PlayExclusive: Valkyria Chronicles

It's safe to say, that Sega has made a winner out of this hybrid 3rd person shooter/strategy game.. where soldiers still wear plate armor on their arms, rocket launchers are shaped like lances, and where tanks are still designed perfectly fine the way they are in this world.

Graphics
What can I say, I'm a sucker for cell shading, and the "CANVAS" shading engine on this game is especiallyshiny. Everything is a cellshaded figure or just a drawn texture, but the pencil shading filter and paper vignette they place over everything just blends all the elements together perfectly to look like it was all illustrated in the very history novel the player is supposedly reading.Explosions, expressions, and even teammate death scenes look amazing and well animated, it gets nothing but a full 10/10 from me.

Story
The game is all accessed through a menu system shaped like a history textbook, in which is the history of an alternate Europe where a certain ambitious empire has decided to take rule over world, and makes their last mistake tangling with a small country with city names inspired by certain Nordic legends.

Thankfully the usual JRPG copy pasta elements, like insane anime hair and drawn out stories, are thankfully nowhere to be seen. Just a colorful handful (roughly 50) of 12-35 year olds that join the military to defend their home, each with his/ her own personalities, quirks, abilities, and a one page history that grows as your team learns more about em'.

The story progresses through small episodic videos, no more than a few minutes in length, with decent (I've heard worse) full voice acting. And by "Full voice acting" I really mean full voice acting. Minor story scenes get voice acting, your less important grunts in your team get individual voices, even the old vet in the cemetery visiting his comrades gets voice acting and story too. Seriously.

Gameplay
With 50 characters, 20 in a full battle platoon, and 5 classes, customization is no issue with game, unless you count whether you should bring more Troopers or Scouts as an issue.

The faces of Squad 7. Yes, the first face in Lancer Team is a man with makeup.

The 5 classes are quite even, and yet need support each other in different ways, forcing a careful balance of what you want to throw on the field, like keeping a scout to survey far ahead, a stormtrooper to mow through nearby enemy defenses, or a Lancer to keep pesky tanks and mortars off your smaller grunts.

Battle starts with a birds-eye map to place your units in set areas, then later to select what unit you would like to move. From there, again, the similarities end, as you take full control of your unit, running about in 3rd person view unlike most strategy RPG's.

A set number of points decide how many units you can move per turn, forcing careful planning, but it shouldn't cause too much stress to casual gamers.

After battle, EXP and cash are earned to upgrade your equipment and units.

Everything is all done as a team, so no annoying individual levels, like one lvl 20 character and a pile of useless weaklings around her. You train as a team, and upgrade as a team, one set level per class type, upgradeable with EXP. Simple and clean, just like that.

Customization on your equipment is all done through a development tree, starting with upgrading one weapon, till it hits different models, varying from attack power, accuracy, and other such stats.


The platoons tank, as one of the main story devices isn't just ignored either, as it receives upgrades through a block placement system, with newer upgrade blocks purchasable through the same development tree system as your weapons.

Overall

It's a solid game that combines tried and true strategy RPG elements with an exciting battle system, and there isn't anything I would change. Sega did this game right, and if they made another 2 sequels, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.


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Copyright 2009 Johar Aston, TheLAG.