Anyway, let's talk about Valkyria Revolution, the game that officially gets the #1 Most Under-rated video game ever made award. Seriously, this game got so much negative reception it's actually kind of sad. But on the topic at hand, Valkyria Revolution is the fourth installment in the cult classic Valkyria Chronicles franchise (I reviewed the very first game years ago), a franchise of Strategy/Third Person Shooter hybrid games that take inspiration from the Industrial Revolution as well as both World Wars. And with a little bit of Cyber-Punk thrown in because everything's better with Cyber-Punk! Anyway, lore-wise, the main thing about this franchise is it's emphasis on war as a plot device, and every game has at least one of the titular Valkyria, powerful creatures that (normally) take the form of a silver-haired, red-eyed woman ("Valkyria" is derived from "Valkyrie", a female angel from Norse Mythology who guides the souls of the deceased to the afterlife). Whether the Valkyria is an ally or a villain varies.
Japanese UI for the WIN!!!
However, Valkyria Revolution is by far the oddest entry in the franchise, in that it is neither a strategy game, nor a third person shooter. It trades in the difficult to explain but satisfying to use combat of previous titles in favor of an Action-RPG system, with a heavier focus on magic and melee weapons than guns and technology. This is actually part of the reason why this game gets so much hate. The purists view the genre shift as an inherently bad thing, and them being overly vocal about it causes the BandWagon Effect to cause people who HAVE NEVER PLAYED A SINGLE GAME IN THE FRANCHISE to hate on it as well. Which, ironically, is also part of the reason why Sonic the Hedgehog gets a bad rep nowadays as well.
Anyways, Valkyria Revolution has an interesting and actually really novel premise of a student and a teacher uncovering the truth surrounding a quintuple of war criminals known as the Five Traitors, who manipulated several counties into going to war with each other to enact their revenge against a tyrannical emperor. The student only knows what was published in the history books, which was obviously laden in propaganda, because, you know, history IS written by the victors. The professor, on the other hand, knows the truth about the Traitors' exploits. It's a simple narrative concept that I haven't seen any video game do, and it's really unique, and actually kind of immersive/impressive. Also, and I really don't want to pull this review into a political warzone because politics are one of the touchiest subjects known to mankind, but let's be real, the propaganda plaguing the history books (or anything really) is one of the reasons why public education is terrible. I will never forgive public school teachers telling you about how the universe is made of three forms of matter when in fact there are FOUR forms of matter (Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma), or how literally no one mentions that Christopher Columbus was made governor of a Spanish colony shortly after discovering North America, and then promptly arrested for abusing his power. Bet'cha you didn't learn THAT tidbit from a kindergarten class!
But before anyone says, "Spencer! Stop trying to defend this trash!" I'm not defending it. I'm giving it a fair review, unlike literally everyone else. And my first major gripe with the story is it takes a while to get rolling, and the pacing is abysmal, especially early on. To give you an idea of how bad the pacing is, in the game's first hour (the campaign is roughly 50-60 hours long), only 10 minutes of that hour were spent in actual gameplay, as the rest were cutscenes. Depending on your tolerance for story-telling, this is either no big deal or a major annoyance.
Something this game does get right, however, is the politics surrounding warfare. After all, the Five Traitors are clever enough to bribe major superpowers, manipulate the business industry to mass producing weapons of war, and even commandeer the newspaper and have news publishers pour out an endless sea of pro-war propaganda. It also shows how gullible the major population is, considering their opinions change at the drop of a hat, and go from encouraging the soldiers to go out and fight the good fight one day, and then bicker and complain that the war is nothing but trouble the next.
Something the game doesn't handle as elegantly as it's political drama, sadly, is it's anime influences. It throws almost every anime cliche imaginable into the game, mostly for the sake of doing it. Is the main hero and leader of the Five Traitors a brooding pretty boy with a humongous sword covered in glowing marks? Yes. Can the playable characters cream entire armies while wearing nothing but casual street clothes? Yes. Does the main hero have to do battle against a mysterious, rival whose code of honor makes him refuse to kill the heroes until they've proven their worth as warriors? Yes. Do they defeat the villain through a happy little song and the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP? Most definitely. And then there's this game's Valkyria (Brunhilde!), who fulfills the game's role as the token "Make a female anime-character as impossibly attractive as possible and hope half a million weirdos buy the game because of their weird and slightly disturbing attraction to the character" archetype that makes everything harder to take seriously.
