Valkyria Chronicles opened to protagonist Welkin sat cross-legged at a riverbank, sketching fish swimming upstream by clear, sun-dappled waters.
Idyllic string swells underscored this peaceable second of reflection, and, though it was short-lived, it set a tone for your complete game. A reminiscence of home calm to distinction the hours of bloodshed that adopted, placing weight behind each spent shell casing, each historic city lowered to rubble, and each misplaced comrade.
Taking place in the identical universe, with the central conflicts already established, Valkyria Chronicles four takes a livelier strategy. After a quick second of bromance between earnest commander Claude and hot-headed Raz, you’re thrown straight into battle. An keen Squad E emerge, rifles-ready, from under a waist-high area of pink and yellow flowers. Enemy artillery shells fall, battle plans are rapidly shouted, and the game’s first conflict with the Imperial forces begins.
This breathless opening is becoming, since Valkyria four takes all of the spectacle, supernatural weirdness, and anime silliness, and turns it as much as eleven. It’s nonetheless acquired all the center you’d count on from a Valkyria game, it’s only a lot much less refined and a bit much less skilful at expressing it. Less a watercolour sketch of a bittersweet reminiscence, extra an excited pet bounding as much as your chest and slobbering emotion throughout your cheeks. At the tip of the day, although, it’s extra Valkyria Chronicles, and even a barely flabby plot crammed with overwrought character moments and some dud missions don’t diminish what made the sequence nice to start with.
If you’re new to the franchise that many have dubbed ‘anime XCOM’ — or simply must dampen the reminiscence cobwebs collected within the ten precise bloody years since we final noticed a house console entry — Valkyria Chronicles four is a method JRPG that mixes tactical fight with real-time motion throughout the handfuls of battles that make up its 40 hour marketing campaign. At the beginning of every mission, you deploy models from a pool of 5 sorts, plus a tank or two, then take it in turns with the enemy to concern orders to those models utilizing a useful resource known as command factors.
A mechanic known as ‘interception fire’ implies that models can nonetheless take injury on their flip in the event that they transfer in vary of a hostile unit. Mission targets fluctuate, however they typically contain capturing an enemy base camp whereas defending your personal. Broadly, then, Valkyria Chronicles is about prioritising threats, studying which models are handiest in sure conditions, and creating openings to securely push ahead by enemy traces whereas conserving your personal camps effectively defended.
The real-time components that outline the sequence appear virtually superfluous at first. All pictures are aimed manually, however other than being a contact fiddly, there’s no actual stress concerned, because the motion pauses when you line up the crosshairs. The guide motion, too, looks like an odd match for a techniques game, permitting for much less precision, extra guesswork, and extra potential errors than simply ordering your models to their desired positions.
Not solely does Valkyria Chronicles four make these techniques work, although, however they find yourself lending fight a splendidly weighty sense of immediacy. Moments like charging your favorite Shocktrooper by all hell as bullet casings litter the tank-tread torn mud round them, just for them to slip behind a pile of sandbags moments earlier than mortar hearth falls, imply you’ll come to really feel for every particular person beneath your command. There are not any generic models right here; every of the handfuls of troops you’ll be able to select from has their very own identify, backstory, and persona quirks that come to outline their position in fight. When one in all them falls in battle, and falls sufferer to the game’s unforgiving permadeath system, you’ll come to mourn that loss, every defining your private journey by the game’s in any other case linear marketing campaign.
Fans of the primary game will realise fairly rapidly that not so much has modified in ten years. Visuals are a bit sharper, fight is a little more refined, however in any other case, that is the very same Valkyria Chronicles you bear in mind. The game’s single new unit — a mortar wielding grenadier that may hearth artillery from above over lengthy distances — provides an additional layer to fight, however doesn’t change issues up all that a lot. As good because it to return, the entire game can really feel like an apology for the poorly acquired Valkyria Revolution at occasions, a risk-free reiteration that continues proper the place the unique left off.
One welcome new addition are Squad Stories — non-compulsory missions that supply perception into the supporting solid, in addition to granting highly effective new skills to particular person troops. These typically finish with the characters studying some form of invaluable lesson about not being dicks to one another, normally alongside the traces of: “Maybe the real ludicrously oversized tank was the friends we made along the way”. These moments break up the tempo of the primary story effectively. Alongside non-compulsory replayable skirmishes, Squad Stories can simply push the game’s size previous the sixty hour mark.
This prolonged size isn’t at all times a constructive although – if something, the primary story itself may have fortunately delegated about ten hours or so to additional non-compulsory content material. The considerably rushed introduction is remedied a bit afterward with backstory, however lengthy stretches happen with out a lot context for the handfuls of characters you’re rapidly anticipated to care about. Character tensions floor, boil over, then resolve rapidly with no actual room to develop.
At the identical time, there’s large chunks that don’t appear to advance the plot or characters a lot in any respect, or else appear torn by way of tone. Characters spout mournful soliloquies in regards to the nature of struggle, then appear to do not forget that they’re chirpy anime archetypes. The game will deal with a minor demise with overwrought melodrama, then joke about squadmates simply killed with pleasant hearth. You’ll watch buddies homicide a whole platoon someday, then go red-faced with embarrassment when a service provider errors them for a romantic couple. This balancing act between the whimsical and the tragic is one thing the unique acquired proper, nevertheless it doesn’t at all times work right here as meant.
Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you need, however regardless of all this, it didn’t take lengthy for the characters to carve their method into my chilly, cynical coronary heart with tiny anime bayonets product of FEELINGS . The game goes out of its strategy to current the story of struggle as only a backdrop to the tales of the people that battle it, remaining essentially human behind all of the goofiness. As the tip credit roll, you’ll be proven the names of your squadmates, letting who survived, and who sacrificed themselves in battle. As uncertain as I nonetheless was about twenty hours in, I nonetheless discovered myself so invested by the tip that I gave a silly little salute to the display screen because the names of fallen comrades scrolled previous.
If you’re new to the sequence, I’d nonetheless completely advocate beginning with the unique. For followers, although, it’s extra Valkyria Chronicles, and that’s cause sufficient to pop a large pink exclamation mark above your head with pleasure.
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