So a little over 5 years ago (Jesus Christ) I had written a review for a game I thought was great that almost nobody played. It was a bizarre blending of anime, JRPG, tactical RPG, 3rd person shooter, and first person shooter. All these mechanics should have made it some ridiculous mish-mash, but somehow it worked. I really enjoyed it a lot, and felt since nobody bought I would heap some credit on it. That game was Valkyria Chronicles.
Apparently there must have been some demand for it, because after the release of the PS4 Sega decided to give it a purdy HD sheen and re-release it with all the DLC on PS4. And I bought it again, because I'm a sucker. There was also apparently demand for the two following sequels released previously on the PSP. So someone at Sega figured why the hell not, lets toss out a new Valkyria game and see how it does? I couldn't wait, and bought it without hesitation.
VALKYRIA: REVOLUTION(PS4)
The story of Valkyria: Revolution takes well into the future of the first game. It begins with a man and his teach discussing a private grave honoring the 5 traitors of the nation of Jutland, and why history doesn't explain why they were honored so. Richelle is teacher to the Jutland royalty and knows the true story, and sits to tell him the true story of the Jutland Liberation.
The continent of Europa is still a country of nations, and ragnite is still the resource that rules the world now not only for its potential as a power source, but now for the alchemic properties that allowed so many nations to enter an advanced industrial age. The Ruzi empire has the biggest slice of the pie, and has advanced and expanded its influence to maintain its military power and ragnite control over Europa. During its expansion, the emperor Klaudiazs and his five generals set flame to a stand alone orphanage and took hostage to its caretaker, a woman named Maria.
The continent of Europa is still a country of nations, and ragnite is still the resource that rules the world now not only for its potential as a power source, but now for the alchemic properties that allowed so many nations to enter an advanced industrial age. The Ruzi empire has the biggest slice of the pie, and has advanced and expanded its influence to maintain its military power and ragnite control over Europa. During its expansion, the emperor Klaudiazs and his five generals set flame to a stand alone orphanage and took hostage to its caretaker, a woman named Maria.
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| She basically put up zero defiance, so I don't know why Ruz had the raze the orphanage. |
Five of the orphans that survived formed a tight knit circle and after their adoption advanced themselves with skills to take revenge with the nation of Jutland. Amleth, rose as a soldier to captain an elite squad. Violette uses her femme fatale charms as a spy, Basil uses his economic influence and power to equip the military, Fritte uses his skills as a columnist to stir the will of the populous, and Solomon uses legislature to advance political action of the nation. The five of them decide to use the nation of Jutland to push to war with the Ruzi empire to kill the Emperor and his 5 generals and learn of Miss Maria's fate under the guise of Jutland liberating the empires captured nations.
But all is not so easy as the Princess of Jutland herself, Opheila, joins the military to fight along side her people on the front lines, stationed in the unit under Amelth's command. The 5 now have to advance carefully to pursue their revenge and manipulate the war, without their intentions being discovered by Opheila, who wants truly nothing more than the liberation of Jutland and the surrounding nations.
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| Violette, Basil, Amleth, Solomon, and Fritte: the Traitors of Jutland. |
Did that seem wordy? Because it was. I know Valkyria games really heavily lean on cutscenes to get their stories across since the levels aren't really long enough to effectively weave the narrative into the gameplay, but this one is in a severe, SEVERE need of an editor. First off it's trying to tell this complicated tale of two nations militaries at war, then it's trying to explain the subterfuge of the 6 major characters trying to control it from the shadows, (only one of which is playable).
But then it also deals with the interpersonal relationships with the squad, and the princess. The squad has like close to 15 playable characters, and it's like they all try to cram a line or two of dialog into every cutscene like a bad impov session. When this happens scenes that should have been over like 20 minutes ago will drag on and on because every character has to drop some trite one line platitude that does nothing to contribute to the story or develop their character. The squad is literally a pick and mix of anime tropes and most of them aren't even good. Some of them are literally the same as the character they share the scene with.
It's made especially bad by some phenomenally bad voice acting. This to me is the more amazing thing because since I play a lot of games, I recognize a lot of voices. Some of these actors are incredibly talented. I've heard them in better works. Hell eff'n Matt Mercer who does amazing voice work is in it and while he's one of the better acted characters in this game, overall the voice acting makes cutscenes that drag on far to long feel even longer. I've had some story segments run over 40 minutes before I actually got to a level (and when you are streaming this does not keep people watching, let me tell you).