Anyway, Something this game does better than the previous Valkyria games do, at least in my opinion, is handling it's main cast. There are nowhere near as many main characters as the first three games, but we got a case of quality vs quantity. I'm not sure if this is still true for the second and third games, as I've never played them, but at least in the very first one, the way it handled it's characters was kind of lazy, as you literally read the character's backstory in a file and that's all there is to a character from the first game (with few exceptions). Here, each character has a unique personality and semi-reasonable motivation for fighting in a war. And, one of the few things that this game shares with the rest of the franchise are the Potentials, passive abilities that activate when specific conditions are met, and are ALWAYS themed after the character's personality. Example, the extremely friendly Sara gets a boost to her attack if she's near teammates. Not all potentials are helpful, though, such as the timid Blum, whose stats start to plummet if he takes too much damage at once.
Speaking of the gameplay, it's time we talk about it in full. You can move your character around in real-time, block incoming attacks, and switch between one of four characters instantly (which four is up to you), but you can't perform certain actions until a gauge next to your character's health bar is full. When it's full, you can press X (this game is, as far as I know, only on the Playstation family of consoles) to attack, and for particularly lazy folks out there, when your character attacks, s/he will do a full combo. Some people are indifferent to it, some people hate it, and I personally think it makes the game less "button-mashy", but the biggest problem with this system is you can't stop the combo no matter what until it's over, and I have gotten a few Game Overs due to not being able to move out of the way of an incoming attack due to having to wait until the combo is finished to move around again. But what you'll be doing most of the time is pressing Triangle, which freezes time and lets you select special attacks, known as Ragnite Spells, and cast them over a specified area. Time doesn't resume until you have casted the spell, and something I like is how each spell comes with a telegraph on the ground showing you how much ground that attack can cover. Although, I've had some weird experiences with the hitboxes (nothing like the *Plesioth Hip-Check, though, thankfully) where my attacks would hit enemies that were nowhere near the telegraph. Another major thing are the Formations, which you cycle through with L1. What the Formations do is change your team's target, with Squad Formation making all four party members gang up on one enemy (better for boss battles in my opinion), Partner Formation causing the team to split up into two groups, and Solo Formation making it so each party member will attack a different target (really good for clearing out mobs).
But perhaps my biggest gripe here is with the cover and stealth systems. You see, both you and enemies can take cover behind sandbags or around corners. The problem here? Aside from looking kind of cool and matching the military theme the Valkyria franchise use so much, there is LITERALLY no reason to ever take cover, aside from getting a free, albeit painfully slow heal and only SLIGHTLY reducing the damage you take. It also doesn't help the fact that almost every spell in the game destroys cover. It makes you wonder why they put it in the game at all. Additionally, there are a handful of stealth missions, that fall flat on their face due to the game's combat obviously not being built with stealth in mind. You could sneak through, but enemies seem to detect you absurdly easily, and even then there's really no punishment for messing up the stealth segments, aside from having to fight an extra group of enemies, and in a case of irony, I found myself getting caught deliberately because the more enemies you defeat, the more EXP your team gets (and yes it applies to the entire time, and not just the four characters you are currently using). Again, it makes you wonder what SEGA was thinking when implementing this feature.
One of the biggest game mechanics is the State of War gauge, at the top of the screen. This gauge shows who is currently winning the battle, and the more blue it is, the more powerful your characters become. Likewise, enemies become a lot tougher when the Star of War is in their favor. Sadly, there are too many ways to raise the State of War in your favor and not enough ways for the enemy to do the same. For you to raise it, you capture bases, defeat several enemies simultaneously, or defeat the mini-boss-like Aces (red-colored versions of regular enemies). For enemies to raise it i their favor, they have to call for reinforcements (and the amount of times they can do this is scripted) or retake an already captured base (even though most missions end when you capture a base or two). Some bosses possess the ability to temporarily lower it, but they don't lower it enough to make it matter. And once the State of War gauge is three-quarters blue, it becomes almost impossible to lose unless you actively try to. What I'm saying here is, this system, while a neat concept, is so poorly balanced that it trivializes most encounters.
