FreshFromThaDeli

#126 Valkyria Revolution

Enjoyment: 5/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Hardest Trophy: Royal Army Veteran Cross

The beginning of this game is so slow and mind numbingly boring that I instantly regretted even popping my first trophy. It's not too often I would say that about games that I play. I did not like this game. After finishing off the Platinum for the first game in the series last month with Valkyria Chronicles, I was in a great mood to start another game in the series. Valkyria Revolution is a game I have had sitting in the plastic wrapper on my shelving unit for years now. I thought now is a good a time as any other to start playing it but alas, that was not a really good idea. Valkyria Revolution is a slow, plodding and bloated game that should only be played by the hardcore fans of the original game who are really invested in the in game world.

The story is a garbled mess of JRPG tropes. You play as Amleth who is the 100th brooding moody protagonist in a JRPG that is too cool to admit when he is wrong and is incredibly unlikable. I could go into details on the story but it's not worth elaborating. Essentially, it boils down to you and your squad who are trying to take down the Empire from invading neighbouring countries in the 1850's while a Valkyria with the biggest boobs ever is hellbent on taking you down. Seriously, her boobs are so oversized in this game it looks like Sega went into the Soul Calibur character creator and put the upper chest filter up to the maximum value. Her boobs are bigger than my future! 😂

Valkyria Revolution ditches the unique watercolour art style of Valkryia Chronicles and instead has become a (VERY anime) muddy mess. The first game was also an anime game but it was a subdued look and one that I have never seen before. The character models are downright ugly when you see them up close and you WILL be seeing them up close a lot because this is quite possibly the game with the longest cutscenes I've EVER played. Even Hideo Kojima would be jealous of how long the cut scenes just drag on and on and on...Valkyria Revolution throws cut scene after cut scene at you with loading screens in between cut scenes. The cut scenes have loading screens to load even more cut scenes! It makes you question your life and ask yourself why am I playing this if I'm only actively playing 20% of the time and watching cut scenes 80% of the time.

I done the thinkable and just started skipping all the cut scenes from chapter 3 and onwards. I already had spent what felt like 5 hours watching cut scenes, and wasn't engaged in the story enough to continue forcing myself to care. At that point I changed the difficulty to Easy and just decided to rush through the game. It still took me a month to finish the game off because of a demanding work schedule as of late but I'm glad I finished this game so I never have to go back to it.

One positive of this game however, is the OST. Oh my goodness! The OST is simply amazing and is much better than Valkyria Chronicles. Pretty happy about the free CD included in the box so I can copy the disc to my PS3 HDD. I'm excited to try out Valkyria Chronicles 4 one day which is a return to form by being a tactical action RPG just like the first 3 mainline games in the series.