They changed the battle system for Valkyria: Revolution and I honestly have no idea why. Valkyria as I know is more or less a tactical RPG. Think kind of like in Phantom Brave terms: You bring out your set peices to the battle. They have their own moves and ranges and abilities. You move your pieces for attacks (while getting shot at as you) and then once you've made you moves, the enemies get their crack with you shooting at them. It was a weird amalgamation of game elements but they actually managed to work well together.
Valkyria: Revolution has completely done away with the tactical element of the game, and when the fans rebelled in the first trailer videos they tried to adjust the abilities to give it a more tactical feel. Essentially how the missions work is you select 4 troops from your Vanargand squad between your Shocktrooper heavies, fast and nimble Scouts, your Sapper mages, and your Shield-bearer tanks. Typically you will take Amleth and Princess Ophelia for your shock and scout, since 90% of the time they are required for the story anyways. You basically round out the party with whatever characters or roles you want left.
Once the mission starts you usually have a relatively simple objective: Hold this point, take this base, beat this boss. As soon as the missions starts you basically have free reign to wander the map and take out enemies. You have an attack button, guard, dash, menu and lock on. It's not turn based anymore but the action does freeze when you go into the menu if you want to fire a shot with one of your guns, use a grenade, or abilities. This is part of the concession to try to make it a little more tactics based (because upon first seeing the game play fans complained) but it doesn't really hold up that well.
The point of giving use of the guns or terrain is what allowed the tactical combat system to work. You could run to cover, take your shot, then have protection when it wasn't your turn. Now I find that there is little reason to use it as I can just vault the cover and swing my sword around since there is no turn order anymore. The only time you really want to use a grenade or ability is when you have a bunch of enemies grouped or have a particularly stubborn foe like one of the mech tanks.
When you complete missions you get spoils of money and abilities to equip to your characters. These abilities have affinity levels so on top of leveling your character, you basically have to bank in your unused abilities to move around a skill grid to allow you to use greater abilities, as well as build up characters individual abilities on top of their base stats. The problem is you have squad of like 15 people, the grids expand, and you don't get a lot of spoils from fights as you play through the game. So you for sure can expect to be doing a bit of grinding to try to get your mainstays up to level. I think even just focusing on 2 characters, I never seemed to have enough.
In between story missions you can also take on a number of free missions as well. There is no story tied to any of these so they are basically a free sortie to get spoils and levels. But what this also does is affect the map during the course of the war, so there will be hot-zones where you are pushing or getting pushed back. The more area you take during the free battles, the more the trade embargo will be lifted and more items you can purchase during when you are back at your home base.
Much like the previous game, in the home base you can go to your R&D department to improve your guns, grenades, and launchers as well as boost your characters grids. There are also a number of shops where you can buy supplies and you can take them to a main outfitter where you can rework your gear for the team as a whole with bonus effects. I will be 100% honest I did this maybe once or twice at best because the upgrades seemed marginal at best and you have to wait a battle to pick up the item you crafted AND you can only do them one at a time. Sorry Valkyria: Revolution but I got shit to do. For the most part this didn't seem to impede my progress.
So usually when I review a game I go into the basic mechanics then go into what and I liked and what I didn't but as you can already tell from this one, there is a lot of shit that I didn't like. So let's keep that ball rolling. Now I've mentioned that that every single cutscene is much too long and relatively poorly acted, filled with trite and pointless lines.
But it also suffers from the problem of the first game of forcing you to go back to the main menu of the two characters in the future discussing the events at the end of every single chapter. There is no reason to do this. I can't go back and play old missions until the beat the game, and I honestly don't want to see the extra cutscenes. All you are doing is adding a step in getting me through the trudging story and makes it that much harder for me to get the action.
What the hell happened to graphics in this game? Both of them are anime looking yes, but the original had this beautiful watercolor washed out style that made it a joy to look at with bright colors that looked rustic, and classic anime design with soft fluid animations that made it look like I was actually watching old footage. Valkyria Revolution swapped that out for this almost generic video-gamey looking anime archetype. While all the characters are well designed that they all manage to stand apart from each other, something about the eyes just makes them all look too similar to one another.
The animation in combat is fine, but it does the old Resident Evil animation of hand conversations during talky portions of the game, which are silly in their own right. But when a single character has like a 10 minute monologue, that never cuts to a different camera angle, you have a single jackass waving his left arm at about should height in the same circular animation for the entirety of it. It's impossible not to notice and looks even dumber when you do.
