Valkyria Revolution Review

Let’s be honest from the very beginning here, you shan’t find me grand marshalling the next “We Love JRPG” parade. What I can’t deny though is that 9 years ago I played Valkyria Chronicles and was immediately enamoured to how truly charming it was. So I was quick to put my hand up to play the latest addition, a spinoff — Valkyria Revolution. Unfortunately though, it seems the charm can only stretch so far.

Valkyria Revolution presents itself as flashbacks told by a teacher to her younger student as she tells you the story that the history books won’t, as she points out every time you trigger a new chapter and she tells you “This is a true story”. Developers Media.Vision have decided to free themselves from the previous narratives by creating a new universe. Returning are the themes of European imperialism, the inevitable war that such expansions triggers and the walking night light super women that the series take their name from, Valkyria.

This is made worse by the fact that almost all the cutscenes are of characters standing in a circle talking to each other, quite often with camera on their back — don’t have to reanimate mouth movement for localisation if you can’t see the mouth! Rather than let good and organic story telling build the world we are instead treated to expositional dump after expositional dump. Why show me the story when you could tell me the story, aye?

What time isn’t spent in a cutscene is most likely going to be spent in a loading screen. One point in the game I exited a 20 second loading screen to be given a 3 second pan of a location before entering another 20 second loading screen. What followed was a 15 minute conversation cutscene where I learnt almost nothing about the characters or world. I have never in my life had more trouble paying attention or being engaged in a video game storyline.

Characters have lost the grounded feel they previously had with beliefs and convictions that gave depth to each one of them separately. Instead every character sounds like it was their first reading of the script and they had done all of their lines not just in seperate rooms but on other ends of the earth.

Valkyria Revolution has instead opted for a hack-and-slash style real-time battle system. You are able to pause the action with a radial menu that offers you one of four elemental spells for your character, a gun or a grenade — both with very limited ammunition. Before starting the mission you select the four characters you’ll play as with different classes and elemental strengths. In the heat of battle you’ll be able to quickly switch between your teammates or opt to issue strategic commands when things really start getting difficult.

Unfortunately, you won’t need those strategic commands, as the parade of same same enemy units never posed a threat to me. They literally stand there taking the occasional pot shot as you walk up and wail on them with whichever ridiculously over-sized Anime weapon your character is brandishing. The occasional boss battles manages to stretch out a fight long enough to see the game the team thought they were making but then that passes and you’re thrust back into a poorly textured stage to trudge around looking for a challenge.

To break up the already minimal combat sections you’ll keep yourself entertained with the busy work of talking to locals in the same shopping arcade over and over to make sure they don’t hate you or the war — like that one really needy friend. Throw in RPG elements like skill trees and minor armor perk upgrades, all of which feel shallow and added merely to pad out a fairly bare-bones experience.

You’ll also get to visit previous chapters to read notes about the story, get familiar with the glossary or watch cutscenes that are essentially deleted scenes. Due to the amount of cutscenes I’d already sat through, I had come to the assumption that they had fired their editor and there couldn’t be any deleted scenes left to watch. Yet every time I opened a chapter I’d just played there was another scene of a side character going through a checklist of things to ruminate over; war, the Valkyria, how that one specific stuck-up hero will never have a love life… those kind of riveting plot points.