Valkyria Chronicles

By Brendan Rose

Remember SEGA? Back in the nineties the Sega master system was still a serious competitor to the Super Nintendo. They made Sonic, and they were cool, but by the time the Dreamcast was released they were already financial toast, and now they make games for other systems, games like Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3.

Valkyria Chronicles is a bit reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea, except with no grid, bigger levels, and an emphasis on guns and tanks with elements of a third person shooter thrown in for good measure. It starts with an overview map in the Player Phase where you have a limited amount of CP to select units to move. You can select the same unit more than once per turn, but they're able to move less each time. The movement phase is a bit like a third person shooter. You run around until the movement bar is finished, and you can attack once per turn. Enemies automatically attack as you appear within range. When you are out of CP, or finished the round, you end the phase. Then the Enemy Phase starts, they move their units and attack, your characters fire at targets within range, and then the process repeats until somebody wins.

The goals are stuff like:

"Victory"
The enemy base camp is captured.

"Failure"
Welkin dies

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that tries to make you gay. For instance clearly the enemy is your heterosexuality, and Welkin is their own salivating sense of arousal. The cell shading however makes up for this with lots of lively pastel colors.

The game is awesome; it's actually one of the best games I've played this year. It's very tactical and you have to work strategically as a team to win. One of the important factors is hiding behind cover, you take a lot less damage from behind cover, and in turn sandbags and cover can be destroyed by tanks and explosives. You're also able to issue orders (like attack boost). You can fight skirmish battles to gain experience and you level up by class. So if you spend all your experience to bring up Shock Troopers to level 6, all your Shock Troopers will level up. There are also Scouts, Lancers, Engineers and Snipers.

The “plot” is simple. The Empire was at war with a united group of democratic states, and the minor state of Galia had remained neutral in the conflict, but was later invaded by the Empire. You take control of a local militia, and kill an endless slew of nameless, faceless soldiers. Your militia soldiers all look different and have their own personalities. They have individual if somewhat repetitive animations, voices, special abilities and afflictions, and if they die in combat and don't get to a medic, that's it. There are about 50 of them to choose from.

Welkin meets Alicia when he is drawing fish by a stream. Alicia points a gun at his back and tries to arrest him, and eventually they join together to fight the Empire. The story is good, and there's a lot of it, but it is a little bit happy flying pigs and kitty butterflies. Every time it loads there's a picture of two pretty flowers. Still, that is tempered by some rather good action, and the graphics are great. The plot is told by selecting frames on the pages of a book, and is partly in fmv and partly in animated frames. It gets a little tired playing the same skirmish missions over and over for experience, but it is a rich and rewarding game, and a lot of fun. There are at least 20 hours of gameplay, and 9 skirmish missions to unlock. If you try Valkyria Chronicles out you'll find one of the better RPG’s on PlayStation 3, and nobody wants to see SEGA begging for change at the side of the street in ten years. So, if you need a good game, try Valkyria Chronicles.