It’s clear right from the outset that Valkyria Chronicles shares a most important trait with the best games in Sega’s legendary catalog: it’s absolutely fearless. It takes its strange concepts—its hybrid third-person action/turn-based strategy gameplay, its unusual pencil sketch artwork, its World War II-inspired mythos—and explores them confidently. It immediately brings to mind the Sega that once upon a time made games about near-future rollerblading graffiti gangs and RPGs where you sailed the clear blue skies.
Valkyria Chronicles does a lot of very smart things, but the smartest move here was combining the turn-based strategy of something like Advance Wars with third-person action-based unit control. As soon as you select a unit, you’re on the field with them, controlling where they move, dodging suppressing fire, giving orders. This alone rips away layers of abstraction that normally dog the genre, and as a result, characters feel less like chess pieces and more like, well, characters. The battlefield is made a real place to be understood, and even the war itself feels more terrifying and real.
And Valkyria Chronicles, despite its charming pastels and pencil lines, is not afraid to make the war terrifying. It proves this in its earliest cutscenes, when it shows you acts of horror that will leave you wondering exactly what sort of game you’re playing. It’s also not afraid to be completely and ridiculously hard. The threat of permadeath hangs over every unit, and as for the battles themselves, let me give you one example. In one particularly lethal mission, you are left to find the weak points of a seemingly invincible enemy contraption. As soon as you find them, reinforcements come in to stop your assault—and the reinforcements are actually invincible. Surviving the remainder of this battle (and I didn’t survive, not the first three times) requires the sort of lateral strategic thinking that is guaranteed to leave you feeling smug for the rest of the day.
The game does suffer from some of the traditional problems—voice acting can get extremely dodgy, and some of the less important plot points either didn’t localize well or were never good to begin with (check out the beach vacation vignette if you want to see the worst offender in both categories). But it’s also the sort of game where you procrastinate on writing the review just to spend more time playing it. Halfway in, I can’t stop thinking about flanking maneuvers and tactical retreats. Sega might be a shadow of its former self, but as long as, every so often, the company puts out a game like Valkyria Chronicles, we can forgive its many transgressions. Of course, assuming it holds up until the ending.
Stay tuned for part two, in which we take a personal look at the end of the war. Also, the importance of skirmishes.
Previous Reviews:
Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3