Games like 'Valkyria Chronicles' aren't too common but that doesn't meant that when one shows up, it's any good.
'Valkyria Chronicles' is a game about the second world war. This is a fictional retelling with some names changed to protect the innocent but the disguise is paper thin. The story goes thus: The second Europan war has broken out between two factions, the Atlantic Federation in the west and the Imperial Alliance in the west. Gallia sits like a keystone between the nations of these two factions, a small and resource rich country that wants to remain neutral. The Imperial Alliance, being the big evil empire, decides it doesn't accept the neutrality and decides to invade Gallia. Your job, as commander of a platoon of soldiers defending the home front, is to kick the empire back out of Gallia.
The characters are fairly standard in a Japanese game. The pretty boy protagonist, the spunky girl with magical powers who you know is going to fall in love with out pretty boy lead, the aged villain with facial hair and the older and wiser veteran without facial hair who helps you along the way. Your squad is customised by selecting an assortment of extra, less important soldiers with their own unique stats, quirks, personalities and friends lists. The idea is that you select a bunch of people who get on really well with each other and they do better but there's no penalty for putting people together unless they specifically hate each other so I just ended up picking the ones with the highest HP or the biggest rack and everything was just peachy.
That said the customisation is quite expansive. Beyond picking who is in your squad, you then get to choose how to equip them, whether you want them to have more powerful or more accurate weapons or a mixture of both. You control which soldier type gets beefed up faster or whether you want to keep them all about the same level. You also get to customise your tanks with an upgrade grid. If you can stomach the micromanagement, then there's a lot of options to explore to expand on your own personal combat strategy and isn't that the point?
Once you've finished customising, you have the joy of moving through one of the most annoying menu systems I've ever encountered. It wouldn't so bad if the game wasn't slowed to a crawl by loading times but that's not the case. There's two main menus and every option has a submenu and most of those have a submenu too. Most choices will ask you to confirm them, as if it wasn't hard enough to get through all the options. Eventually, if you navigate it, you'll get to the level selection screen. This is divided up like chapters in a book and each chapter is a page or two of cut scenes and battles. For some reason, though, it doesn't just play the whole cut scene then go to the battle. You have to select cinematics individually and every time one starts or finishes, there's another loading screen. That means if the characters talk in three different locations before the battle begins, that's four selections in the book and eight loading screens. Does the plot really need to be divided up like that? Couldn't it just play all of them without double checking that I do in fact want to continue playing the game? Menus don't get much worse than this.
If you eventually do get to combat you'll find yourself looking at a map of the battlefield with pins representing yours and enemy units. Select one of these units and it goes into third person view of that character and you take a turn moving them and shooting at whatever enemy gets in the way. Unusual for this kind of game, however is that the enemy can shoot you on your turn if you get in range. Then, once you've shot at them, they'll return fire if they're still alive. This makes the game a little more challenging and you soon start to see that challenge is the key principle in the design of 'Valkyria Chronicles'.
As you'd expect the enemy units get stronger as you advance in the game but, impressively, the AI seems to get better as well. All of this at a faster rate that you can manage, which keeps you on your toes the whole time. The trouble only really starts in the very late levels of the game when the designers seem to have forgotten that a challenge is only fun when you're not cheating.
The headaches for me began when, in one level, my objective was to destroy two tanks. These tanks not only acted as normal tanks but also fired mortars every turn and seemed to keep them focused on my camp which meant any reinforcements I called would be burnt to a crisp the moment they arrived. This wouldn't be a problem except that the computer is able to call in an infinite number of reinforcements at no cost, arriving automatically at the start of each turn to replace any and all that you killed. This flies in the face of what has already been established – to call reinforcements it costs one of your "command points" and must be done from a camp. I can't stand it when games set down the rules and then start breaking them. Giving the AI an unfair advantage doesn't equal a good challenge.
The final headache came two missions before the end of the game in which my handful of units must lead an indestructible moving fortress down a path of mines by blocking off the road it was originally going to take. Half the vital information isn't received until the fortress is halfway on top of you and after you're told how to get the fortress on the right path, you still have to run that gauntlet yourself and the gauntlet is made of landmines.
That's where I quit. The designers clearly ran out of ideas and started beating themselves over the head with a hammer to come up with new ways to make the game challenging. I'd put my troops through about five "heart pumping" and "intense" "suicide missions" for one war and if I was a soldier in that army, I'd have resigned because the people in charge clearly don't know what they're doing. You can't bait someone into a trap by running into it yourself and setting it off or disarming it.
I'm not a fan of strategy games. I never have been. 'Valkyria Chronicles' isn't all bad and it's certainly the kind of strategy game I can get into. Gameplay is generally fun and everything looks very nice in its own way. But the writing doesn't offer anything new and the final stages in the game push the limits on how much frustration I can take. It's one thing for a game to be hard and succeeding at a hard game feels satisfying. But this game isn't difficult, it's just another ideas-short cop-out and if you can take that then good for you.
While games like 'Valkyria Chronicles' aren't too common, it's not pushing any limits of taking video games in new directions. I'm reminded a lot of 'Hogs of War' on PS1. I've always held it so that a few exceptional parts of a game can make up for numerous flaws. Well the opposite is also true. 'Valkyria Chronicles' isn't a bad game, but where it fails it fails hard and that lets down what is otherwise an enjoyable experience. For me, playing the game turned into an aggravating chore to get through and that's reason enough for me to put it away and move onto to something bigger and better.
Something with zombies.