The music isn't all that spectacular though either. The majority of it is tolerable, well fitting for the menus or scenes you are in. But two songs are played almost ad nauseam throughout the whole game. One is the song that plays when the villains are talking, which sounds so relentlessly sinister they could be talking about giving away puppies to new forever homes and you'd think it's the most evil thing of the world. The title track of the game is the other one, which plays almost every battle and in many cutscenes. It does have a good melody and does give the battle a feeling of epic so in that regard it is well placed, but it's a pretty paltry offering overall.
The grind is insufferable in this game. Things started off hot with me getting a quick level advantage over the enemy that carried me through the meat of the game, but in the later stages where you have boss fights with one of the Valkyria they become these painful battles of attrition because of these bullshit defense stacking abilities that bring your party's damage to next to zero. Even your shock troopers who usually can mow through everything will barely dent through, making these fights take forever.
And as stated above the rewards for doing this are negligible at best. After a few missions I only would get enough reward to move Amelth a few spaces on his grid, because if you want good experience you have to burnt he better skills you get. But those are the ones I want to equip! Thankfully the game continued to dump a number of abilities I never ever bothered to use which helped a little, but again the tedium of the process would just kill any motivation I had to grind.
There is no way to sugar coat it. This combat system is fucking boring. It's not fast paced enough to truly feel like an action game. The animation has no weight behind it so all the strikes glide through as if there was no impact. It's too free form to have any sense of RPG structure too it. Like I said using the skills and guns feel like a token attempt to go "hey see? this is still kind of a tactics game right?" On top of that a significant portion of the missions just take too long, even when they don't. There have been times where I have playing missions that feel like I have been going for well over an hour only learn I played about 12 minutes.
The game also feels just too easy. Like I said its got a pretty convoluted skill and upgrade system, and it can't be that effectual if I was able to basically not use the shops in any capacity, only grinding up a few characters and was pretty much able to cruise through a significant portion of the game. It has about 10 episodes and a finale, and aside from a few trip ups on a few boss fights I sailed to chapter 10 with relative ease.
But this game makes one fucking cardinal sin that made me put the game down. Near the end of the game in one of the final missions, it pulls the bullshit "we need to split up" deal and forces you to control two teams. I think this happens only one other time in the game, and the problem is if you played the game like I had done, you would get the mission with two stud main characters, two acceptable supports, and a whole load of fucking trash because I don't have the 90 hours I would need to level up these stupid characters to equip stronger abilities.
So now I'm stuck. Either I break up my good team and struggle to get through it, or I go in with a team of scrubs and hope for the best. Either way it killed the pace of the game and motivated me to move to something else. Sorry Valkyria Revolution, but I'm a working adult with shit to do.
And the real tragedy of it is, despite some incredibly dumb parts and even dumber dialog, the story was starting to get me a little bit. While the most of it is just useless fluff that I didn't care about, I was interested to see how the situation with the traitors and the princess were going to play out. Looks like I won't be doing that myself, because this game shot its one saving grace in the foot. Its single shred of interesting narrative.
Honestly I don't know why this surprises me. Sega has a long track record of not knowing what the fuck they are doing. The only reason they are sort of succeeding is because they purchased Atlus and them left them alone. They haven't messed up my beloved Yakuza or Persona franchises yet, but other than that if they're not pimping out Sanik's used asshole, it's ruining a franchise people used to love. Valkyria is no exception.
I stomached as much of this game as I could. Hoping it would get better. I really wanted it to. Sometimes you can push through bad voice acting and find a hidden gem of a good game (Star Ocean: Last Hope and Infinite Undiscovery are great examples). But there are just too many horrible errors to overlook on this one. The game was universally panned by other reviews, and I have no other choice but to pile on: Valkyria Revolution sucks. Buyer beware.
Ugh, I didn't even get into the English singing in this game.
Dreadful.
But then it also deals with the interpersonal relationships with the squad, and the princess. The squad has like close to 15 playable characters, and it's like they all try to cram a line or two of dialog into every cutscene like a bad impov session. When this happens scenes that should have been over like 20 minutes ago will drag on and on because every character has to drop some trite one line platitude that does nothing to contribute to the story or develop their character. The squad is literally a pick and mix of anime tropes and most of them aren't even good. Some of them are literally the same as the character they share the scene with.
