Plus it had a cameo by Vyse and Aika from Skies of Arcadia.

OH GOD AND THEN THERE WAS THAT BLOODY PIG-MASCOT NOOOOOOOOOOOO MAKE IT STOP

TRUTH.

Jesus Christ, that scene at the pool. I still have nightmares.

The thing I always appreciated about that game was that it was very "un-Anime" like with its story in a lot of ways.

- Death in war is often unglamorous, unheroic, and inconsequential. At multiple times, important characters just die. Instead of going out in a blaze of glory or making a "I am the big hero" speech or cursing their enemies or whatever cliche thing, they just die. One event that sticks out in my mind is that the main characters discover a dying enemy soldier who died slowly in the arms of a character. That is very mature considering what most games do.

- Race and sociopolitical dynamics that go with it. From top to bottom, it is all over the story parts of the game which is unusual for Japanese to tackle because for multiple reasons they tend to shy away from the topic in general.

- A strangely appropriate reaction to the turn in the story discovering the super power. Instead of that main character going "ROCK ON!" discovering they have legendary god like powers to win the war their reaction was far more interesting. The command was gleefully eager to shove them out there to lay waste to the enemy which was disquieting because it was less about defense and more about revenge. Soldiers start treating treating them like a god. It starts to freak them out. It was the first time in awhile I've ever seen a game do this. Usually video games are about "power fantasy" where here is a main character who has an "ultimate power" but isn't excited or happy about.

Please don't think I mean this stuff was "Shakespearean" because it was definitely light and fluffy and a lot of the underpinnings are silly but still the fact that any game let alone a Japanese game even tried to touch some of this stuff, even with a light touch, is kind of surprising. That first game was definitely crude (the combat engine itself has several issues) but it had solid and interesting ideas that I was looking forward too in an sequel.

Man...I made myself sad just thinking about that. :(

I don't mind the story's predictability so much as it's basically a retelling of WWII. The scenes are basically there to provide context for some well designed combat scenarios. Like the two missions in the forest, the one in the warehouse district, the three in Vassel and the one in Castle Ghirlando. Those are all great combat areas. They are even better in the Hard EX and Challenge DLCs but there is no context for those and that really takes away from the experience.

@yummylee: Hans is just the worst obligatory animal mascot ever.

Uh, I didn't get that at all. Their main characteristic is dark hair, I think that's reason enough for the Engrish inspired name. The things they got persecuted for were largely the Valkyrur's fault and I refused to use any character that had the "Darcsen hater" trait. Also correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the Valkyrur race and the obvious Nazis of the game, the Imperial Alliance, had like nothing to do with each other.

I picked this game up for $15 when I bought a ps3 a while back, but it never really clicked for me. However, it's still better than the second game. That game is chock full of anime tropes and stereotypes that a lot of people can't stand.

In other news, my Vita totally slid off of my lap and bounced off the floor while I was typing this response. Everything looks fine on the surface, but the internal screen is fucked. What is life?

There are some people out there who threw around statements like "one of the best stories in a video game" or something along those lines. Of course there's always going to be some number of people who feel really strongly about pretty much anything.

@video_game_king:

So how long until we see your Valkyria Chronicles blog? 2 years? 3?

Yeah, I agree that the game had some pretty poor writing and a predictable story. Still liked it for its gameplay though, but it totally failed (to me) in the story department which makes me not hold it in such high regard as many others do.

I wouldn't call myself a historical buff or anything, but the 'retelling WWII' thing only works to its detriment. The conditions of the Darcsen camps are way too good, the total disregard of the concepts of authoritarianism vs. democracy (your country is a fantasy-style monarchy for god's sake). It's also hard to overlook the fact that, though it would be an added complication that's unnecessary to the story, the game made by the Japanese casually omits their own role in the war. The biggest problem, however, is that the game fails to capture the real emotion of that war. You don't feel fear of the blitzkrieg, because the Empire doesn't conquer anything over the course of the game. You don't have to deal with the exhaustion of desperate day and night stands like the Battle of Britain; everything casually develops at your own pace, with plenty of time for pig-stroking between battles. You don't get the desperation, starvation and sacrifice of the Eastern Front.

