Rob Zacny

Episode 286: Valkyria Chronicles

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Valkyria Chronicles: a product of Sega's ill-fated R&D development team that was sort of set in Holland and loosely based on a conflict that may have been World War II (but wasn't). Rob is joined by Gamers With Jobs' Shawn Andrich and developer David V. Heron to talk about the 2008 Playstation 3 cult classic that has found new life on Steam, or a platform that closely resembles Steam.

 

Listen here.

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So far Valkyria Chronicles has been regular price on the steam sale. I imagine I'll wait for the sale to end, and if it doesn't show up as a daily sale I'll wind up paying full price for it. I've got a PS3 copy, but if I've got the option of PC I'll take it.

I could swear I've played one or two other console games that had similar mechanics to Valkyria, though I can't put names to them at the moment. Import stuff, I think; one of the unfortunate things about console gaming is that a lot of the good stuff never comes over here because "there's no market for it". Of course, that used to be common wisdom about JRPGs too, until FF7 sold a zillion copies.

As an example, I don't think the "Legend of Galactic Heroes" PC strategy game from 2008 ever made it over here:

Skip ahead to about 1:30 to miss the intro...

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I am loving this game, now while I knew it as great game, from what I had heard about and from watching the anime (more of this later), but didn´t expect to that good.

While I understand that someone might be turned away from the art style,I believe much of the game strength and charm lie there (along with some crazy elements of the narrative and characters), like Rob said, is very different from the general "dark/brow/gritty where everyone is angry" I  am really glad no one tried "westernize it", like what happened to Front Mission Evolve (changed to a FPS) or somewhat Last Remnant (which is Jrpg with some tactical elements and a very strange, but unique battle system).

I wonder too why Sega decided to bring it now, if this a reflect of their focus on Relic and Creative Assembly or Sega is trying to catch on the arrival of several Jrpgs for PC (and even other Japanese titles too, I mean, where one or two years ago anyone would expect to see a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear on pc?), maybe both. The new release was a success much bigger that they expect (also it was amazing port, something rare), I wonder what they will do next...

The anime was very good, I didn´t find Alicia voice annoying in the game (at least this far), I didn´t remember if was the same person (Marina Inoue) in the anime,but checking around it appear to be so.

Since Hexgrid mentioned Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I have to add a few things - first it´s a long, but amazing anime, if possible you guys should give a try, since it is maybe one of the best space operas (is one of my favorite animes), much of the story is somewhat based on WWI and WWII, begin the conflict between the Galactic Empire (lot inspired by Prussia/Germany from WWI) and the Free Planets Alliance (Allies), it about the politics, history and the relationship between two genius and rivals on each side: Reinhard von Lohengramm (Empire) and Yang Wenli (Free Planets).

Fun fact! I don´t know if intentional or not, but Prince Maxilliam does resemble a lot with Reinhard!

Reinhard von Lohengramm



Maximilliam



 

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I finally got around to playing this last year when I first bought a PS3, and adored it. I was surprised at how few people talked about it, let alone played it, and I'm glad the re-release on PC has everyone suddenly really pleased. It's a game that deserves to be learned from, and dammit I'm sick of people overlooking quality games because "Oh God animu eyes". If I can put up with the train wreck that was Limbo's art design, you oughta be able to put up with some damn eyeballs. I understand one comes within the context of a community that definitely has its shittier elements, but between Valkyria Chronicles and Fire Emblem, I'd wish gamers would see there's some real hard substance here.

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I've played Valkyria Chronicles 3 - I know enough Japanese to play it, and in fact play Japanese games on PSP or Vita to brush up on my language skills - so I can satisfy everyone's curiosity a bit.

 

VC3, like VC2, has a system where the battlefield is split up into different zones, each small enough to be rendered by the PSP, and troops in one zone can't affect troops in another.  You capture a camp in Zone 1 that's a pathway to Zone 2, and now you can spend a command point to deploy someone in Zone 2 from your reserves.  If someone is near a camp they can retreat to the reserves for free.

 

Just like VC2, that basically means you can warp soldiers from one camp to another, and you can pull cheesy tricks like having a sniper fire a bullet from the west side of Zone 1, retreat, then re-deploy to fire from the east side of Zone 2, and so on.  Basically, all allied camps exist as a single point in space-time.  I found the game enjoyable mechanically, but a lot of winning tactics do involve hot-swapping soldiers in nonsensical ways.

