Valkyria Chronicles 2 — A Decent Evolution on the Original
Two years ago, Valkyria Chronicles, a random tactical war simulator by SEGA, became an instant cult classic among the, at that time small, demographic of PS3 owners. Valkyria Chronicles 2 is attempting to do the same, with the arguably smaller demographic of PSP owners. The game makes some much needed changes to the gameplay system, which makes for an overall better gameplay experience. However, the game is also lacking much of what made the first game so popular, that being its well done story, stellar cast of voice actors, and unique hand-drawn visual style.
Valkyria Chronicles 2 is set two years after the original game, and your original band of socially mal-adjusted soldiers in Squad 7, now known as national heroes, are taking a well-deserved break. While they fade into the background a brand new cast of characters, ripped straight from the pages of a high-school slice of life anime, takes the stage. In fact, for all intents and purposes, they are in high school, as they are all new recruits going through basic training together. There will be more than one familiar classroom scene, with the goofy protagonist, the hard-ass over-achiever, the popular girl, and so on so forth.
Outside of happy school fun time land, dissent has risen in the south of Gallia. After Gallian’s princess reveals herself to be of the Darcsen race in the first game, the more racist Gallians start a rebel front to dethrone the queen and seize power for themselves. It’s up to our plucky band of recruits to put down this uprising, before civil war breaks out all throughout the country.
The story … isn’t the best. Valkyria Chronicles 1 was known for its story, and its case of voice actors that was pretty much cherry-picked from the well known voice-acting elite. Valkyria Chronicles 2 however, feels like a step backward. The new voice actors all give b-string performances, and the plot is pretty stereotypical, as are the characters. You really got attached to the characters in Valkyria Chronicles 1, so when great plot twists such as serious character conflict or death came about it hit you emotionally. The same cannot be said for Valkyria Chronicles 2, as the characters are all cookie-cutter. The game throws new Valkyria at you for … well seemingly no reason, and the whole game takes a sharp detour from the framework set up in its predecessor. It’s enjoyable at times, but all in all the game boasts a story that just isn’t as good as its older brother’s.
Luckily, the gameplay has only changed for the better. The basic systems are all still in tact. You get to see a map of the whole battlefield with your troops strewn about like chess pieces before you take a turn. Once you spend a command point in order to make your units move, the actions shifts to real time. As you run around the map with your selected soldier, enemies that see you will attempt to gun you down. You have a limited movement range, and you may stop to take aim and fire at the enemy with your equipped weapon. Shots can go anywhere within the targeting crosshairs of your gun, and headshots do critical hit damage. You and your opponent take turns like this until one of you completes the map’s objective, which is generally the capture of an enemy base, although there are new mission types this time around, with item retrieval, escort, and “kill all enemies” objectives thrown in.
The one new addition to this whole formula is the morale meter. Perform well, and your morale goes up. Perform poorly, and your morale goes down. High morale increases the chance of positive special abilities activating, while low morale increases the chance of negative abilities activating. If your morale hits 0, you lose the fight entirely. However, a high moral can give you a great deal of momentum and can allow your troops to shred enemy forces. Be careful though, because the enemy also has morale, and the amount of morale you gain or lose is not based on simple attack and defense. Take a particularly bad hit by a grenade, lose a base, or have a character die, and your morale will plummet. However, concoct a particularly good strategy that takes out the enemy in a creative way, and your morale will go through the roof.
Due to the processing power of the PSP, large maps are broken up into smaller individual areas to make the action more manageable. It’s not a bad direction to go, as it’s easier to strategize when you have to think about fewer troops and a smaller area. The addition of an “easy mode” to the game also helps to cut the difficulty a bit too. I am not sure I would go with the whole small area skirmish model if we saw another Valkyria Chronicles come to the PS3, but it certainly doesn’t detract from the game at all.
Serious revamps have been made to the game’s class and leveling system. Your level was capped at 20 in the first game, but now your level is capped at 50, allowing you to learn far more special abilities. Levels themselves also seem to be slightly more important, with each one effecting your troops abilities a bit more than it did in the last game.