You can't criticize a game for something it doesn't try to be, but it definitely feels like the writers didn't 'get it' when it comes to the appeal of the WWII setting.

I've always been more measured in my appreciation for Valkyria Chronicles than most of its super-fans, but I will say that while the story itself is fairly predictable, I don't actually think accusing it of anime tropes is very fair. As previously mentioned by another poster, a lot of key moments in the game subvert a lot of the tropes you would expect. The anime style of the game seems mostly incidental, IMO. I actually found that rather refreshing.

@ervonymous said:

Yeah, this.

I really liked the game overall, in spite of its anime-ness. I'm incredibly done with anime tropes at this point, and this game is practically a master class in them. The gameplay is really fun, though, and the graphics and sound are great.

For sure, but I think you nail it with the first part. To me, this game could have been a cool retelling of WWII, but instead it's basically typical cliche anime fantasy fast forwarded on a timeline to have some WWII-style tech.

@marokai said:

The love-interest who's an orphan and doesn't remember her past turns out to be a super saiyan and is the key to everything. Also, there's that scene where everybody goes to the beach and the love-interest is all shy because she's wearing a swimsuit and it's hilarious because she's shy and stuff.

I mean, I'm just sayin'.

Its a good game and had a good story ... you are just a bunch of close minded people :(

I told you, I told everybody!

Next prediction will be that, in time, people will realize that Red Dead Redemption is a boring and over rated game.

If you didn't care for the plot of the first game, let me tell you all about the amazing anime high-school stylings of Valkyira Chronicles II. I enjoyed that game quite a bit, but it's not even ironically funny how bad the story and characters are.

@yummylee: I don't think anyone is saying it's not anime, just that people calling it out as pure anime bullshit are either being unfair or don't actually know what they're saying. As @extomar said, a lot of important moments are very unanime.

Anyway, Valkyria Chronicles is probably one of my favorite games on the PS3. I found the gameplay to be really enjoyable in that it scratched all the same itches for me that a good Fire Emblem game does. As for the story and characters...whatever. It's stupid and cheesy as fuck. I wasn't expecting anything different. I don't think it's anything special one way or the other, but I had a good time. What it COULD have been or what I think it SHOULD have been is completely irrelevant to me. It is what it is and I feel ways about it. Yeah, sure, you could have done without basically every character that isn't a part of your squad since most of them were just dry exposition, but a lot of "better" games have a lot more of that than this does. To me anyway.

Also, it's god damned beautiful.

I was real fucking impressed by that first game, but then it was also my first PS3 game, so there was an element of "next gen whooooa" attached. That said, the second game was hot garbage in everyway. The characters and writing of the first game were already a bit too anime, though at the time I had a higher tolerance for the stuff, and the second, well, the second took place in a High School ("Military Academy," it was a fucking high school). That's really all I have to say about it. All while losing the beautiful animation style for some generic, $20 anime sketches. Damn, that game was horrible.

I kinda want to go back to that first game, now that I've got some years between now and its release. A little scared too, because I half expect that what people here are saying about the writing and animeness is right, but I kinda wanna hold out hope for it. At its core, VC was a good game, I'm just sad that everything done with that IP afterwards was complete horseshit, or just straight up never released in the states (and that frakking anime oh my grrrrrrr...).

The game's premise is a lot more like WW1 - with more tanks - than WW2. You know, that war everyone forgets and turns 100 this year.

Hell, the bad guy is even a stand-in for the Kaiser.

@yummylee: I'll give you the beach crap (which I didn't even remember existing, holy shit) but I dunno. Maybe I've just played too many things that I've become numb to cultural-video-game-trope-distinctions at this point, but the part where it's super obvious a certain character is a Valkyria (or whatever they're called) just struck me as lazy writing rather than "THERE GOES JAPAN, PFFFFFFFFF."

The vast majority of time spent with the game is not an over-indulgence of tropiness, though it exists in bits and pieces that those who are super sensitive to that sort of thing will obviously latch onto them and never let it go. The moment to moment stuff, though, keeps it pretty clean and simple, the characters are mostly fun, and the gameplay (apart from a couple levels where it's just broken-hard) is superb.