 

Outside of that, the battle system is tightened up quite a bit; simply playing the game well will usually get a high ranking on missions, and there are optional, repeatable missions explicitly set out as such for times when you think you need to grind.  However, it's still a game with a lot of missions that take a fair length of time to complete, so needing to do more of them is painful and there's a fair chunk of filler in the mandatory missions.

 

The premise of VC3 is that there was an off-the-books stealth squadron in the army, made up of malcontents that were too useful to execute but not good enough to treat well.  People who were the wrong race, or lost a political fight, or committed crimes get sent to this penal squad that is sent on ludicrously unwise suicide missions.  As you can guess, of course, the story is that they keep coming back alive anyway.

 

So it covers the same time period as the original Valkyria Chronicles, but from a different perspective; this is the OTHER rag-tag squadron of heroes who saved Gallia, but they didn't get a book written about them because officially they never existed.  It's actually a pretty clever way of letting the story continue without abandoning the alternate-WW2 setting, and it even retcons a few plot oddities in the previous games by saying that the secret squadron did the work, but they're secret, so the book that was the framing device of Valkyria Chronicles 1 doesn't include anything about them.

 

I also felt it struck a nice balance between the basically happy-go-lucky nature of the games and the somewhat dark premise - your squad is literally sent to die, on more than one occasion.  Your squad is also given the dirty work, such as "test this prototype weapon, don't worry, it's totally not forbidden by the Geneva Convention, by the way we deny all knowledge of your existence."

 

The characters are still a mix of broad anime stereotypes and broad war-movie stereotypes, and just like VC1, there's an unfortunate - although brief - trip to the beach.  I did feel that the characters grew on me over time, particular the main character, Kurt, and by the end of the game when he made an inspiring speech and launched his squadron on a desperate last-minute attack, I wanted to pump my fist and shout "GALLIA, FUCK YEAH!".

 

Overall, I felt it's a worthy sequel, and yes, better than VC2.

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It's a game that deserves to be learned from, and dammit I'm sick of people overlooking quality games because "Oh God animu eyes".

 

The funny thing is, the whole anime/manga character design thing is ideally suited to video games.  The whole point of it was to make expressive character faces on crappy low-fidelity cheap print run comics.  That's why the style evolved the way it did; you could still make out the facial expressions on shoddily printed phone book manga.

 

Turns out that what's good for low-res print is also pretty good for low-res screens.  It was very important back in the NTSC/PAL era (it's why, for instance, you can actually take emotional cues during conversations between 16x16 pixel sprites in old JRPGs...), and until we're all running "retina" TVs and monitors, it's still going to be a useful shorthand.

 

Also, I'll take anime-styled characters over uncanny valley almost-human-but-wrong characters any day.

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As someone whose favourite games include things like XCOM, Jagged Alliance, Fallout (the originals) this is a game that's been on my radar for quite some time.

However, like Troy I'm more than a bit worried I'll juat bounce straight off it because of the Anime art style too hard. I never really saw the fuss about FFVII (which I played on the playstation on release) it had a largely inpenetrable plot and half the time was just a long hard grind to get anywhere.

What I'm probably trying to say is that it needs to be dead cheap or have a demo. But that's just me.

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Slightly dissapointed with Rob's homework for the show: you had tank in Giant Enemy Tank scenario and the girl with spear was explicitely stated as unbeatable by cutscenes. I guess it's understandable as he doesn't like cutscenes. Also your rating depends only on number of turns it took you to win.

 

What I like in the artstyle and story of this game is that everything there is cleverly vague: Gallia is simultaniously Holland (windmills and sort of tulips), Finland (dress), Israel (ruins of ancient temples in the desert), Switzerland (mountains, neutrality and military)... The Empire is Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany but also it has shades of Napoleonic France (just look at Maximillian). It's wonderful fantasy Europe as seen by Japanese. And the conflict itself is very much like WW1 too: pastoral landscapes are suddenly bombarded by giant grey machines.

 

Still the gameplay itself lacks something. There's no balance which is OK for single player game, I guess, but most missions ended up me taking scout (since midgame it's Alicia cause she gets amazing potentials), giving it couple of orders and sending it to rampage through enemy lines to the target camp. In this camp everyone is dead thanks to snipers or tank mortars, it's captured, voila. Gets rather repetetive. I'm at chapter 17, Jager's Panzer. I've started that mission, saw how much enemies there and turned it off. Cause I know that the plan is the same as ever, the question is what route Alicia will use to destroy the passive dumb enemy.

