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So I remembered watching Valkyria Chronicles anime many years ago and in 2022 it was on sale so I decided to buy the game to play it. I did absolutely no research on the system and turns out it’s the bane of my existence. It was so infuriatingly annoying that in fact I actually made Kanade play every single battle the whole time and we ended up injecting mods to just basically cheat our way through everything because as it turns out, apparently speed/cheating is actually the most efficient way to play this game! It’s not about strategy at all and in fact you’re supposed to basically use the fastest characters to just get to the enemy’s base and capture the flag and you’re gold. Many of the battles in fact were scripted that allowed no freedom and even with mods on, we had to follow the script or we’d get a Game Over.
Since I am a grognard that loves turn based squad combat games, I actually was excited about the combat. The first mission or two were fun, but then I quickly realized once we started to get to the tightly scripted missions that they were actually puzzles. Your rewards are not based on how many enemies you defeat or how many of your soldiers survive but are solely based on how quickly you complete the mission objective. What this means is that now the optimal strategy for the missions is usually to do things like spam fast units over and over to run towards the enemy base. Just zoom past enemies and don’t waste time actually fighting them. At that point I too stopped really caring and just embraced the mods since it became quite clear that there weren’t really too many opportunities to be creative or thinking on your feet or rolling with effects of RNG or coming up with strategies. And then since you’re “supposed” to speedrun the missions, I get the feeling that this disrupted the pacing and flow of the story because rather than being a breather between lengthy missions it made it feel like you were constantly slamming the “view next cutscene” button.
Still despite this bullshit, we persisted so I could see Alicia and Welkin kiss and get married. Unfortunately, even though this happened, it felt so…unsatisfying. I think the problem is, the game spends way too much time wanting you to do all the military battle bullshit, that when you end up cheesing it, the cut scenes feel short and unsatisfying. Meanwhile I guess if you played it legitimately, you’d be so frustrated and happy to overcome the bullshit battles that when you got your few crumbs of cut scene, it would probably feel more satisfying? Ah yes where have I experienced this bullshit before… So because of this even though I have my collection of Welkin x Alicia moments, the game ended in a quick span of about 14 hours.
The point I kept making is that compared to Persona 3, the amount of shipping compared to the total playtime is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy higher. This was only a 15 hour game for us (obviously would’ve been significantly longer if played legitimately) and consistently averaged 3-5 stream markers per session. I would say that “watch cutscenes of Welkin and Alicia holding hands” is a pretty significant element of the game! I think the problem here is that the only gameplay here is the battles, and having other ways of interacting with the characters, setting, etc. would’ve greatly benefited the general experience. This game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Sakura Taisen games, but the big difference here is that those games had free roaming segments between the battles rather than just cutscenes. I figure this is also the difference as well with P3R, where Tartarus sucked really badly but it was only part of the game (albeit a BIG part).
Because the cut scenes were so structured and rigid and every few minutes would cut off and force you into clicking another “section” in the book it felt really disruptive to the flow of the story. Many cut scenes that were separated into 3-4 parts, could literally have all been one of those “many cut scenes will play in sequence.” At this point I’m thinking it was some kind of PS2 or PS3 limitation that didn’t allow them to have such long cut scenes? I don’t know. It feels like by the time I got to know a character they were a war casualty or the fact that I saw a character in maybe 2 cut scenes and when they are like “I’m taking one for the team! *dies*” I was like “uh okay I barely knew you my guy.”
I also think that the fact that the game has a set storyline just doesn’t mesh properly with the way the battles are set up. When I’m playing a game like XCOM, there’s a lot of emergent narrative based on what your army men do during the battles which then creates an affinity between you and the various troops. So you kinda get that during this game, but then that also clashes with how the story revolves around the specific batch of main characters. This then leads to awkward situations where I care more about some of the randos in my party because I remember cool things they did during the missions than I do about Isara dying since she doesn’t directly participate in the missions (the tank after all is labeled as “Welkin” during missions). Then on top of that, all the important characters (other than Welkin) have plot armor during the missions! Permadeath is a pretty important aspect of making your care about your units, but meanwhile you know that some of them will never die (except of course in a cutscene when the story demands it, aggravating you even further.)
I think if the game focused less on the shitty battle system and more on the JRPGesque cut scenes, it would have been a much better game. In fact the anime in my opinion does a much better and cohesive job of showing the Valkyria story than the game ever did. It’s disappointing to say that if you saw the anime, the game isn’t really worth it and if you are interested in this game….honestly just watch the anime instead. Or you can just watch my video of what actually mattered ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°):
In other words, this game probably would’ve been fine if it was “Sakura Taisen but in Europe” (not to be confused of course with “Sakura Taisen in Europe“).
Bread Master Lee 
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