Valkyria Chronicles

So as promised, a brief little synopsis of my feelings about Valkyria Chronicles. So in case you are unfamiliar, it is a turn based strategy game with some real time elements that takes place during a fictitious WWII. The actual game play is great. I love being able to take my time by taking turns and how I want to spend my command points when it comes down to my turn. This is one thing I found I dislike with more recent RTS games in that I can't take my time doing stuff since there is so much to do, I always have to be doing something. I also love the real time elements in getting to control a character with cross fire actually happening. It is truly a great mix of action and strategy. The game is fairly difficult in places, but some of this is that you don't know what is coming at you. If I were to play again, I know I wouldn't have as hard a time. The game is sort of nerve racking though. I always felt the pressure of war since if I made a big mistake I felt I could lose a lot of my troops. I wish the AI would have been a little better in some places. Once you got the hang of it, it became easy to trap soldiers or make their moves worthless. Some of the Boss fights seemed like they had better AI and it would have been cool if that was always present. Most of the mission difficulty always stemmed from being outnumbered instead of being out thought. It also would have been nice if the grade you received on missions was based on more than the speed at which you performed the task. It would have been nice to get a bonus for going beyond the mission like eliminating troops.

I thought the story of the game was mediocre at best. It was a typical love story inside of a war story. There wasn't anything really exciting or new about it, but it wasn't bad either. Just totally average. The story was presented in a book format, which I had mixed feelings toward. I liked it at first because it was a cool concept and I liked the go at your own pace mentality, but some of the scenes became tedious since I had to initiate each new scene even if the last one was very short. It would have been nice to some how string scenes together better. The presentation in an anime format was superfluous. I appreciated it, but I imagine it might have sold better without it. The graphic themselves were really good. They were simplistic at times, but they got the job done and looked good. The pencil filter they had was cool for going with their book motif. Since the game was optimized for 720p and I had it in 1080p, I got plenty of jaggies but that didn't really bother me at all. The voice acting for the game was extremely good. I can't imagine Sega made their money back since there were some good talent in there. They also used a bunch of people for all of the different recruits you get in your squad. On top of being very authentic, it made the game seem real. This also made me not want to bring much harm to any of my characters since they each had a personality. The music wasn't anything great, but it wasn't grating so I guess that's good.

The game does have a New Game+ option to go back with more difficulty, but I'll pass for now. The game also had 3 DLC packs. One was just an advanced difficulty for new game+, which I won't take immediate use of. The one was another mission focusing on some of the recruits. This was a fun little mission and took some getting used to the troop layout. The last was a couple missions where you are the enemy. This was the most fun, but ultimately since each character didn't have a personality, I felt like I didn't care about them too much which kinda detracted from the game. Overall, these missions were fun and a good challenge, but I feel like since my party was weakened and taken back to an earlier level, it left me feeling weak and powerless. I didn't master the missions, but still got the feel for them. Still good fun though. There was talk of a sequel, especially for Japan. If it would come stateside despite the initial poor sales, I would grab it up in a heart beat. A great strategy RPG experience.