Comments

1. Michael Birt Said,

   I personally think this game is pretty fun if your into shooters and rpg’s it is a good mix, but at the same time very repetitive and after a while starts to get very dull. I would give this game a 3 out of 5 stars, but as of right now it has a 5 out 5 and that is wrong only perfect amazing games deserve that rating and this is not one of them.
   Rating: 1 / 5

2. M. burns Said,

   Wow. I was really looking forward to this game but I was greatly disappoint with the outdated and basic gameplay.

   The only good things about this game is the art direction and the story. The graphics and story are basically “anime/manga-ish”, both of which, while not awesome, give this game alot of character and uniqueness.

   However, if I wanted an anime I would have bought an anime. I buy games for gameplay and this game is an absolute failure in the gameplay department. Here is a few of the points that irritated me with this game and why after 1 day and only 7 levels I put it on eBay.

   - Shoots that “hit” targets (it is obvious when you miss a target) and grenades that land 1ft from targets did no damage.
   
   - No strategy required. Most maps are narrow and small which basically limits you to one strategy. You are basically limited to the strategy designed by the developers and that is it.
   
   - A stealth mission where you are supposed to slip by the enemy to get back together with your platoon. However, the ONE path through the level brings you in front of every trooper in the level. Even those that you sneak behind turn around and fire on you.
   
   - The always fun “invinsible enemy” level who can run all over the map in one turn and shoot her ultimate weapon that instantly kills your team. How do you survive said level? That’s right, you have to use the one strategy designed by the developers.
   
   - Rudimentary battlefield. The only battle cover is tall grass, sandbags, and trenches. However, these do not hide you from the enemy nor lower your chances from getting hit by fire. All it provides is that it negates the auto-kill headshoot. No protection from trees, no popping out from the sides of buildings to fire. Basically move, shoot, move shoot.
   
   - Weak weapon/armor/troop leveling flow chart and no weapon customization.
   
   - No multiplayer

   There is a reason why this game has poor sales, it is a poor game. Do yourself a favor and avoid this game.
   Rating: 1 / 5

3. K. Majarrez Said,

   Just bought this game this weekend because of all the great reviews. Wish I would have purchased Fallout 3 instead. When I think of 5 star games I think of Super Mario Brothers, Twilight Princess, Golden Eye, Gears of War…but this just isn’t it. True, the game is different than any game I’ve played. Reminds me a lot of a video game version of Risk. The main character is 22, but of course looks and communicates like he’s 16. The graphics are decent (blues look really pronounced in anime), but the game plays at only 720p. Think this game would have been better suited for the Wii, personally. It’s cool to be able to deploy troops in battle, but what really sucks are the actual battles. No blood, gore, it’s really just reminiscent of a paintball competition where the objective is to capture the flag. More suited for little kids, for sure. What really sucks is moving the characters in battles…depending on whether they are fast engineers with little power or slow snipers with excellent range, it’s tough to get all the right people in the right places. Countless times I’ve been just a few inches away from blasting an enemy, only to lose my ability to move and have to wait a few turns, or worse, if at the end of my round, the enemy blasts my character I may have spent a few rounds getting into the “almost” right place. And the training is week, you just trade points accumulated in battle to level up your troops. No actual training occurs. Perhaps it’s just me, but compared to Twilight Princess or even Metroid, this game feels a few levels short. I’m only a couple of battles in but already feeling like I dropped way too much for this game [...]). Not to be completely negative, as it’s a fun and decent game, but maybe suited for a much younger gamer. [...].
   Rating: 3 / 5

4. Dwayne J Said,

   Why do people like Valkyria Chronicles? I really don’t understand it. There’s nothing innovative about the game, and the non-innovative things aren’t very well-executed either. Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s anything good about this game.

   GRAPHICS AND ART STYLE

   The graphics are very technically well done. As someone who has dabbled in computer graphics, I know how difficult real-time non-photorealistic rendering.

   And yet, all this fine technology is wasted on the bland, unimaginative art style of Valkyria Chronicles. The character designs? Repetitive and monotonous. The tanks? Plain and boring. The landscapes? What landscapes? (Seriously.)

   MUSIC AND VOICE ACTIING

   The music sucks. None of the tunes are particularly catchy. None of the battle music gets my blood going. None of the cinematic music gets to me. The only memorable song in the game is the Title theme. And that’s only because I hear it every time I turn on the game. Also, whoever thought it was a good idea to do the your turn your music, my turn my music thing should be fired and blacklisted from working in any job in any creative industry.

