the Tommy|Zor era

Valkyria Chronicles
Developed and published by Sega
PlayStation 3
Difficulty: Masochistic
1 Player

As we get older, our emotional core is lessened. What used to make me bawl as a teenager (girlfriends, running out of gummy bears, porn tape ripping off the spool) now just makes me slightly agitated. What’s worse than that is that things that used to please us no longer do, or do so to a much lesser extent. I will never, ever be able to experience the joy that is Chrono Trigger for the first time again, even if I lost my memory. I was 8 years old when I first played Mario Bros. 3 and I nearly shit myself coming to terms with how awesome it was, and now I can’t feel that. I can never have my second Big Mac as a kid and like it that much. At this age we’re just not capable of such jubilation.

The odd time, something so extraordinary happens that it reminds us about being happy. It’s rare, but it happens. Being in love with someone new brings that out, but after your 14th pair of tits you realize it may not end well, rendering your new-found joy short-lived. I’m now going to tell you about something so extraordinary that I’m happy just writing about it. I’ve found something that is so amazing, so utterly unexpected:

A good game with the name “Sega” on it.

Sega has made precisely 8 good games. 8 fantastic games – in their entire history. The last good one was Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox in late 2002, and it is the second-best rail-shooter of all time (Star Fox 1 gets the nod). Their mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, hasn’t been in a good game since 1994, and that’s sad. To me, Sega as a brand, is dead. It’s like the passing of a good friend who had some seriously good things about them, but still abused you until the day he died.

What if you found the cure for cancer and couldn’t share it with anyone? What if no one took you seriously and didn’t bother to try it? What if every family member and friend had cancer and still didn’t listen to you, and you had the cure right in your hand, one dose per person? How would that make you feel? Ladies and gentlemen, that’s how I feel today, holding this copy of Valkyria Chronicles in my hand. It is everything that is right with video games and no one’s ever going to give it a chance. You are all terrible people, and in a sense, you will all be punished for your sins eventually. You will not buy Valkyria Chronicles, and you should be ashamed to call yourself a gamer.

Medieval armor + guns. What can’t the Japanese improve?

Valkyria Chronicles is a strange hybrid of Japanese RPG (and fuck is it ever Japanese), turn-based strategy game, a third-person shooter mixed with chess and rock-scissors-paper set in a semi-fictional world in the 1930s. Never before have such things been combined, and it’s impossible to imagine them working together any better than this. Unlike some games that are greater than the sum of their parts, every part of Valkyria Chronicles is greater than all parts of all sums of all math. It flat out rocks, and it engages every part of your brain that’s been dormant for so long; ever since you’ve been playing those murder simulators and ‘music’ games. The action bits are quick, the turn-based bits take turns, the strategy parts require just that, and the presentation is like a beauty queen who happens to be dating you.

Just to be clear, I don’t like strategy games, at all. I hated Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, and that game was great. It was so hard, so unforgiving. Half the time you were watching your characters get killed and you couldn’t move an inch to save them. It was bullshit. In Valkyria Chronicles, you move in real time as you see fit. If you want to move exactly 3 pixels to the left to avoid getting shot, you can do that. It makes you feel like you’ve been released from the prison of bad, annoying game design. It gives you nearly limitless control of your characters, without being open-ended and boring, like a computer game could be.

One of the game’s many cutscenes

I could tell you all about the great graphics and lovely music, but none of that really matters. The game is presented in this wonderful water-colour painting style, complete with brush and hashmarks in high-definition glory. If the story of the game takes place in a book, then the levels and scenes are pictures and pages in the book. It’s never been done before, and it suits the game perfectly. If you hate all things anime and cell-shaded, you’d still find the look of the game impressive despite your opinion of the art style. The music is subtle but charming, and the voice acting is just fine. It’s pretty average, and in no way a detriment to the overall experience.

To sum up how the game actually works, I’ll use a nice list for you. I’m sure you can follow along and try to picture this.

