Written 22.11.2010 - Uploaded 22.11.2010
I think I should have written about Valkyria Chronicles quite a bit earlier. Mostly because it's a game that deserves way more attention. Sure it was noticed by critics and received a bunch of awards. So I'm a bit late, considering that it already has a sequel and another coming. Sadly they are released for the PlayStation Portable which I don't own. Then again, these sequels will be enough reason to get one soon.
So what's it all about? Valkyria Chronicles is a tactical role-playing game set in a fictive World War II setting. In a turn-based war, cell-shaded anime soldiers are fighting their way through twenty-something missions. I usually don't even spit at the direction of WW2 games, but Valkyria Chronicles with its fantasy is something quite different. Well, what would you expect from a game where good portion of your soldiers are cutesy teenager anime girls? Now don't let that bother you. Missing Valkyria Chronicles because of anime girls would be a terrible mistake. Besides, what Japanese tactical RPG doesn't have cute teenagers? So yeah, now you have been warned and we can proceed.
The story is actually quite good. I mean it's nothing spectacular but it proceeds nicely. The game's story "UI" is quite nice. Each chapter is presented as two pages in an opened book and each picture leads to a cutscene or the mission itself. Watching all the cutscenes is mandatory on the first playthrough (well, you can skip them once they've started) but after that it's possible to just go straight to the missions. While it's only a small detail, the book works. From there you can also navigate to the HQ but I'll come to that a bit later. The nicest thing about the story? It has some content around bare essentials. Sometimes there's a bit of anime silliness but it remains on tolerable levels.
Once the battles start, there definitely is no silliness. The game features an excellent system, mixing turn-based commanding of units and real-time action. The basic idea is this: each turn, you have a number of command icons. Activating a unit costs one icon, unless it's a tank in which case it costs two. While no unit is active, the battlefield is viewed from a map which shows units as symbols and sketches the terrain. Once a unit is activated, the game goes into third-person action mode where you control the character directly. Each character has a movement range dependent on its class. During activation, the character can move freely as long as there's movement left. They can also perform one attack. While a character is active, all enemies who see them will constatly fire. Remaining in cover is important. Time only stops when the character is attacking, allowing the player to carefully choose where to shoot. Attempt a head shot for more damage, or aim for the torso to get a certain hit?
The system is brilliant. It gives the player full control of where units will move to. No cursing the AI for choosing wrong routes. If you move a character badly it's your own damn fault. It also makes scouting interesting. The only way to get detailed information on terrain and enemy positions is to actually move in and see for yourself. Spotted enemies will remain spotted until they move on their own turn. Finally, cover and guard fire during the enemy's turn ensures that it really matters where characters end up after moving. Ending up in a bad position or failing a crucial shot are not the end of the world though. Same units can be commanded multiple times. The catch? Every time you do so, they only get half of the movement they got on their last activation. On second activation most units can still move reasonably far, but after that the activations mostly get you more shots at the enemy. Sometimes it is worth it, when a character is in good position.
I do have somewhat mixed feelings about this reactivation system. It is definitely necessary and even gives the game more tactical depth and allows certain lenghts of heroism. Then again. sometimes it means half your squad won't be doing much of anything while the other half gets the job done. You'll understand soon enough when I get to the core of the problem. The system itself is not in fact at fault. Unused command points are spared, so it's possible to spare momentum for a future turn if things are getting quiet. Fear not, that is rarely the case. Position in general matters in this game. Enemies are easier to defeat from behind (they can't evade) and tanks have exposed reactors at their rear. Getting behind tanks, now that's another story. Finally there's boss fights, which yet again turn the tables and require some serious teamwork. When cover is not available, how about using your tanks as moving cover?
Units in the game come in five classes of infantry. Scouts are your basic tools. They run farthest, do decent damage up to medium range with their rifles and their elite ability (rifle grenades) makes them even somewhat overpowered. Shock troopers are armed with sub-machine guns. They have heavier armor and are at their deadliest at close range. Unfortunately for them, they are not as swift, getting only about half of scouts' movement range. I found them to be a bit useless because of this, as scouts were often quite capable of neutralizing enemy infantry. Lancers on the other hand are an important unit even though they are slow. They carry anti-tank lances which makes them really, really important. Your only other anti-tank weapon are your own tanks, but activating them is costly and they have an even harder time getting around enemy tanks.
Support units include engineers and snipers. The former are all-important to keep forces going. Engineers can repair tanks, disable mines and reload ammunition. They are not very impressive in combat though. Basically they fight like scouts but with less speed, less accuracy and less endurance. Snipers are excellent for taking out enemies before they get close. Then again, they are really slow and weak. A well-positioned sniper is a beast but sometimes getting them into position is too hard to be worth it. The command point system, especially the re-activation part, makes even one sniper quite useful. Until they run out of ammunition and need to get reloads. If units are knocked out during battle, more can be summoned from conquered bases (which are usually also objectives). Units can also be withdrawn, so a bad squad composition only causes the loss of some command points.
Losses in general are not very serious in this game. Units become wounded and can be rescued if another comrade gets to them before the enemy does. Even when units die it's not a disaster. The reason for this? Units are leveled up by class, not as individuals. So losing a level 10 scout means pretty much nothing (unless you happened to really like that character I guess), because another level 10 scout will be available for recruitment. They only have some small traits for individuality. These typically give small bonuses are penalties, are context-dependent (or just random) and usually the best they do is save a command icon now and then. Another way to make units a little bit different is to give them different weapons. New weapons can be reserched with money at the lab. Once developed, there will be infinite copies. Some more unique weapons can only be gotten as rewards and there are no copies.
So losses don't matter as much as they do in, say, Fire Emblem. This would be quite okay if the game's reward system wasn't so stupidly simple. The problem: missions are rated based on completion speed only. I have ranted about this problem in an article, so I'll be relatively brief here. Basically, this makes optimal tactics plain silly (go look them up from gamefaqs). I see this as a problem because careless play is not really punished. The game is themed as a story of comradeship. Teamwork is often emphasized in the fluff. Then it turns out it doesn't matter one bit how many soldiers get knocked down, as long as the objectives are reached as fast as possible. This almost breaks the game. Fortunately the game is hard enough to demand actual tactics from players. Still, I hope they do something about this in the sequels. Like, make the rankings two-dimensional with casualties as another axis.
The only other complaint I have with this game is the uselessness of shock troopers. More precisely, scouts are a bit over-powered. While it is true that shock troopers dish out more damage, getting them to dish out that damage too often requires more command points. Scouts simply have much better overall range. I think the other classes are well-balanced, so maybe the solution would be to buff those shock troopers a bit. Oh and another quite useless thing would be special orders, which I hardly used. They seemed like waste of good command points which could have been used for activating scouts, tanks or lancers.
That all said, there is no doubt that Valkyria Chronicles is a really good tactical RPG. One of the best really. The system is brilliant and mission design is excellent. The game puts up a good fight and keeps up its difficulty level well, challenging the player all the way through the game. Sure, this is often achieved via overwhelming odds rather than sharp AI, but this is what we've gotten used to in other tactical RPGs. While I criticized the leveling up system, it does mean that the game doesn't become as much of an EXP-fest as some other titles (Disgaea, I'm looking at you). I don't know yet what they've done with the system in the sequel, but I'm looking forward to it. If the sequel retains the same level of awesomeness, I'm expecting a good lot of hours well spent.