   And the English voice acting is horrible. Now, I generally have a pretty high tolerance for bad voice acting. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of dubbed anime, and I didn’t mind the English voices. To insist on the original Japanese voices is a rarity for me. But the English voice acting in this game was so bad that I went and changed the voice-overs to Japanese. That’s how bad it was.

   STORYLINE

   Utterly boring. Now, in general, I have nothing against long cutscenes. But only as long as those cutscenes are interesting and relevant. Valkyria Chronicle’s cutscenes were so boring, I’m pretty sure you could cut 45 minutes for every hour of cutscenes, and not only would the story be more entertaining, but you’d still have a coherent story with a beginning, middle, end, and fully developed plot (if it could be called that). At least the writers had good sense to make some of the cutscenes optional. With one notable exception (which had NOTHING to do with the plot), they were the most boring cutscenes of all.

   Now some of you might cite character development as a reason why the cutscenes are so long and uneventful. Well, I’m sorry, but having one character constantly talk about his love of nature for a few hours while another talks about how she loves baking bread hardly counts as character development. (No, more like filler.)

   Others of you might claim that the long and uneventful cutscenes were an attempts to show what kind of emotional trials the characters are going through. Except they failed to realize that emotional scenes (which, to be honest, weren’t very emotional) about characters that the audience doesn’t give a flying fish about will merely bore the audience to death. The writers assumed that we cared about the characters. It doesn’t work like that. You need to give us a reason to care about these characters, THEN show us the emotional trials of those characters.

   And the plot twists. The plot twists were all so predictable. With one notable exception (which also had nothing to do with the plot), every plot twist in the game was heavily foreshadowed. As a result, when the shocking plot tiwst happened, they had little (if any) impact. That and, shocking plot twists generally aren’t a very good form of storytelling. (Consider M Night Shyamalan.)

   GAMEPLAY

   Now, the meat of the review. The hype mill has been telling people how innovative Valkyria Chronicles is and how well designed the game mechanics are. What game mechanics? Everything Valkyria Chronicles offers either has already been done to death by other Strategy RPGs or adds nothing to the game or is just poorly executed.

   The battles aren’t strategic at all. When building your squad, there’s no customization and no variety. Instead of using strategy to fight your battles, either it’s a simple case of shoot anything that moves or it’s a case of trying to figure out which hoops the game wants you to jump through in order to clear the mission. Not only that, but the gameplay is grossly unbalanced. The only reason why some of these battles are even winnable is because the player goes first and because the opponent AI is an idiot. Seriously, I’ve been in multiple situations where the computer opponent has the game in the bag, but instead of winning, they either retreat for no reason or they charge straight at my tank and/or shocktroopers and get themselves killed.

   And to make up for this horrible horrible AI, the game designers decided to let the computer opponent cheat. Basically, they get access to much better stuff than the player, they get to start with much more material on the board and better board position, and they get an unending supply of reinforcements.

   Not only that, but how could they claim to be a strategy game when something as simple as looking at the board is so obfuscated. The overhead map is all but useless. If you really want to navigate the battlefield, you’ll have to use the mini-map in 3rd person mode instead (which often, but not always, contains better information than the overhead map). So you inevitably end up wasting the first few actions trying to figure out what exactly is going on on the battlefield. (Which doesn’t matter anyway, since on the “hard” missions, you’ll end up restarting a few times while figuring out what hoops the game wants you to jump through.) Some people will say that this is to give the game a bit of realism, since you rarely have complete battlefield information. Well, there’s already a tried-and-true gameplay mechanic that simulates this. (And it’s even named after the actual military term for imperfect battlefield information.) It’s called Fog of War. If you’re gonna re-invent the wheel, at least make sure it rolls.

   Other people will claim that these crappy maps help immerse the player in the role of the commanding officer, where they make decisions based on sketchy maps. And then the game goes ahead and breaks the immersion by allowing you to zoom into 3rd-person views of any particular soldier anywhere on the map. (And I’m not even gonna mention the whole “Book Mode” fiasco.)

