Nukezilla Review: Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP)

As I foreshadowed in my demo impressions for Valkyria Chronicles II, all may not be well in the land of Gallia. This sequel to the beloved, but tragically underselling Valkyria Chronicles is compressed from the PS3 onto the relatively tiny scale of a PSP title. Gone are the large scale battles with massive warzones and animated cutscenes, though all of the basics of the innovative turn-based action combat and RPG plot and character progression remain mostly unchanged.

Moving past what could have been, to the quality of the final product Valkyria Chronicles II is an entertaining and deep game, featuring challenging missions, interesting characters and a slow twisting story of a fictional nation’s civil war.

One of the first major gripes I have with this game is how the story and dialog sequences are communicated to the player.

With a small number of exceptions, all character development is optional, but if you’re like me and want to see all there is to see you’ll be forced to suffer through hours of slow paced, cheesy dialog sequences. The pain is compounded by the oft-repeated audio clips and character drawings representing the scene. While playing through these side stories, I had to apologize to my wife several times for the annoying noises coming from my PSP (if you’ve played FFXIII, you can understand my pain; imagine each voice performance is about on par with Vanille’s).

This is the same portion of the game where you’ll burn even more hours purchasing equipment and spending experience points on your squad. Each function takes ages to complete and considering the portable game should have provided the player with a more streamlined experience, the menu system appears to have been designed by a mad man.

Thankfully, there’s still a lot to like about Valkyria Chronicles II. Most of the early missions feel like poorly designed padding, but as the game progresses the mission objectives and overall quality improve significantly. By the end of the game, I think it’s fair to say VCII is way more challenging than anything you experience in the first game, which is saying a lot seeing I played most of the way through VC on the unlockable Hard Mode. There’s a lot more game here for your money, but I feel they would have been better served by improving the quality of the missions, not the quantity offered.

If you were a fan of the original game and have a high tolerance level for atrocious writing, obnoxious teenagers and bite-sized missions, give this game a try. Otherwise, I suggest you do what the rest of the Internet seems to be doing right now: trolling the Sega forums with childish rage demanding that VCIII be developed for the PS3 and refusing to buy this competent sequel.