Valkyria Chronicles is a surprisingly good game to me.
User Rating: 9 | Senjou no Valkyria PS3
Valkyria Chronicles is a RPG for the PS3. One of the only "good" RPG's that are currently on the PS3 today. This game takes three basic RPG elements and blends them into one amazing and fun battle system. It combines: turn-based, strategy, and first person shooter into a sort of tactical/action RPG battle system. I had fun with this battle system; it's pretty difficult at first because of the several functions that can be used, but once you understand the battle system it actually becomes pretty easy to use. My favorite part of the battle system is when you move in to shoot an enemy, and when you get close you can aim for the head or the stomach and pump them full of bullets for max. damage. there is a flaw with the gameplay though. The flaw with the gameplay is that sometimes it's very difficult to get a clean shot on the enemy. Most of the time, there are objects, houses etc. in the way of the character preventing him/her to get a good shot and thus forcing you to use another CP (Command Point, the points you use in your turn to move your characters). Sometimes the accuracy of the weapons can be very low, which can frustrate you. The graphics in this game are very well done. The visuals are awesome! The enviornments will definetely capture your imagination. the characters in this game are definetely on the best character sets in an RPG ever. The characters are very likeable and they have very good personalities. There is lots of humor in this game, ehich some of the moments will make you laugh, while other moments will just bore you. The music in ths game is excellent. I liked a lot of the music in the game. The music is fun to listen to initially, but after about a few hours, the music sadly gets boring. In my mind, the biggest flaw with this game is the difficulty level. The first three missions of this game are very good and have a balance in terms of difficulty. However once the Ch.4 mission starts, the game all of a sudden gets very difficult. From Ch.4 onwards, it only seems that there is only one certain strategy to clear the mission. I wish that the creators of the game would not have done this because I think there should be several strategies to clearing the missions, not just one certain strategy. It's very difficult trying the certain strategy because most of the characters your characters get killed or you have to sacrifice a character to try to reach the goal. You have only three turns to rescue a fallen character. After three turns are up, the character is gone forever. This is definetely extremely frustrating because this will force you to restart the mission constantly. I feel as though the missions should be less difficult and more straightforward. There are special missions called "Skirmishes." You can do these Skirmishes to gain a little EXP and Money for your characters. However, to get to good level, you have to repeat these skirmishes over and over again, which gets very boring. There is also the EXP and Money system. You earn a certain amount of EXP and Money after each mission. There are a certain number of turns you can earn a max bonus, which means max EXP and Money. However this is very difficult to achieve because most of the time you only have so little time to achieve the max bonus goal. The steep difficulty and the enviornments mostly affect your startegies. Overall this is an excellent PS3 game, give this game a try I am sure you will have fun with it. Buy it if you like.