   And every now and then, the game will insta-kill you for no real reason, which makes the game frustratingly unforgiving. Sometimes, it’s because you made just the slightest mistake. (Like you positioned your tank slightly off center so that an enemy lancer could make a lucky shot from halfway across the map and blow up your tank, causing you to instantly fail the mission. And by Murphy’s Law, if it can happen, it will.) Others, it’s not because of any mistake you make, but rather because the game never told you that the enemy can do that. (Like when the enemy’s armored train that is equipped with a powerful machine gun that can shoot you from halfway across the map is ALSO equipped with a heavy anti-tank cannon, which insta-kills your tank, causing you to instantly fail the mission.) And sometimes, it’s because the game is just plain unbalanced. (Like when the enemy has an anti-tank cannon that can kill your tank in 3 hits, and in this mission, the developers decided to code the enemy to shoot your tank with it 3 times in a row even though normally the AI is dumb enough to NOT do that, causing you to instantly fail the mission.) Fortunately, being able to save during battle mitigates this problem, but that also opens up a completely different set of exploits.

   The game also puts undue weight on clearing missions quickly, so much so that even fans of the game will tell you that speed is more important than tactics. A STRATEGY game where SPEED is more important than TACTICS. Yeah, sure whatever. And sure, the game will also reward you for blowing up enemy tanks and killing enemy leaders, but the reward for speed-clearing is orders of magnitude higher, and it drops off so quickly that even being a couple of turns too slow will make that reward disappear.

   Valkyria Chronicles is so NOT a Strategy RPG that even the game describes itself as an “active simulation RPG” instead of a Strategy RPG. And by that, they mean it’s a turn-based 3rd-person shooter with minor RPG elements.

   Beyond the lack of strategy, the game also has serious pacing issues. During battle, it takes a long time for anything to happen. (Punctuated by the fact that the game will often interrupt these slow battles with INSTANT GAME OVERS.) Outside of battle, even though the game takes about 40 hours to complete, the game is so boringly slow that it seems like a short game. (And yet, this gamer was glad it was finally over, because it was just SO AWFULLY BAD.) For some reason, the designers thought it was a good idea to have only 1 battle per chapter, even though some battles are obviously related in the story. (Example: The “Prologue”, and the first two chapters, which really should have been part of the prologue.) This results in most chapters being completely undeveloped, despite hours and hours of (uneventful) cutscenes, as well as way too few battles in the game for you to have a real game. And then, for no apparent reason, the designers break the 1 battle per chapter rule several times over the course of the game.

   Basically, everything the back of the box promised was a lie. “Elaborate strategic maneuvers”? More like SCOUT RUSH!!! “Action-packed real-time combat”? More like slow, uneventful combat where the player and the computer opponent take turns moving soldiers one at a time. “Epic storyline filled with dramatic warfare”? More like long and drawn out storyline filled with repetitive pea-shooters. “Customize your platoon with 50 characters”? Really, each and every one of these characters is a near perfect clone of one of five different archetypes.

   CONCLUSION

   Why do people like Valkyria Chronicles? The stunningly beautiful graphics engine is wasted on the unimaginative art style. The music is horrible. The storyline bores me to tears. And the gameplay is frustrating, unbalanced, poorly executed, and just plain not fun.

   You know what I think happened? The developers had a nice non-photorealistic rendering engine, and they wanted to build a game around it. They heard people liked RPGs, but they also heard that RPGs had already been done to death. So they sat in a room for a few hours and quickly came up with a few concepts, then whipped up a game as fast as they could, and didn’t bother polishing it at all. Then, in order to get the game to sell like hotcakes, they paid game reviewers to rave about this game and hype it up to get people to buy it.

   And the PS3 owners, frustrated that all the good RPGs went over to the Xbox 360, decided to buy Valkyria Chronicles and convinced themselves that it was actually good. And half of these people don’t know what a “Strategy RPG” is, so they think Valkyria Chronicles is actually innovative. And a lot of these people are secretly Shooter fans, and since Valkyria Chronicles has guns, hurray for them!

   And THAT is why people like Valkyria Chronicles.

   But that still doesn’t make Valkyria Chronicles a good game.
   Rating: 1 / 5

5. Derek A. Fox Said,

   I gave this game a try after I found it on sale and heard all the positive feedback from it. I was pretty disappointed with what I experienced. There is more boring storytelling than actual gameplay. You have to sit through five story chapters for every one gameplay chapter. It’s almost as though the actual game is just an afterthought. Once you get to the gameplay you’ll find a sub par strategy RPG. Don’t be sucked into the hype.
   Rating: 2 / 5