Valkyria Chronicles

It may surprise you to know that Sega, currently the purveyors of avoidable Sonic games and movie tie-ins, used to make some of the best JRPGs out there. The Phantasy Star series and Shining Force series stood comfortably among the Final Fantasies, Fire Emblems, and Dragon Quests of their times. In short, yes, Sega games used to be good.

But, secretly, in some hidden back-alley or underground corridor in , there are ragtag groups of Sega rebels. The ones who remember good Shinobi games. The same ones who blew millions upon millions of dollars on Shenmue. And while the others work on new, terrible Sonic games, they have been clandestinely pushing out titles like Valkyria Chronicles and Yakuza. Don’t tell their bosses.

Valkyria Chronicles had the misfortune of coming out within months of the similarly titled Tales of Vesperia, another anime-styled roleplaying game with which I was frequently confused. Let’s set this straight: Tales of Vesperia is another Tales game, and Valkyria Chronicles has tanks. Got it? Okay, let’s move on.

The game has been billed as a combination third person shooter and Advance Wars style strategy game. This is misleading. The only real timing or action portion of the game consists of quickly moving your unit, via third person camera controls, through the line of fire before making your shot. Traditional shooter skills like strafing aren’t that useful, and even the process of aiming is superseded by your character’s proficiencies and stats. Even if you line up a perfect headshot, it can (and frequently will) miss simply due to your character’s inadequacies, or environmental factors. In addition, even with the first person aiming mode, shots may miss and hit objects due to slightly unreliable sightlines.  It is this aiming system which is the weak link of an otherwise enjoyable and very addictive combat system. The combat is, in fact, so good that you will find yourself hoping to unlock more battles and scenarios.

There aren’t a ton of unit types: you are limited to tanks, scouts, snipers, engineers, and lancers, the latter of which are rocket-firing anti-armor troops. They work in a rock-paper-scissors manner, but all have their hidden depths, and individual units can, if you prefer, be customized with found enemy weapons. Otherwise, you improve all your unit types as a whole, increasing the levels of each class, instead of each character. You have a large pool of soldiers to choose from, and can deploy whatever mix of units you prefer, though you are usually limited to the one tank. The scenarios are a mix between standard battles of relatively equal sides and more specialized sequences, which can involve destroying a moving fortress, navigating two characters through a mine and soldier infested area, and a bizarre night mission to save the nation’s vegetables.

The combat can be frustrating, but it’s a good, old-fashioned kind of frustrating. There is often a “trick” to defeating what seem to be insurmountable foes; hidden weak spots, an alternate route to take, or just choosing a different emphasis when you deploy unit types. If you don’t like the kind of game which will absolutely destroy you until you figure out what you are supposed to be doing, then this one isn’t for you. The commanding officers will give you advice which can vary from paint-by-numbers instructions on extra what you have to do to vague indications that there might be a hidden strategy to use.

Valkyria Chronicles starts off slow, and tests the patience of gamers who don’t like a traditional narrative with a heavy cut-scene to gameplay ratio. But if you have a soft spot for either anime or a 90s style JRPG storyline, there’s a lot to like here. The story concerns , a neutral nation of the somewhat familiar continent of Europa, caught in the midst of two warring nations in the Second Europan War. The Holland-like is invaded and forced to fight, and you command a scrappy militia group headed by a nerdy scholar who has inherited a tank from his father. While it may seem gabby, in the long run there is considerably less dialogue in this compared with a 60 hour epic, and the archetypes used (the unwilling hero, the older soldier, the plucky heroine, a freakin’ annoying flying pig) are reasonably sympathetic.

One unusual angle that the plot takes is the veiled reference to the real-world attitudes towards the Jews and Gypsies during the 1930s; there is an ethnic group called the Darcsens, or Dark-Hairs, who are ostracized as the cause for much of the world’s problems. It takes a surprisingly nuanced look at the bigotry of the era, as Isara, your main tank engineer, is constantly harassed for her heritage by otherwise friendly characters.

If there’s any game whose aesthetics demand that it be played in high definition, it’s this one. Playing Valkyria Chronicles is reasonably good looking on a standard definition television, in a good looking PlayStation2 kind of way, but play it in 720P and suddenly the pencil lines and cross-hatched coloring stun you. During its fully-animated cut-scenes, this relatively small release shines among the best looking games on the console.

If you miss the Sega that made Shining Force, then pick this up. If you liked Advance Wars and want a faster, smaller-scale variant on the theme, this can work too. There’s plenty good about this production, and the only real flaw is that it demands an unusual amount of patience from a player for this console generation. That and the flying pig thing.