Board 8 > Okay, let's talk about Valkyria Revolution

(+) Yeah! (+)

This game is getting (rightly) trounced by reviewers. Having read quite a few of them, I went ahead and bought it anyway, because I am an idiot consumer. That being said, I'm not quite sure it's as bad as people are saying it is, based on my first impressions.

The music, for one, is pretty great - as expected from Yasunori Mitsuda. The copy that I bought came with a soundtrack, and the songs seem to have characteristics of both Mitsuda's earlier work and the original Valkyria Chronicles. There's lots of drums, soaring horns, etc. There's also Mitsuda's knack for mysterious melodies too.

The gameplay feels different from VC in all really bad ways, but if you take it on its own and forget that it should be a strategy/3PS hybrid, it becomes simply a middling action rpg. I've only played a couple battles, but as long as the difficulty increases at some point, I could see this working. All the characters play the same though, so that seems to be a problem.

The graphics are crap and that's all there is to say, really. Really stiff animations/lack thereof, unnatural posing (and not in a stylish/JoJo way), and poorly directed cutscenes. I'll blame this on it being multiplatform.

Speaking of, a lot of people have complained about the cutscene length. This is valid: imagine VC without the book and 8 cutscenes between battles instead of 4 or 5. One cutscene fades into another one, and the player has no idea when he or she will be able to save, access a menu, etc. Maybe the book shows up eventually, but I don't understand why it wasn't here from the beginning. This seems like something that would be easy to patch in, as well as easing the loading times.

So far, the story isn't as bad as many of the reviews made it out to be. It's nothing unique but it has at least some tension in it. I've played far worse is what I'm trying to say.

My first inclination is to give Valkyria Revolution a 6.5/10. And even though it's bad, it seems worth a play for the music alone if you're a fan of the franchise.

@ninkendo
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damn shame, Valkyria Chronicles is 1 of 8 games post Casual Revolution of 2007 in my top 100
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so that's it? no one got this?

I got to the part where they're going back to the book more often. this game is no longer a disaster. It's just a kinda bad game.

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those bizarre games where everyone else's idea of what makes the game good is opposite mine. It gives the feel of a SRPG but a lot of the "RPG" parts aren't fleshed out and there's no real "Strategy" as much as a fairly stirct path to follow in 60% of the battles.

The second was much better organized, but it suffered from being on PSP and a considerably bad plot. Even still, I would say it was much better than the first.

If everyone is hating on the new one, maybe it's worth checking out
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colliding posted...

so that's it? no one got this?

I got to the part where they're going back to the book more often. this game is no longer a disaster. It's just a kinda bad game.

Heroic Bigpun posted...

@ninkendo

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