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It was weird listening to this episode because I had some good memories of the game, but as the episode wore on I started to remember everything about the game that drove me crazy. It tries a lot of different interesting ideas, but that kitchen sink approach to game design means it ended up with a lot of annoyances that people have to overlook.

 

As far as fantastical World War II turn based tactical games go, I think Silent Storm still comes out as the winner.

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"I wonder why it didnt click in 2008 ?" - that's the sort of question a bunch of people who dont play on consoles ask about a 1000000+ sales game. And honestly, who in their right mind can possibly think that a game that "didnt click" and didnt sell would get two sequels, a bunch of manga and a whole 2-cour anime series approved ? Someone tell these people about Fire Emblem, they will be mighty surprised and inquire why this giant franchise "didnt click" back in the 90's. Or Gods forbid they hear about SD Gundam !

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One more thing I found really amazing - from what I could understand, the more you use same soldiers and unlock their potential, you also expand their biography - in my game one girl acquired a potential where she got nervous if she end the round with no ammo (unsure if this was because os natural progression or because she missed a lot of shots in another battle) while other girl start to hate Rosie because she have somewhat oneside rivalry with her. Also I just found that one of my machine gunner is quite found of tanks.

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I'd heard great things about this game, and after picking up a ps3 late in the cycle I'm finally getting around to playing this game. About 75% of the way through but already have some concrete thoughts about it.

 

I think overall the game is good and I like the painterly-looking art style, but that said it has some major problems. Foremost among these is just the soldier classes themselves. Rob and his guests didn't use the orders much at all it sounds like. For me, I use them all the time, or one in particular. An order that gives a damage boost for soldiers against Anti-Tank.  The order basically makes the anti-tank guys useless, because instead of using an anti-tank guy who is slow as molasses and doesn't do reaction fire and requires 4 shots to destroy a tank from the front,  can instead just use a scout which moves twice as far, has the longest range reacton fire and with this damage boost order can destroy almost any tank in 4-5 hits to the radiator.

 

I basically only ever use Scouts and Engineers, I'll have a few shocktroopers and maybe a token lancer or sniper sometimes. But Scouts and Engineers move the furthest, react fire the furthest, and with orders can do pretty much anything. Snipers or Lancers are completely hit or miss, with Snipers particularly useless because even if they're elevated and see a guy in cover they often cannot one-shot kill the guy.

Sometimes however the game will screw with the player, like in my previous mission where suddenly attacking the weak point on a special tank had no effect at all from either boosted-scouts or the gatling on the Shamrock. Had to hit it with an anti-tank cannon to do anything. Why? Who knows. Game decided to change the rules and didn't explain why.

 

Speaking of cover what good is a grenade when I can't lob it over a wall? What good is a lancer when I can't be up against a fence and fire at something beyond it? The terrain system is in some ways atrocious. The grenades are nigh useless and its only the addition of rifle-launched grenades when they become worthwhile at all.

 

The story likewise is typical blase anime faire. I like anime, but I'm tired of 16 year old philosophers talking about the meaning and life and war. They're not characters, or even archetypes, they're just mouthpieces for a much older generation who is unable or unwilling to portray a youthful individuals. The story chapters in general have too many cutscenes between individual battles and the loading times are frequent and annoying.

 

Worse still is the constant need to upgrade your guys after every battle. A person isn't making interesting choices, just return to HQ, buy this upgrade that, repeat ad-naseum. Each time needing to skip through the same repetitive an inane dialogue.

Overall though the system has potential and forces some tough choices, even if my choice is between "do I activate Scout A, Scout B or Scout C?". The characters can be fun and humorous, like Ted.  I've heard Xcom The Bureau uses a similar system, I'll need to check out my copy sometime to see how it plays out. Could be totally wrong though

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the game is much better if you just play it the obvious way

 

use lancers to kill tanks / mounted guns

use snipers to snipe from afar

use scouts to scout / grab forward positions

use engineers to defuse mines / repair & restock

 

i didn't use orders at all and found it to be extremely well-balanced for a single playthrough

the trick with all these Japanese games is to avoid overleveling and making a supersquad. i think i finished the game with level 10 units

 

maybe i got lucky with my progression being close to whatever the game was tuned for, but it was a nice change of pace to play a game that was appropriately challenging by design instead of relying on a bunch of difficulty sliders in the setup screen and letting the players figure it out

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