As of a few hours ago I beat Valkyrie Elysium Hard Mode with 97% of the trophies gathered. Ready to give my thoughts game.
GOOD:
- Fun battle system. The best thing about the game really. One thing you'll notice right off the bat is that Valkyrie is a lot more grounded than most Action/RPG heroes. Once a attack is initiated, it must be finished before you can go into block or dodge roll. This encourages players to wait for an opening before you strike or you will be knocked out of your combo string(Valkyrie takes a century to get up). Parrying, Precision block and just frame dodge rolling are all included and more are difficult to do in this game but more rewarding. Success at any of these will slow down time around you and have enemies take more damage and drop tons of health/magic gems(nearly a full restore). Enemies can crushed(more damage, gems, and stunned) by using their weakness element. Einherjar can be summoned using the magic gauge and the amount it takes per summon depends on summon length (15secs, 30sec, 60sec,). 2 can be summoned at a time and outside of assisting you in battle they add elemental damage to your weapon which leads to more damage and crush just by attacking. Using a magic of same element that you are currently wielding will unleash more powerful version of said magic. Battle system revolves around whittling down enemy packs quickly by crushing them. You don't really have many area based skills so it is more about taking enemies out 1 by 1. You always want to wielding the weakness element of whatever you facing and building that crush gauge quickly. Lots of enemies are thrown at you at a time and it is very easy to get overwhelmed and enemies are quite aggressive and there are just some enemies pairings that can be lethal. If a group of 4 enemies composed of 2 fired based, and 2 ice based appear kill them in parings. It helps to conserve MP than trying to bounce back in forth between both parings. One you get the tempo down battles just feel very satisfying.
- Great characters designs. I makes me want to see more of the artist work.
MEH:
- Action/RPG but definitely more action than RPG. If you've played Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry/Bayonetta then you know what to expect. I really did not like the power up system for Valkyrie. You need gems to power her and her weapons up but every chapter limits the type of gems you can find thus capping how much progress can be made. I hate hard capping in any RPG. After chapter 6 all gems will be available and you can potentially maxed Valkyrie and weapons out. All runes/magic and weapons will be available as well. If you go for everything at that time than every chest form chapter 7 onward will be useless. You can still find items but they cap as well and you wont be using them anyways because they lower end chapter ranking. RPG lite.
- The story is dull. Not gonna sugar coat. Pays homage to the original series in a way that long time fans will guess everything before it is revealed. Nothing in it for us. I have a hard believing the new fan will fair any better because the story does not even begin to go somewhere until that the last 2 chapters. Chapters 1-6 are just go here and purify souls, enlist a Einherjar, or find this item. Story tries to be exciting by having the the Black (armored) Valkyrie Hilde frequently get in the way and have Valkyrie and crew question their mission but it is the same shit every time, "Haha, you still don't know?", or "Haha you still don't get it?". Then when everything is finally revealed it is like nothing is revealed because really, if you are a fan of the classic series or even basic Norse Mythology, it ends up not being a huge revelation story wants it to be.
- Just like the story, every character is fucking dull. Back in the original Valkyrie Profile every Einherjar would have a wonderfully dramatic cutscene that depicted the last moments of their life. This game not only just has you sit through audio files with no art or anything, it is also optional, tucked away in the Einherjar window. I sat through one Einherjar's audio story and that was it because I did not find the presentation of these interesting and kind of just forgot about them. Valkyrie herself is just Lenneth again; We seen her already. Odin and Fenrir are standard god archetypes. Nothing stands out. Not fair actually, the one thing the story did that was semi interesting is the setup for a sequel. They can go a lot of places.
- Some of Moitoi "Boitoi" Sakaruba's most forgettable work. OST is just bland and does not ooze any of his trademark sound. Not bad, just not Sakaruba.
- Sidequest suck and reek of laziness. We have entered a time where sidequest are used to flesh out the world the game takes place in. These sidequest harken back to PS2 JRPG's. They take place in contained areas of bigger maps and they just involve battle after battle after battle regardless of the context of the actually sidequest. Soleil are composed of ex Team Ninja/Vahalla guys and instead of doing these lame sidequest why not look back at their roots and have sidequest like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May cry? Battle rooms that task you with clearing them a certain way. Yea, it is still more fighting but at least it has interesting stipulations. The best stuff is gotten from sidequest so at least they're fruitful.
- Targeting system is a pain in ass. Some kind of issue going on that makes it hard to auto target enemies too close Valkyrie. This leads to Valkyrie tending to target enemies much further away. When you finally get the enemy you want, you can hard target, but that also has its own issue. You control the camera with the right stick and you also move between hard lock targets the same way *smh*. I need to adjust the camera aaaand oops!, now I'm targeting somebody I didn't want too. How stupid. Targeting the enemy you want can be pretty tedious, especially when enemies have multi parts to them and/or there are a lot of them in the area. On the camera itself, its does its job, but huge enemies in tight areas usually means camera being stick somewhere until they back up.
BAD:
There is only one thing that I genuilly disliked about this game; The padding. This mainly will be an issue for those of want the Plat, but there are some general ones as well.
1. If you missed an item, rune, or magic and want to go back to a chapter to get it, be prepared to finish the entire chapter. You cannot exit a chapter once you started it; If you do, all progress will be lost. These Chapters are not short. Imagine missing something in the beginning of the chapter. I would have been fine with a save point quick travel (travel between save points)l. Not even that.
2. There are difficulty trophies. One for Normal and hard mode playthrough. 99% of other games would stack these trophies(Beating game on highest difficulty would clear all lower difficulties). Not Valkyrie Elysium. You have to play the game twice. Bullshit.
3. Above would not be so bad if there was a New Game Plus. There is no New Game Plus.
4. The most tedious thing to do in the game is SSS ranking all weapons. There are 6 weapons in the game (DLC ones don't count). Every time you land a hit you gain weapon XP(magic does not count). Gain enough and the weapon will rank up. You'll go through Rank E - SSS. If you play through the game normally you will be nowhere close to having weapons maxed out. If you only used one weapon the entire game, you STILL would not t have maxed. This alone will add 5-8 hours on the clock.
No NG+. No stacked difficulties. The absurd amount of weapon XP each needs to be maxed. This is all just done to add time to clock. Valkyrie Elysium can be beat in 20-25 hours and that includes doing all the side quest. The methods used to extend the game end up making the game feel outdated as if it has been paying attention to modern trends. This feels like PS2 era shit.
As y'all can see; MEH is the overwhelming sentiment. Valkyrie Elysium is just ok. I would give it a 7/10 but with plat in mind 6/10. Decent start, but a sequel would need to be so much more. Improvements in every category. With how the game ended I am curious to see where they taking this new Valkyrie series. They really opened book to do its own thing after playing it so safe with this entry. Hopefully that entry comes because I would hate to see this series and the classic fade away.
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