Edy’s Rip-off
It is difficult to score a piece of downloadable content like this. One the one hand, Valkyria Chronicles is an awesome and completely fresh game that is worth owning, playing, and possibly even replaying. Even without trophy support. On the other hand, Enter the Edy Detachment is not a lot of content for way too much money. But it is new content for the aforementioned good game.
The story of this map pack is fairly straightforward: Edy and several of supporting cast members get separated from Squad 7 and have to find their way back. Presumably so that the main story can advance. Along the way they come upon a village under attack and decide that, even though the odds are strongly stacked against them, they will valiantly defend it until the civilians can escape. Fair enough story justification for this gaiden episode, how is it executed in game? Well, read on.
The mission proper is very difficult. Or at the very least, far harder than many of the main campaign missions. No tank. No support. Just a rag tag bunch of minor characters given an impossible goal. Specifically defending a town at first and then something else happens. (For the price of admission, you’ll want all the surprise you can get.) Of course "defending the town" means not letting any enemies cross into the cramped area you are defending. Sort of like a horrific game of football where everybody on the other team has a ball and can score. And your end zone is constantly being shelled by mortar fire. And at the start there are two tanks at point-blank range pointed square at your huddle waiting for you to hike the ball. As I said, it’s a mission that is harder than most.
The only part of it that is unreasonably hard is that a losing condition is that the enemy just has to walk a scout into your starting zone. Scouts frequently spawn almost adjacent to the area you’re protecting. He could have eight guys next to him that are going to shred him to chum on your turn, but that doesn’t matter, because the hostile psychic radiation from one enemy in this scenario kills hundreds of civilians instantly. It probably has something to do with ragnite.
Speaking of cheap justifications, typically a five dollar price tag is not that big a deal. If you got into a movie for that amount of money, it would be either a sweet deal or a fair way to kill time in a weekday afternoon by watching a movie that was released nine months ago. I just spend more money than that on a sandwich which did not take me as long to complete as this episode and said foodstuff has shittier replay value. But in terms of just downloadable content, this is a hefty price tag for what is, in its entirety, one new senario. The file itself is less than 120 megabytes, so it is good that it’s quick to get, but indicative of how little you are getting.
My biggest problem with this DLC is that the description made it seem like this would be a multi mission arc featuring some ancillary characters from the main game. But its only one mission. You can buy an entire game for that much money on the Playstation Store. If this was $0.99 or even $2.99, this would be a no brainer for people who own the main game. But as it is, the question is just how much do you like the main game? If the answer is “a whole lot,” then by all means let the Edy Detachment take the stage.