Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles is easily one of most innovative game that has came out of Japan for many years, but despite its exceptionally fresh new gameplay design, it still suffers from a very backward story telling method, that plagues countless of games in the similar genre before it.

The first thing that anybody notice when they start playing the game, is that the artistic style of this game is one of the best on the PS3. Its cell-shaded graphic overlays with a canvas style white out on the edges of the screen, along with a paintbrush style filter, gives the game an extremely fresh, unique and beautiful presentation. The game engine that powers the game creates some of the most fluid cut scenes, and it out do most of the anime productions from Japan. Almost every single dialogue in the game is spoken by a voice actor, and the choice of either English and Japanese is welcomed for an otaku like me.

The base game mechanic is a mixture of turn-based strategy games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea and Advance Wars with a touch of Gears of War style cover, aim and shoot element. The great freedom given by the lack of movement grid system currently present in virtually all turn-based strategy games is a definite plus. In many ways, it feels like a real time strategy in some aspect, since the battles are very fast pace and require instantaneous reactions and decisions. The player is given a set amount of 'Control Point' at the start of each round, which determines how many actions you can perform per turn. It is possible to use all of them on a single character, but the character will eventually fatigue and only moves a very short distance, so it pays off to plan ahead and use them strategically.

The game takes place in a fictitious WWII setting, the main protagonist is the young protege who magically appears and starts to decimate an unstoppable force with a mysterious love interest, a very typically Japanese style story. The game progresses in a manga style chapters with cut-scenes in between each missions. There are two types of cut-scene, one for cinematic and one for general dialogue. The latter one is extremely slow pace, in many case, it holds the game back so much because they are long and boring. It feels like its one of those case where the developers are trying too hard to be screen writers, and in this instance, you are watching an interactive anime rather than playing a game. It is disappointing that the developer made such an innovative gameplay to just have it falls back on such an ancient way of story telling. The AI is also very flawed, and is the most problematic in any of the turn-based strategy games that ever come out of Japan. They are always pre-determined, with no variation at all. The game presents little challenges, missions are always simple to finish.

There is no doubt that Valkyria Chronicles stands out as an unique product for the PS3, one of the best effort from a Japanese developer in an attempt to reinvent the genre. In many ways, they have succeeded, the game is fun, if only I did not have to press circle so much...