It's made especially bad by some phenomenally bad voice acting. This to me is the more amazing thing because since I play a lot of games, I recognize a lot of voices. Some of these actors are incredibly talented. I've heard them in better works. Hell eff'n Matt Mercer who does amazing voice work is in it and while he's one of the better acted characters in this game, overall the voice acting makes cutscenes that drag on far to long feel even longer. I've had some story segments run over 40 minutes before I actually got to a level (and when you are streaming this does not keep people watching, let me tell you).
 |
| Toooooo many eff'n characters. |
They changed the battle system for Valkyria: Revolution and I honestly have no idea why. Valkyria as I know is more or less a tactical RPG. Think kind of like in Phantom Brave terms: You bring out your set peices to the battle. They have their own moves and ranges and abilities. You move your pieces for attacks (while getting shot at as you) and then once you've made you moves, the enemies get their crack with you shooting at them. It was a weird amalgamation of game elements but they actually managed to work well together.
Valkyria: Revolution has completely done away with the tactical element of the game, and when the fans rebelled in the first trailer videos they tried to adjust the abilities to give it a more tactical feel. Essentially how the missions work is you select 4 troops from your Vanargand squad between your Shocktrooper heavies, fast and nimble Scouts, your Sapper mages, and your Shield-bearer tanks. Typically you will take Amleth and Princess Ophelia for your shock and scout, since 90% of the time they are required for the story anyways. You basically round out the party with whatever characters or roles you want left.
Once the mission starts you usually have a relatively simple objective: Hold this point, take this base, beat this boss. As soon as the missions starts you basically have free reign to wander the map and take out enemies. You have an attack button, guard, dash, menu and lock on. It's not turn based anymore but the action does freeze when you go into the menu if you want to fire a shot with one of your guns, use a grenade, or abilities. This is part of the concession to try to make it a little more tactics based (because upon first seeing the game play fans complained) but it doesn't really hold up that well.
The point of giving use of the guns or terrain is what allowed the tactical combat system to work. You could run to cover, take your shot, then have protection when it wasn't your turn. Now I find that there is little reason to use it as I can just vault the cover and swing my sword around since there is no turn order anymore. The only time you really want to use a grenade or ability is when you have a bunch of enemies grouped or have a particularly stubborn foe like one of the mech tanks.
When you complete missions you get spoils of money and abilities to equip to your characters. These abilities have affinity levels so on top of leveling your character, you basically have to bank in your unused abilities to move around a skill grid to allow you to use greater abilities, as well as build up characters individual abilities on top of their base stats. The problem is you have squad of like 15 people, the grids expand, and you don't get a lot of spoils from fights as you play through the game. So you for sure can expect to be doing a bit of grinding to try to get your mainstays up to level. I think even just focusing on 2 characters, I never seemed to have enough.
In between story missions you can also take on a number of free missions as well. There is no story tied to any of these so they are basically a free sortie to get spoils and levels. But what this also does is affect the map during the course of the war, so there will be hot-zones where you are pushing or getting pushed back. The more area you take during the free battles, the more the trade embargo will be lifted and more items you can purchase during when you are back at your home base.
 |
| Skill upgrading in this game is the fucking bane of my existence. |
Much like the previous game, in the home base you can go to your R&D department to improve your guns, grenades, and launchers as well as boost your characters grids. There are also a number of shops where you can buy supplies and you can take them to a main outfitter where you can rework your gear for the team as a whole with bonus effects. I will be 100% honest I did this maybe once or twice at best because the upgrades seemed marginal at best and you have to wait a battle to pick up the item you crafted AND you can only do them one at a time. Sorry Valkyria: Revolution but I got shit to do. For the most part this didn't seem to impede my progress.
So usually when I review a game I go into the basic mechanics then go into what and I liked and what I didn't but as you can already tell from this one, there is a lot of shit that I didn't like. So let's keep that ball rolling. Now I've mentioned that that every single cutscene is much too long and relatively poorly acted, filled with trite and pointless lines.
But it also suffers from the problem of the first game of forcing you to go back to the main menu of the two characters in the future discussing the events at the end of every single chapter. There is no reason to do this. I can't go back and play old missions until the beat the game, and I honestly don't want to see the extra cutscenes. All you are doing is adding a step in getting me through the trudging story and makes it that much harder for me to get the action.
 |
| There is no reason to keep bringing me back here. Let me jump to the main menu from the pause menu when I want to go. Keep the story going. |
What the hell happened to graphics in this game? Both of them are anime looking yes, but the original had this beautiful watercolor washed out style that made it a joy to look at with bright colors that looked rustic, and classic anime design with soft fluid animations that made it look like I was actually watching old footage. Valkyria Revolution swapped that out for this almost generic video-gamey looking anime archetype. While all the characters are well designed that they all manage to stand apart from each other, something about the eyes just makes them all look too similar to one another.