Something else I want to talk about is the mission types. These come in three different types. Story Missions, which progress the story (DUH!!!), Free Mission, which is a quick and easy mission you can do to grind for EXP and other goodies, and Tactical missions, which let you take over a territory on the world map (thus giving you a variety of buffs at the beginning of a mission among other benefits) or prevent an already taken territory from falling into enemy hands. The only problem with this system is it's completely random when Tactical missions occur, and they have to be completed (or at least accepted) eventually because if you let the Tactical Mission disappear (either through speeding through the story or grinding out Free Missions) you will lose control of that territory, and it could take you hours to get it back.
Outside of combat, you can roam the hub town of Elsinore, which is divided into five areas, the most prominent being Promenade. While here, you can watch Circle Events, optional cutscenes where your party members will take a break from fighting in the war to hang out and be friends. They also unlock Priorities, things you can use to alter the AI of the party members (such as only using melee attacks or only attacking tanks and armored soldiers). I actually quite like these events myself, as they provide comic relief and provide a small amount of character development for the supporting characters. Additionally, if you use a certain character on your team enough times, you will unlock Note Book Events, which are only accessible in the main menu and most people don't realize it exists due to the game never once mentioning the Note Book. But basically, Note Book Events are essentially longer versions of the Circle Events, and will unlock new Potentials or, sometimes, replacing a negative Potential with a positive. Some of the Note Book-exclusive Potentials are pretty overpowered, such as Daryl's "For a Friend" Potential, which gives him extra ammo every other time he fires his currently equipped firearm, or the oddly motherly Brigitte's "Freedom Fighter" Potential, which dramatically increases ALL of her stats if she's fighting in Solo Formation.
Additionally, you can make each party member stronger by visiting Basil's Factory (the second most important area in Elsinore) and while there you can spend money to Research and Develop new firearms, grenades, and other goodies, or you can customize your character's movesets with Ragnite Spells that you have collected. Or, alternatively, you can sacrifice duplicate spells to make each character's melee weapon stronger, increase stats even further, or expand the movesets so you can equip EVEN MORE spells to use in the future. You unlock more potential upgrades on a Skill Tree-style system that gradually expands as you progress (but only getting 100% unlocked once you defeat the final boss). I personally really like this system, as it gives you a way to get rid of junk you don't need but still benefit from throwing it away.
Most reviews cite the gameplay as a boring mess of shoehorned mechanics that don't blend well together, and while I can see why people would say that (seriously, why does the cover system exist?) I didn't have a problem with the gameplay, in fact I daresay I enjoyed it. If anything, on the gameplay side of things, this game's fatal flaw is it's repetitivity. You have to grind A LOT if you are trying to get a specific spell or item, and the main story is kind of wonky when it comes to preparation. I've had moments where I could breeze through massive chunks of the Story missions, only to get walled by a sudden difficulty spike, forcing me to grind not only to level up my team, but also to get better spells. The level jump for the final boss is the biggest offender, as the mission before recommends a party of level 45+ characters, while the final mission recommends level 60+. Granted, if you have a particularly overpowered spell or two you could easily do the final mission at level 55 or lower. But again, if you want good spells you will have to grind. "But Spencer!" you cry. "You're the king of Monster Hunter, one of the grindiest games on the planet! You're a total hypocrite for complaining about grinding!". Allow me to explain. Monster Hunter's grinding is fun and satisfying, as you have to take down fantastical beasts to get the things you want, and there you at least know how to get the items you want (How do you get Rath Ruby? Fight literally anything with "Rath" in it's name!). In Valkyria Revolution, however, which spell is rewarded to you (and how many) at the end of any mission is completely random, so sheer dumb luck is a major factor in determining if you can go for a good setup.
