Finished off Valkyria Chronicles. Enjoyable for the most part. One or two "aargh" moments, usually related somehow to a rocket launcher-equipped soldier spawning directly behind my tank (i.e. the bit with the big shining blue radiator that he can then kill in one hit, ending the mission...) I'm not about to complain about the radiator mechanic - goodness knows I have aimed enough anti-tank lances into them myself. But it's disheartening to play a turn-based strategy game and have the other side win in a single turn because you didn't anticipate that THERE was where the enemies would pop up from.

On the other hand, they did a great job characterizing your grunts without making them so much of a part of the story that the game can't afford to kill any of them. It helps a lot that the story allows for a quirky crew (you're a militia unit, so you've got a couple of 14-year-olds, at least one old lady, and pretty much everything else in between, including at least two flaming homosexuals and a fangirl.)

The game invents an ethnic group called the Darcsens (essentially the Jews in this fantasy WWII, down to the camps and persecution). I wonder what it says about me that I used them for about half my squad on the first play-through? Probably that I'm a little lazy...

Characters in Valkyria have a set of "potentials", which will activate under certain conditions and give them this bonus or that penalty. Some characters are happier in the countryside, some are better in the city, some are happier around the opposite sex, some prefer to be alone, and all of them have a few friends who they'd rather be working with. This makes putting a squad together something of a challenge. It's not game-ending or anything if you get a group of incompatible fighters together, but every little bit helps.

Darcsens tend to have "good" potentials rather than ones with penalties (and none of the really bad ones, like "oh I forgot my ammo"!) They also tend to have potentials that say "works well with other Darcsens". They all like your tank, because it's being driven by your adopted-little-sister Darcsen. And it's easy to screen out the rest of your squad members for "hates Darcsens", especially because a lot of those characters will have additional "bad" potentials.

I was happy with the game overall. Very unusual graphics done well, very realistically-styled but with the sketch element to keep it out of the uncanny valley. Solid gameplay - feels like it's a straight-up turn-based game, but the real-time control within each character's turn is an interesting change (though with an aiming mechanic that pauses the action so that you don't miss shots because you're rushed... which is good because it's pretty fiddly otherwise.)

Now to decide on what to start playing next... I never did open up GTA4, and I still have Persona 3 here. Or is there something else new-and-good out for the PS3?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:16 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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