I know I'm probably just used to it at this point to where I can immediately key certain things out (like that beach stuff I still don't remember) but on the grand scale of video game anime tropes, this game is pretty low.

I'm well aware. I'm just saying that if you want to inspire sympathy for them, you probably shouldn't use an obvious bad-guy name.

They're the Aryan superhuman myth to the Imperial Alliance's Nazi Germany. I imagine you could even make the link between the Valkyrur Lance and Hitler's quest for the Spear of Longinus.

Late June.

@yi_orange: Eh, even if they're not strictly anime/JRPG cliches they're still cliches anywhoo. And even when they're maybe not necessarily cliches, everything is delivered with such a ham-fisted execution that all of the drama and emotions fall completely flat on its face. The writing is of a very poor quality, and that's the point that matters. The voice acting isn't particularly great, either.

Given how entrenched the game is in its story and the characters, it's a criticism worth bringing up, especially since I know for a fact that I would have enjoyed it a lot more if the story wasn't so front-and-centre ala XCOM. Or if it was better written of course, that would have helped. I never even actually completed it; I got very close to the end, but I just couldn't be bothered anymore unfortunately.

@yi_orange: @arbitrarywater: I respect that if you selectively shut out the story parts, the game becomes pretty good, somehow - , but I have trouble looking at it that way. Somehow the game is less to me for having those lousy story bits in there than it would have been if they reduced all the stuff outside of battles to a single mission briefing custcene in the style of a Company of Heroes or whatever. If they had done that I probably would give it four stars instead of three. Addition by subtraction, I guess.

And if nothing happened in the game that orphan would have gone on never know and be happy baking bread which seems contrary of the "destined savior"/"power trip" fantasy thing a lot of these games and stories often fall into. That orphan would also laments how screwed up her life is now too. Did anyone from DBZ, One Pice, Naruto, etc. every complain about that? Actually the one who embraced that trope was the big chested Selveria (sp?) and she got stomped.

Again I don't think people should claim this game has a complex story or intricately designed or even classy but it was doing something different. Which makes how VC2 turned out more crushing.

I didn't make the Longinus connection at all, it's so obvious now. I still sympathized with the Darcsen but can see how you'd get the feeling.

I guess I am the odd man out. I didn't hate the story at all, I thought it was fine, along with the characters. And the gameplay was bloody awesome. Easily one of my favourite games for the PS3. And Darcsen is an "obviously evil name"? I never made that connection.

@extomar: DBZ, no, but personal anguish over 'chosen one' status is not original to anime. See: Evangelion, Attack on Titan, some Gundam characters. I could name more if I was a bigger anime fan.

The issue is people are complaining about how tropish the story is. I don't think Evagelion or AoT or the like follow "the tropes" just like VC which makes them interesting.

Maybe we need to go back and and ask "What are the problem in VC?" For instance, the complain game relies heavily on "the destined one" trope seems kind of odd because of things I already mentioned. If nothing else, she was never destined to do anything.

@extomar: Ugh, Selvaria... she was one of the worst. Given she's on the boxart I figured she would have had a much bigger presence, but overall (from what I remember) all she really did was act all submissive to the emperor, strut around her warhead tits for some fanservice, and occasionally show up as a bullshit invincible boss enemy. Although maybe she makes a grand return at the end somehow or something, I dunno. Still, again, even if you wash away the anime/JRPG cliché criticisms, the characters are poorly written all the same so, it doesn't really matter.

I can still remember the almighty cringe I suffered after Welkin's stupidly idealistic line about ''wanting to be the bridge who brings our nations together'' or something or other. But then I've always been intolerant with that stuff, perhaps over the norm even. I mean even a game like Persona 3 just drove me mad, and I disliked pretty much every character I encountered and thought all of the dialogue sounded unnatural and awkward. I gave it about 12 hours but... nah just wasn't going to happen. Which is unfortunate because similar to VC, I happened to at least really enjoy the gameplay and the schedule-keeping stuff.

Also, I was paying more attention to the fact that love-interest girl is an 'orphan who can't remember her past', which is then explained by way of her being of a super powerful race of whatever.

Y'all are crazy, that game was awesome.

Also practically everything in everything is a trope at this point.

