Valkyria Chronicles

It’s complete happenstance that I sat down to actually write something about this game on ‘Remembrance Sunday’, perhaps if I was a better writer I could spin a yarn tying the real life world wars, the current mania within Britain around this time of year and this extremely anime turn based tactics game together into something poignant… but today its not that day

The Eastern Front's Power Couple

We Brits currently live in a country and a ‘mood’ right now where on national television it is considered essential for even the Cookie Monster needs to wear a fucking poppy, and I must admit that Britain’s latent festival of the dead and reverence of all things military makes me rather uncomfortable. But all the same I am a rapacious consumer of military themed video games, things are slowing down a bit as I get older admittedly, but I have absolutely rinsed an incredible amount of my spare time into virtual war. I have well over 60 hours invested in the Second Europan War as of right now as well and I’m here to talk about what I’ve seen. 

Valkyria Chronicles is a turn based tactical RPG, it has a 30-40 hour long campaign all in all, gorgeous graphics (for the time) with a wonderful watercolour crossed with comic book presentation throughout. It’s a game that passed me by back in the day when it was originally released. I was deep into Xbox around this time so this PS3/PC exclusive didn’t even register on my radar, which was embarrassingly achievement focused back in 2008. It has a pretty tidy difficulty curve, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, I picked this up for the Nintendo Switch and have greatly enjoyed it, I found it’s translated really well to the handheld experience, I’m not sure if I would have stuck with it as much if it wasn’t ready to go while my daughter watched CBeebies! 

Heavy themes and allegory feature prominently in a game that also has like a kawaii pig pegasus

The combat and core gameplay here is fantastic, and I do really appreciate the option of playing a game such as this and not be pressured by time or circumstances, I can do a turn and then shelve the game for days/weeks and pick up right where I started, there’s no pressure and the game has a light airiness about it that always feels welcoming and a pleasant place to be.

Valkyria has a ‘Strange Real’ style depiction of the world in the 1930s, but unlike the Ace Combat games which takes its strange take on the real life world to a more abstracted and difficult to place reality that can more easily live on it’s own and thrive in it’s own melodrama and absurdity. Valkyria stumbles within this regard though which I think outside of just how aggressively anime this game is, these moments might be a bit of a stumbling block for some.

Drastic tone shift ahoy, we literally just plunged a giant railway gun with a cartoonish moustache twirling villain into a fucking river

See, this is a war game with basically a fairly grounded set of main characters, who also have like a pig dog with wings as a pet, who help lead an alternate Belgium fight off it’s eastern european aggressors who have a city sized hover tank. Turns out there’s like… magical battle witches called Valkyria, but also a holocaust-like sub story that feels uncomfortable at best with the plight of the Darcsens which for me was a step too far for the game to pull off. The actual combat in the game is not especially fantastical at all, the fantasy elements are more in how the characters look and that rocket launchers are lances in appearance as opposed to bazookas or panzerfausts. The game has a cheery disposition mostly, there’s happy smiling engineers, you can learn orders from a creepy guy in a graveyard, unlock days down the beach by funding your own embedded reportor, That real nice and gentle atmosphere throughout that makes the battlefields of Gallia a fun place to be, and Valkyria Chronicles a rather quiet and relaxing game to play, despite the fact it’s actually kinda like a world war 1.5 as far as the war it’s attempting to depict… only with magic I guess. 

If the fact that the main character happens to have his dead fathers famous main battle tank in his garage feels like it would be too implausible or otherwise bother you then this is absolutely not the game for you.

Can’t beat a great Ragdoll death (or several)

I’ve finished the main campaign and I’m even a fair bit into getting A ranks for all the missions, there’s not even trophies at stake (I’m playing on switch) and that for me is something rather unprecedented in my recent gaming history. I’m honestly even tempted to pick up the PSP versions before I get stuck into the 4th entry in the series at some point in the future. If I was to level a major criticism outside of the story is that they really need to allow players to fast forward the enemy turn.

But as I’ve just mentioned, sometimes the tone is waaaay off with some neckbreakingly abrupt changes moving from scene to scene. This is where I’m actually pretty happy I had it on the switch, so that another human being wouldn’t walk in on me playing this game and wondering why there’s a man with a giant blue sword of lightning on top of a giant tank being lit up by my pink haired mini skirt wearing machine gunner. 

This is our little secret ok? 

For Gallia!