Once again there are five basic classes in the game, but they have been switched around a bit. Scouts, troopers, and lancers are basically the same as they were in previous games, but engineers have totally changed, and snipers have been removed in favor of a new class, the heavy tech. Heavy tech units have extremely high defense, decent move range, and the ability to disarm landmines (which the engineer no longer has). However, these units don’t carry a firearm, instead choosing to attack their enemies for high damage with melee weapons, putting themselves in the line of fire in the process. Engineers on the other hand are now your medics, who have the ability to heal other characters at long ranges. They too now equip a new weapon type, a pistol, which does good damage at short range, but is very inaccurate. They are also the most fragile class in the game.
Each of the five different classes now has three tiers of promotion to work yourself through, gaining new abilities and stats at each tier. For example, the scouts can become scout veterans or snipers at their first class upgrade. Scout veterans obviously have higher mobility than snipers, while snipers get the ability to equip sniper rifles and attack enemies at extremely long ranges. At the third tier, your abilities split again. Scout veterans, for example, can become scout elites, which have the best mobility and evade in the game, or heavy scouts, which have more HP and Defense and can fire rifle grenades. Every class has similar trees, with third level classes all boasting some extremely powerful weapons and abilities, such as muilti-shot sniper rifles and flamethrowers.
The most interesting thing about this job system, is that every promotion does cause you to fall behind in some areas that your character previously excelled at. For example, scouts lose mobility when they become a sniper. This makes the whole system more of a specialization system rather than a promotion system. Sometimes you will want to keep your characters at a lower level class, just because of its generalized stat spread. This isn’t an issue, actually, because characters are no longer locked into a single class. You can freely switch your characters classes between all six variations of all five basic types between battles (once you have unlocked them of course). Different characters work better as different classes, and raising a character to be exactly the class you want, gives the game much needed focus on individual character development.
The equipment and item system has been overhauled. You can still equip weapons and items to specific characters, but developing weapons takes more than just money now. You will need to get specific combinations of raw materials in order to forge the weapons you want, which does make weapon development more tedious, but this is balanced out due to the increased number of options you have while forging equipment. Tank weapons and items have also undergone some changes as well. Instead of the Tetris like parts grid, your tank simply has a weight limit that you can’t go over. It’s simpler to understand and it makes swapping one tank part for another much easier than it was in the first game.
Multiplayer is a new addition to Valkyria Chronicles 2 that the original was severely lacking. You can play just about every mission co-op with a friend or three either locally or on the intertubes, and while this does make some missions incredibly easy, it is still fun to put your heads together and form a winning strategy. There is also versus play, which is where the game’s multiplayer really shines. Since individual PSP screens can hide information, the game becomes one of the best tactical war games on the market to date. The multiplayer is very addicting, and losses don’t affect your troops in the actual campaign so you immediately start experimenting with some crazy strategies that would make great story fodder for an epic war movie. It’s a lot of fun.
Graphically, the game looks pretty decent. Sure characters at the tiniest bit more blocky, but the game does look good all things considered. The anime cutscenes are a treat to watch, but the in-game graphics suffer a bit. The PSP simply is not up to the task of recreating Valkyria Chronicles watercolor graphical style, and that is a big disappointment. The game doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t look like it should, and you will notice this.
The musical score has also taken a hit. Many of your favorite tunes return from the first game, but they are remixed, and by remixed I mean made simpler. Perhaps this is another limitation of the PSP, but the musical score sounds dry and minimalist, which is unfortunate considering how epic the original’s soundtrack was.
For all its faults Valkyria Chronicles 2 is still a damn good game, if only for the fact that you don’t have much of a choice here. There aren’t many good strategy RPGs on the market right now, and quite frankly if you were even a passing fan of the first game, you will probably like the second. The game will take you 50 hours to complete, and you’ll sink even more into the multiplayer. It’s nothing that you should buy a PSP for, but if you have one lying around you certainly shouldn’t let Valkyria Chronicles 2 pass you by.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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