Why is Valkyria Chronicles good?

[badgenome]

Rainbird said:
The demo is pretty limited in scope, compared to the whole game.
The story is quite good (there are a lot of story sequences), you have a big pile of soldiers (50-ish I think) that you can take in and out of your squad whenever you are out of combat. Each of these soldiers have unique traits you will want to exploit depending on the task at hand (night or day, city, forest, desert area etc.) and you will also be changing equipment to suit the fight at hand. A fight in the desert is more likely to benefit from long range weapons than a tight city fight.

The game makes you emotionally into the decisions you make too, because if a soldier dies in combat and you don't rescue them, they will be out of the game permanently. And most of the characters are both likeable and fledged out in a way where you can easily become emotionally attached to them.

It's really a lot of small things that come together and make this game something better. Every character is very well fledged out in terms of information on them, and their "potentials" (traits) reflect this very well.

The demo is quite shallow when compared to the full game, the story really feels like an addition to the gameplay, but you can entirely skip the story if you like and still have some great strategic gameplay.

How fleshed out are the non-main characters? Out of those ~50 soldiers, is there a lot of faceless grunt types?

I've put off buying this game for a while because of the huge stack of unfinished games I have, but I think I'm about to breakdown and bite on it. I can't take it anymore.