Valkyria Chronicles Review
It has become an increasing occurrence lately to see popular Japanese console games being ported to PC. In many cases, these ports are half-baked without features many PC gamers have come to expect, but in Valkyria Chronicles, Sega has done a masterful job of porting over one of the PS3’s cult classics. Valkyria Chronicles is a tactics strategy game that is not only a great example of PC ports done well (see the end of this review for a quick port summary), but an expertly crafted game in and of itself. Though it has occasional pacing problems and runs a bit long, Valkyria Chronicles is solid enough in terms of narrative and gameplay that it ranks itself among other tactics greats such as Fire Emblem and XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
VC takes place in a thinly veiled, slightly more fantastical version of World World II era Europe. The meat of the game is similar to other tactics games; you control a small squad of soldiers on a battlefield, each with different specialties and abilities. A turn consists of moving and taking actions with these characters in an over-the-shoulder third person view, allowing you to move and attack with a personal perspective of the battlefield. After using up enough command points, the enemy takes its turn, and so on. Each victory nets you experience and money based mostly on how many turns you took to complete the mission, which you can then use to level up your soldiers and upgrade their equipment. Progression is handled well and by the end of the game, I found myself pretty content with how far many of my soldiers had come in terms of skills and abilities. Core combat mechanics are fun and satisfying, although I found that some mission-specific mechanics could have been explained a little better.
Battles themselves feel well-varied throughout the course of the game, and usually strike a fair balance in terms of difficulty (later missions get pretty darn tough). It doesn’t explicitly tell you, but VC does allow for saves during a mission -- a point of contention in some tactics games. In many ways it is a nice feature because you may sometimes unwillingly send your allies into a hellstorm of enemy fire without realizing it, and it makes the game a bit more accessible to newer players. The fact that VC gives rewards based on fast mission completion, however, means that it can be very tempting to continually save and reload once you understand more about the mission and the enemies you are facing (or if you make a crucial mistake). Obviously that’s a choice that’s completely in the hands of a player, but it’s a serious temptation when you are effectively penalized for not doing so. Unfortunately, mid-mission saving and loading makes missions a little less satisfying to complete and makes an already long game take considerably longer -- I’d encourage anyone playing VC with experience in this genre to use this feature as little as possible.
Valkyria Chronicles’ story itself is surprisingly pretty good, though it does take a long time before it gets interesting. The plot gradually unrolls through a huge amount of dialogue, so be warned that this is a pretty long (30-40 hour) game if you want to experience everything. Characters have some depth and relationships are multi-dimensional, which is helped along by mostly quality voice acting. To Valkyria Chronicles’ credit, it takes the brutal atrocities of World War II head on, and does so with sufficient tact, but the juxtaposition against its whimsical presentation is a bit jarring at times. Anyone who outright hates anime may have some trouble with the visual art style, though anime tropes are used sparingly and everyone but the most close-minded should find the characters and style perfectly fine, if not likeable. It’s also worth noting that the musical score throughout Valkyria Chronicles is beautiful and very well done, from the opening title screen to the final battle.
Finally, some quick port details. I was able to run VC at 1080p at 60 FPS on a GTX 570 with no issues whatsoever. It supports both mouse/keyboard and Xbox gamepad support, and works well with both. Cutscenes are still rendered in their PS3 resolution, but look perfectly serviceable.
Overall, any tactics fan will find a ton to like in Valkyria Chronicles. For those less familiar with the genre, VC is a decent starting point in that it is not too punishing and offers up an enjoyable war tale. Combat is rich and satisfying, and the sheer amount of content offered to the player is impressive. It may be a bit much for those looking for a short and sweet experience, but for most players, Valkyria Chronicles will be worth every minute.
