32. Valkyria Chronicles (PS3)
STOP! In the name of love! Before you break my heart by missing this awesome game! (Unless you've already played it, that is. In which case, carry on.) Valkyria Chronicles was the reason I finally broke down and bought a PS3, a system I previously had zero desire to own. (I came for the Valkyria Chronicles, but I stayed for the Flower.) The promise of a strategy RPG that was this visually arresting was just too much to resist. But with that much riding on it, it had to be nothing short of spectacularly epic in order not to disappoint... and it is that, in every way, shape, and form. Valkyria Chronicles tells the tale of the Gallian Civil War, a sort of pseudo-World War II, with a basic good guys vs. evil empire premise that is executed with such beautiful presentation and enough humanity and panache as to not seem horribly clichéd. On the contrary, it's actually quite an engrossing story. The 50+ characters (across five different class types) at your disposal are a very personable lot on balance, perfectly fitting the Sega Blue Skies aesthetic of the game, and endearing enough that you'll find yourself genuinely rooting for them.
Charm and good looks aside, every SRPG lives or dies by its gameplay, and here, too, Valkyria Chronicles is a smashing success. It's a truly deep and well-balanced strategy title, and its crowning achievement is the innovative BLiTZ system which provides hugely engaging mix of turn-based strategy with real-time action on a character's turn. It can be pretty tense to sprint across a battlefield to the next piece of cover with enemy soldiers firing at you, and it's downright terrifying to round a corner in a cramped city only to run into a hulking enemy tank. Additionally, the many characters' personalities are also one of the more interesting elements of the game, as this character's dust allergy or that character's tendency to turn into a chatterbox when a friend is near adds flavor and an extra wrinkle to battles by lowering your accuracy while another's ability to sometimes attack twice or move twice as far on a turn can be a potential lifesaver. There is just so much for strategy hounds to love here.
So how do you follow up on such a lovingly crafted and critically acclaimed title with over 1 million in sales worldwide? Well, if you're Sega, you kill it by putting two sequels on a system that is dead everywhere but Japan and then rape its beautiful corpse with social game spin-offs until everyone forgets that you ever made such a staggeringly wonderful game. Good job, douches.