-The story is presented to you in a picture-book format. There are real-time anime-style cutscenes that set up whatever it is that you’re doing. In this case, generally you’re in the middle of a war, and you’re commanding your troops, defending your country, and adventuring.
-A new action level is unlocked based on the story. You now go into a battle and you are ready to command your troops.
-You choose which unit to move somewhere on a large overhead map. They are 6 types of characters – scouts, shocktroopers, snipers, engineers, lancers, and a tank. They are have different abilities. Rock-scissors-paper, you know how it is. You generally choose any combination of them, although a few characters are mandatory. The levels all have a different objective – capture their base, destroy a tank, meet at a rendezvous point, etc. Tons of variety.
-When you choose a character, you move them on the field in real-time like a third-person shooter complete with full aiming. Your unit can move as far as their basic stats allow, and you are allowed one ‘action’ per turn. You can shoot, heal, give commands, repair tanks, throw grenades, etc. You can duck in trenches, behind sand bags, and behind walls to avoid getting hit. No bullshit here – if you’re behind a well, you can’t be killed. Awesome. Once you’re done an action, move onto the next character (or the same character again, with lessened ability and ammo). After you are done moving all your units, it’s the computer’s turn. When it’s not your turn, some of the units return fire automatically. That means you can’t just run up to the enemy and stand there and shoot them in the head. They will fucking kill you. Same goes for the computer, and it’s incredibly satisfying to kill enemies when it’s not even your turn to move. Incredibly satisfying, like winning a $50 lottery when you only spent $8 in tickets.
-After you win, you are awarded money and experience points that you can use to upgrade your troops and weapons. They’re pretty generous with it, so it always feel rewarding. It’s kind of like how in the Burnout games, they just give you awards and cars for every goddamn thing you do.
-You can then change team members, change their weapons, etc etc etc. It’s that JRPG element that’s so addicting, but unlike most JRPGs, this game is so fair with the stats. You upgrade a character type, and they all level up. Thank you. What sucks more than being forced to use characters you don’t like just to have them all eventy developed?
-Back to story mode.
-Another battle takes place.
-Rinse.
-Repeat.

Your operation overview map, and another tale of red vs. blue

I can never properly explain the wonderful level of depth that the game offers you because it would be a disservice to how great it all actually is. Some things that are great in particular are:

-Characters can die permanently. If they get slain in battle, you have 3 turns to go retrieve them with another unit. If you do, they are available for the next round. If you don’t, they die forever. Forever. They also die if an enemy touches them after they’re on the ground (rare.) It adds some sick type of moral pressure on you to save them, even though you don’t have to. You will WANT to save them, though, because it’s the kind of person the game makes you want to be. These characters become your in-game family, and protecting them becomes a personal task that transcends all mission objectives. The game even features an in-game graveyard where you can see all your dead troops, but I simply cannot have a person in there. I can’t do it.You probably will, you sick fuck.
-Every character has these things called ‘potentials’ that determine their behavior on the battle field. Some characters get stats boosts when they’re around their friends (which are listed in their profile), or alone, or on grass, or on sand. Some characters are gay and get stat boosts by being around the same sex, and some hate certain genders or races and react accordingly. It’s so fascinating, because the level of complexity is profound. Every ability seems to have an opposite, too, as some characters get chatty around their ‘friends’ and actually lose stats because they’re distracted. It’s just so damn…interesting.
-Balancing your unit types for a specific mission is so perfectly done. If you’ve made a mistake, you can retreat certain characters and replace them with someone more suitable at the expense of one turn. It makes grim situations feel full of hope, and it makes you feel like a genius for adapting to your enemy’s tactics. You are never punished and never feel cheated when you’ve clearly made some terrible choices.

