Many years ago I played a little game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for the Nintendo Wii. Like many WiiWare games, it was short and experimental and a little rudimentary, but the notion behind its structure proved unexpectedly compelling. As the sovereign of a small country beset by supernatural enemies, your tasks were split between developing your kingdom and producing would-be adventurers to quell the hordes outside the gate. That meant ensuring they had the best gear, the best training, and took on specific missions that weren't too easy or too hard for their specific level, and reaping some share of the rewards afterwards. I don't recall it being overly complex, but something about its format stuck with me. Back to the present day, I was intrigued to hear that another game was seeking to do something similar: Agate Games's Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, the game we're covering for this edition of Indie Game of the Week.

If anything, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story has proven to be even less layered than that decade-old WiiWare game. As the principal of the Royal Academy of Valthiria (which I renamed Valkilmeria, "an Institution for Top Guns and Real Geniuses"), the purpose of which is to train generations of soldiers and adventurers to keep the queendom safe from enemies both foreign and domestic, your goal is to ensure these students receive the best educations possible. The gameplay is broken up into two modes: the simulation aspect where you bankroll and construct new facilities for the academy, including dormitories to house more students and special training classrooms to promote students to various classes. Then there's a mission structure that is the source of all your funding: these missions are split into effectively active missions and passive "errand" missions. The latter simply entails sending a party of students on their way to handle it themselves, but with the former you control the party directly. These combat missions are pretty repetitive and mashy - they remind me of the procgen dungeoneering mode of Recettear, mostly in how the paper-thin hack n' slash gameplay makes it feel like an afterthought for the "core" simulation mode - but it is at least one innovation it has over My Life as a King.

However, most of the game is as threadbare as it gets. There's a crafting element but you only ever find three different material types; students are randomly generated and only have a handful of stats, three of which determine which of the three classes (each class has two advanced versions also, making ten total if you include the nondescript "Apprentice" class everyone begins with) is best suited for that student; there's only a few missions per chapter and most don't respawn, making it harder to train new recruits and earn money unless you deliberately fail them for whatever scraps of XP you earned from the monsters (failed quests remain active for reattempts); there's about a dozen monster types I've seen so far and half of those were palette swaps; the simulation aspect gives you very little to construct early on (and very little room to do so), but will gradually open up as your academy becomes more famous; and the vaguely Fire Emblem-esque story of the queendom's five color-coded pretenders to the throne jostling for dominion suffers from many localization issues and is fairly uninspired besides. There's also a mechanic, similar to the einherjar of Valkyrie Profile, where you have to graduate at least one student per semester: unless you have some talentless goon that you've bothered to train up to the required level limit as a sacrifice, this often means losing one of your heavy hitters from the main party. The students you get at the start suffer from early obsolescence due to the way that level caps are raised every time the academy levels up, but only for students that enrol after that point. That means there's no point getting attached to the first crowd to come through the gates when they're always going to be stuck at level 10 - since upgrading the academy I've been enrolling students capable of reaching level 15, so I've little reason to stick with the early worms. Ditto when I upgrade again and start admitting those with level 20 caps. (At least the game bothers to unequip graduates for you, which I appreciated as a time-saving measure.)

The developers primarily produced games for mobile platforms prior to Valthirian Arc and it shows between its dearth of features and a simplified user interface, but at the same time the game has that same sort of "just five more minutes" energy that mobile game developers have become so adept at, by necessity. Even if I'm just bashing slimes and boars around a familiar map of raised bluffs or dark caves for handfuls of cash or the same three crafting materials - though there is an oddly significant amount of recipes to find - and putting that money into a new fountain for the campus center or some other project to boost the academy's income and fame, there's something about that loop that keeps me drawn in for the time being. My hope is that the game eventually ends close to the point where I'm bored of the cycle and that maybe a higher level academy will have a few more bells and whistles to keep that small flame of interest alive a while longer, but it's also a bit underwhelming given the potential of the premise. Feels like a case where the ambition perhaps outpaced the execution, because there's certainly room for improvement and many areas it could elaborate upon further. I wouldn't say it's a total waste of time, but it's not the My Life as a King spiritual successor I was hoping for either.

Rating: 3 out of 5. (So far.)