@video_game_king said:

I took it as the exact opposite: as an innocent name that could easily be misconstrued in-universe as having sinister implications, giving even more reason for them to be scapegoated and oppressed.

@extomar: If I had to identify the anime tropes that are at fault in this game it'd have less to do with 'the chosen one' and more to do with happy go-lucky and ultrasubmissive personalities among female characters, despite them being in war, where presumably such personalities would be rare. Also, yummylee mentioned the problem with overly idealistic main characters - definitely an anime trope, and I'd say that plays a part too.

The real problem isn't with tropes or archetypes, though. It's that the characters are two dimensional, the story fails to reach for the real emotional impact of the moment in history it is shamelessly emulating in favor of adolescent drama and 'life lessons' about tolerance, and I saw the big story twist coming a mile away, from the moment Alicia opened that door. These aren't problems that are unique to anime. Bad writing like that happens in every medium and I'm not okay with it anywhere.

@veektarius said:

Definitely. There's a lot of "omg I hope senpai will notice me" and "tee hee this is like a fun school field trip" going around among the makeup-laden 16-year-old soldiers, which is really weird given that it's an active battlefield where people are being killed left and right. It's extremely sugarcoated, and while I don't think I'd necessarily like a super gritty setting either, it still makes the game's setting feel really strange.

Sounds to me like you have an almost irrational hatred of Japanese tropes. Maybe you should avoid Japanese games altogether, if positive idealism really rubs you the wrong way. Personally, I kind of like that stuff. I guess I'm just not that jaded and I like to think of the world as a generally positive place. I thought Welkin was a great hero, one of my favorites in all of video games, because I respected his motives. Very few main characters in video games have such clear, simple-to-understand reasons for doing whatever it is they are doing.

I never watch anime, so my only exposure to these "tropes" you all are speaking of is through video games. They don't bother me. Valkyria Chronicles was a great game, and I enjoyed Valkyria Chronicles II, as well. It seems like a lot of people on this site really hate Japanese tropes.

Final point: of course the writing is going to seem ham-fisted in a lot of these games: it's been translated. There are examples of scenes in certain games where it would be ham-fisted either way (Tidus and Yuna laugh scene in FFX immediately springs to mind), but for the most part I think it might be less awkward in the original language. Again: maybe you should just avoid Japanese games, and let people who like them like them?

Wait, are we pulling a Bioshock Infinite on Valkyria Chronicles?

@mamba219: It's got nothing to do with being jaded, VC is just a really poorly written video game. What especially annoys me as well is how it tries to actually tackle serious themes and issues, only it's put through a filter that makes it all sound like it was written for 12 year olds.

Haters gonna Hate.

Keep in mind my comments so far have never focused on the actual the specific characters where I am commenting about the story in general and will note I can't quite remember their names either. :) Playing with the theme of an ancient war is a great idea. Having one of your squad members be a idol star isn't so.

For a "typical anime story", it would have been so "easy" to make the savior whats-his-face's sister especially if she is a Darcsen making everyone feel sad for treating her badly. It also would have been so "easy" to make Selvaria the stereotypical "evil woman" in so many shows and games who was just interested in jumping blonde's bones. It would have been easy to make the whats-his-face saving everyone by firing a super cannon off his tank at the bad guy featuring him standing in the light of the shot screaming for 30 seconds before vaporizing the screaming bad guy. But none of that happened...

I do get what everyone is saying because I definitely see the flaws in the story but there was still something different going on. There are plenty of times where they show something interesting and bork it by following it up with something silly. I mentioned the scene where the main characters come across the guy who dies slowly which was kind of interesting if not awesome to see in a video game about war. Immediately afterwards they get caught by an enemy patrol and are let go because they saw they buried the guy which is "what the what?!"

I remember that scene. I also remember not liking Welkin or Alicia for it. Something about her character in that scene making no sense. I think it was because she felt guilty about the guy dying, even though Welkin should feel that way, since he's the one with the medical knowledge that could've saved his ass. Hell, his medical knowledge was a gameplay mechanic in the battle right before that scene!

Are you actually trying to say the game was pro labor camps?

Not at all. I'm saying that they didn't portray the labor camps respectfully.