Someone’s made turn-based gaming exciting again *GASP*

One thing that a lot of people talk about when discussing Valkyria Chronicles is the difficulty level. It is hard. It is absurdly, wildly challenging in the best possible way. The game kicks your ass so hard it literally changes your skeletal structure in a way that is both unpleasant and surprising. However, every single time it happens, it’s entirely your fault. You pay for every single mistake, but you never feel like you’ve received a cheap shot. It’s like Ninja Gaiden for Xbox. “If you block, you can’t get hit.” That didn’t stop anyone from never blocking and getting destroyed every single screen and bitching about it for years. It takes an amazing amount of discipline to say “I know what I’m doing will get me killed, so I will not do that.” Valkyria Chronicles handles that, and you, perfectly. You know when you’re going to do something stupid, but you still will. In fact, the game lets you save any time you want, but you won’t. You will spend 2 hours on a battle and die, and you’ll feel like an idiot because you were too cocky, too proud to save. It’s a litmus test for what kind of human being you really are. I found it fascinating to find out that I might be the stupidest war commander on the face of the planet – 4 times in a row. I spent over 5 hours on a single level simply because I am an idiot. On my final try, it only took me 30 minutes to beat the level and I didn’t lose a single unit because I had advanced as a human being and beat a multi-core, multi-gigahertz processor at its own game. It felt like the training wheels were taken off my brain and I was allowed to bike around freely and laugh at the enemy.

Until the next level put my ass back on a tricycle nailed to the ground, that is.

I can’t remember the last time a game made me play until the wee hours of the night with no consequence to my actions. The clock strikes 4 am and I’m still in a battle and as awake and attentive as a teenager at midnight on YouTube. It’s not that the game is addicting (I don’t believe in the concept of addictions, actually, as everything we do is a decision and as such, we have complete control over it) but I just want to play it. All the time. I can’t stop thinking about it. It brings me joy, and it feels like I’m finally using my brain to its full potential. I even made the mistake once of saving during a nasty battle and then leaving the house. All I could think about all night was my next move, and it was consuming my soul. Memories of my childhood came flooding back as I pondered what could be in the next dungeon of Zelda, the next world in a Mario game, and what kind of underwear Rebecca was wearing under that dress under her desk. I fantasized, I pondered, I dreamed. I came.

Little girls and tanks – every boy’s dream

Being a huge gamer, I am fully tapped into the games industry. It pains me to know that Valkyria Chronicles has been selling very poorly, and is barely available at retail. If some goddamn Bratz Petz game can sell millions, then Valkyria Chronicles deserves to sell infinity millions, plus my copy. I honestly feel like I should buy another copy just to show my support. If I were a billionaire, I would literally buy half a million copies of this game, just to make sure a sequel is made. The team that made this (also made Skies of Arcadia, the best Dreamcast RPG ever, and its main characters are actually in this game – which is beyond fucking awesome) deserves awards, money, handshakes, hugs and a pat on the back just because they’ve made a game that could make me feel this way.

The whole game feels like a loving fan-service to the gamer. You don’t like the English voice acting? Change it to Japanese. Want subtitles of each language? Go ahead. Mix and match. You want to install the game to make it load faster? You can do that. You want to save any time and restart any turn? Sure. You want every unit to be the same for a new challenge? You bet. You want New Game Plus+ so you can play again and kick so much ass just for the hell of it? Check. Valkyria Chronicles wants you to enjoy it, it gives you every opportunity to have a good time without being some sort of chore or exercise in stubborn game design.

It’s a shame that none of you will buy or play this game. You’re too busy pushing coloured buttons on a plastic guitar or shooting the heads off space aliens. Valkyria Chronicles is one of those critical darlings that gets overlooked, ignored and mistreated in its lifetime. I hope I’ve reached out to someone out there and they enjoy the game as much as I do. I am just doing my part to get the word out there, and the developers deserve it. It still gets me gives me chills that the game starts with a Sega logo, on a PlayStation system, and it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s almost up there the first time I played on Sonic game on a Nintendo system, but of course that game sucked the orange off a pylon. Congrats, Sega, I’ll see you in another 6 years when you don’t embarrass yourself as usual.

So here’s to Valkyria Chronicles – proof that a staggering, amazing, joyous celebration of gaming is still possible without making a game for ‘everyone’ and lowering it to the lowest common demominator. It’s original, it’s beautful, it’s hard, it’s rewarding, and most of all – it’s amazingly fun. If games had a hand I would shake it on this occassion. My highest recommendation.

Here’s a video review on GameTrailers that I suggest watching to see this piece of art in action (watch in SD Standard Definition so it plays in this window):