Player’s Club: Valkyria Chronicles review
January 23, 2009 at 6:38 pm by Garrett Martin in A&E
Valkyria Chronicles
Rated T for Teen
Released on Nov. 4, 2008
PlayStation 3
Deveoped and published by Sega
You know what would’ve made World War II better? Miniskirts! Or so says Valkyria Chronicles, Sega’s excellent new tactical role-playing game. It’s not officially about World War II, but the parallels are blatant, with a fascist power marching across a continent called Europa while imprisoning a dark-haired ethnic minority. The big picture is similar, but the details are all wrong, like a history class essay by a 15-year-old who spent the entire semester doodling record covers.
Players command the overwhelmed militia of Gallia, a small country that’s basically Switzerland. The militia is a diverse, mixed-gender bunch. It includes dozens of playable characters who fall into one of five distinct military classes, each with its own special skills, combat styles and level-based power-ups. Like any good role-playing game, characters earn experience and money that can be used to power-up offensive and defensive stats and develop new weapons. Players recruit a squad of soldiers from each class and deploy up to nine at a time in a number of major set-piece battles, all spread out over a series of 18 chapters. These confrontations eschew the isometric turn-based battles of genre classics such as Military Madness and Final Fantasy Tactics, opting instead for a brilliant hybrid of top-down and third-person perspectives. Players select the unit they wish to command from a bird’s eye battlefield map and then take direct control of them in a 3-D third-person environment. It makes the combat more immediate and engrossing, and less like a high-tech version of Risk. It combines the cerebral pleasure and power-rush of military strategy with visceral action-game thrills into an addictive and unique gameplay system.
Each battle is book-ended by a myriad of anime-style cut-scenes full of personal and political intrigue. Non-playable narrative bits like these can easily undermine a game through bad writing or voice-acting, but Valkyria Chronicles’ cut-scenes are surprisingly well-made. Beyond the beautiful graphics, which look like a water-color painting, Valkyria Chronicles boasts a relatively sophisticated story that doesn’t gloss over the less savory aspects of war. Characters die, but they also live more believably than often found in video games. Their relationships on and off the battlefield aren’t as simplistic or cartoonish as many localized Japanese role-playing games, which so often suffer from indifferent or disrespectful translation. The game doesn’t entirely escape clichés or stereotypes (including a shameless gay caricature that’s mind-boggling in its political incorrectness), but the story is subtler and more thoughtful than expected from something in this genre.
Despite the female soldiers’ cute uniforms and a ridiculous number of battleground upskirt shots, Valkyria Chronicles is about as sexy as a Geocities website. Tactical role-playing games have always been a small niche in this country, and Valkyria’s PlayStation 3 exclusivity limits its potential audience dramatically. A game like this would never make waves in America like a GTA or Call of Duty. That’s a shame, because the massively enjoyable and satisfying Valkyria Chronicles is one of 2008’s best games. Blogger Brilliam once chastised game critics for not disclosing games they didn’t consider for best-of-the-year recaps due to ignorance or lack of personal experience. If I had played Valkyria Chronicles in 2008, it definitely would’ve made my list.
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Hey thanks for the shout! I am massively jealous that you’ve gotten a chance to play that game… maybe one day I’ll get a PS3.