The animation in combat is fine, but it does the old Resident Evil animation of hand conversations during talky portions of the game, which are silly in their own right. But when a single character has like a 10 minute monologue, that never cuts to a different camera angle, you have a single jackass waving his left arm at about should height in the same circular animation for the entirety of it. It's impossible not to notice and looks even dumber when you do.
The music isn't all that spectacular though either. The majority of it is tolerable, well fitting for the menus or scenes you are in. But two songs are played almost ad nauseam throughout the whole game. One is the song that plays when the villains are talking, which sounds so relentlessly sinister they could be talking about giving away puppies to new forever homes and you'd think it's the most evil thing of the world. The title track of the game is the other one, which plays almost every battle and in many cutscenes. It does have a good melody and does give the battle a feeling of epic so in that regard it is well placed, but it's a pretty paltry offering overall.
The grind is insufferable in this game. Things started off hot with me getting a quick level advantage over the enemy that carried me through the meat of the game, but in the later stages where you have boss fights with one of the Valkyria they become these painful battles of attrition because of these bullshit defense stacking abilities that bring your party's damage to next to zero. Even your shock troopers who usually can mow through everything will barely dent through, making these fights take forever.
And as stated above the rewards for doing this are negligible at best. After a few missions I only would get enough reward to move Amelth a few spaces on his grid, because if you want good experience you have to burnt he better skills you get. But those are the ones I want to equip! Thankfully the game continued to dump a number of abilities I never ever bothered to use which helped a little, but again the tedium of the process would just kill any motivation I had to grind.
There is no way to sugar coat it. This combat system is fucking boring. It's not fast paced enough to truly feel like an action game. The animation has no weight behind it so all the strikes glide through as if there was no impact. It's too free form to have any sense of RPG structure too it. Like I said using the skills and guns feel like a token attempt to go "hey see? this is still kind of a tactics game right?" On top of that a significant portion of the missions just take too long, even when they don't. There have been times where I have playing missions that feel like I have been going for well over an hour only learn I played about 12 minutes.
The game also feels just too easy. Like I said its got a pretty convoluted skill and upgrade system, and it can't be that effectual if I was able to basically not use the shops in any capacity, only grinding up a few characters and was pretty much able to cruise through a significant portion of the game. It has about 10 episodes and a finale, and aside from a few trip ups on a few boss fights I sailed to chapter 10 with relative ease.
 |
| No connection Slyvia Bles, who actually was a deep, conflicted, and interesting character. By having it jump so far down the timeline this is really the only connection to Valkyria Chronicles. |
But this game makes one fucking cardinal sin that made me put the game down. Near the end of the game in one of the final missions, it pulls the bullshit "we need to split up" deal and forces you to control two teams. I think this happens only one other time in the game, and the problem is if you played the game like I had done, you would get the mission with two stud main characters, two acceptable supports, and a whole load of fucking trash because I don't have the 90 hours I would need to level up these stupid characters to equip stronger abilities.
So now I'm stuck. Either I break up my good team and struggle to get through it, or I go in with a team of scrubs and hope for the best. Either way it killed the pace of the game and motivated me to move to something else. Sorry Valkyria Revolution, but I'm a working adult with shit to do.
And the real tragedy of it is, despite some incredibly dumb parts and even dumber dialog, the story was starting to get me a little bit. While the most of it is just useless fluff that I didn't care about, I was interested to see how the situation with the traitors and the princess were going to play out. Looks like I won't be doing that myself, because this game shot its one saving grace in the foot. Its single shred of interesting narrative.
 |
| I did end up growing to like Ophelia in her naivete. She's for her country first, but she is surprisingly receptive and understanding to all sides of the conflict. |
I stomached as much of this game as I could. Hoping it would get better. I really wanted it to. Sometimes you can push through bad voice acting and find a hidden gem of a good game (Star Ocean: Last Hope and Infinite Undiscovery are great examples). But there are just too many horrible errors to overlook on this one. The game was universally panned by other reviews, and I have no other choice but to pile on: Valkyria Revolution sucks. Buyer beware.
Ugh, I didn't even get into the English singing in this game.
Dreadful.
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