As for the presentation, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, this game's graphics are not that good. Which is especially jarring because it's a Valkyria game, a franchise famous for having a beautiful, half-water-color, half-cel-shaded art style akin to Renaissance painting. Valkyria Revolution trades that for what can best be described as a stereotypical shonen anime art style. The environments look fairly nice (albeit empty and vacant), but the character designs range from decent to downright awful. Grand General Maxim has, in my opinion, the worst design I've seen in any video game character, EVER. It's inconsistent in it's color scheme, has an oddly textured collar that clashes horrendously with the rest of the outfit, and the cyborg motif isn't really played up, and it's very easy to forget he's even partly mechanical because his "mechanical" features blend in TOO well. If it was a Terminator type thing, I wouldn't mind, but Maxim being a cyborg is INTENDED to be the first thing people in-and-out-of-universe notice about him. I don't really care for Maxim as a character either, due to him being at best a stereotypical anime rival, and even then he doesn't do anything to take the archetype in a creative direction. The animation could be a lot better as well, because quite frankly, the animations for everything besides gameplay feels really stiff. It's not helped by awkward camera angles and bizarre lip-sync making it difficult to tell who's actually talking during some cutscenes. The animations for gameplay are better, but the lip-sync is still off. But apparently, and I learned this shortly after doing some research on this game for the review, that the Valkyria Revolution staff were given an incredibly low budget to work with, and the final product's lack of funding definitely shows in it's more cinematic moments. There are some cutscenes that are actually decent (the one-on-one duel Amleth had with Grand General Gilouche for example), but those are few and far between.
Here's this game's Valkyria, Brunhilde, who,
in addition to sporting some absurdly form-fitting
attire, is also based off the Grim Reaper.
As for the sound, the voice acting is... Actually surprisingly good. By RPG standards. RPG's are infamous for having laughably bad voice acting, at least in the English dub. But here, the voices are alright. Everyone sounds appropriately, and the only voice I didn't like was Helena, due to her voice being annoyingly squeaky. But the music? It's also surprisingly good. Special mention goes to the Valkyria songs (which play during when the Valkyria is on screen). Additionally, the regular battle theme is also respectable, if a little repetitive. The soundtrack is easily one of the best things about this game.
The Five Traitors!
After playing Valkyria Revolution, I can see why some folks hate it, but it's not a wholly awful video game (unlike Sonic '06 which is hands down the worst game I've ever played in my life). In fact, if one was to critique it BY ITSELF, it would be a decent, if flawed experience. But when compared to the rest of the franchise? It becomes so poor in quality that this game is laughable at best. Your enjoyment of this game comes down to one of three factors. One, are you looking for a political drama with an interesting premise and good music? I recommend the game, but not at full price. Are you a fan of the first three games in the franchise? Don't touch this game with a 10-ft pole, your previous experiences will spoil you heavily. Have you heard how amazing Valkyria games are normally and thinking about using this game as an entry point into this franchise? Don't do that either. At the end of the day, I give Valkyria Revolution a 5.5/10. It has an innovative premise and a surprisingly good soundtrack, but it's numerous flaws make it a mediocre experience. The ".5" is because even though Valkyria Revolution is so radically different from the rest of the franchise, it gets brownie points simply for being a Valkyria game. And before you be like "But Spencer! This isn't a fair review at all! Your score is way too low to be fair", believe it or not, my review is actually being GENEROUS to Valkyria Revolution. Most reviewers gave it 1/10's and every once in a while, a 3/10. I don't have a problem with people disliking this game, but what I have a problem with is purists hating on it for unfounded/petty reasons.
EDIT: Just to let you all know, I don't HATE this game, I did enjoy and I most certainly don't regret getting it, and I know my reviews are pretty generous, but given that I'm an optimist who can put up with some flaws relatively well, there are just so many flaws with this game that I couldn't ignore it. Hence the low score.
*-That is a Monster Hunter joke by the way. Read my Monster Hunter blog posts for context.
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