Even though I’m making a casual reference to the
ill-fated Power Glove, don’t get the wrong idea. I have no love for Valkyria Revolution. It’s a
bad game, and you should do what you can to avoid it. In fact, my biggest take away from it is that
I should go back and play Valkyria
Chronicles 1. I just might when
all’s said and done.
With that said?
Valkyria Revolution isn’t just
bad. It’s fascinatingly bad. And I
guess it’s up to me to explain why.
Like, okay, cards on the table. I’ve played bad games before. We all have.
I’ve taken my bad experiences personally, and in the past I’ve spent days
-- if not weeks, if not months --
going over as many details as I can to explain why a game isn’t good. My suffering only emboldens me to strike
back. And of course, my ability to hold
a grudge should never be underestimated.
But with Valkyria Revolution? Things are different. Whereas stuff like Final Fantasy 13 or Watch
Dogs fill me with rage, VR almost
makes me want to laugh. I say almost, because most of the time I’m
left shaking my head in disbelief, thinking in a hushed, awed tone that “This
is really bad. It’s so bad.”
I don’t think this game gets a single thing
right. Well, no, that’s not true; the
music’s fine, as you’d expect when one of the composers worked on freaking Chrono Trigger. But it gets enough wrong. So much
wrong. If not for a couple of instances
-- if not for moments where, if I squint hard enough, I can see the traces of a
good idea trying to break out of its prison -- then I’d be fine with saying
that virtually every choice it made was the wrong one. Good design can’t save a game from bad
execution. That’s assuming, of course,
that there were good design choices to begin with. And right now, I’m just…I’m pretty much
sitting here in awe over everything.
Every single thing.
I hardly even know where to begin -- so I guess
I’ll do the safe thing and start with an overview.
The thing about VR’s story is that it’s part of a framing device. There’s a student who wants to find out the
truth behind what happened in the past (i.e. the game’s present), and so he
discusses the truth -- the knowledge his teacher holds -- in the midst of a
graveyard. The point of contention: the
role of the Five Traitors, a group of individuals who have pushed their home of
Jutland into an all-out war with the Ruz Empire. On the surface, it’s a way for Jutland to
deal with dwindling resources and the Empire’s blockade (because of course
there’s an evil empire). Their true
motive, of course, is to exact their revenge on those that wronged them,
particularly after burning down their orphanage and killing their
teacher/adoptive mother/totally not a
villain now.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I tapped out
of the story -- and the game as a whole -- by this point. Said point is apparently seven hours in, but
it feels I’ve played for three times longer than that (and technically I’ll
have put in a little more time by the time you read this post). The story is rife with sins, but since we’re
dealing with a game, you know the rule.
Gameplay is king. It’s a shame,
then, that VR’s gameplay can’t
justify sticking around for very long.
It’s a mix of VC1
and Dynasty Warriors, to sum it
up. Players will take a squad of four
onto various battlefields, throwing down with Ruz soldiers, massive machines,
and marching from base to base to gain an advantage against the dreaded
empire. Critically, the gunplay from
previous installments takes a backseat; your soldiers this time around are
equipped with a range of melee weapons, which in turn carry mana-enhanced engines. The end result? You’ve got access to close-range attacks and
magic, as well as more conventional weaponry like rifles and grenades.
But since this is still a Valkyria game -- albeit a spinoff -- you can still count on some of
the conventions from previous games.
While everything takes place in real time instead of a turn-based
hybrid, you can still rely on cover to land sneak attacks or protect
yourself. Similarly, you’re rewarded for
landing headshots with bonus EXP (and another dead soldier, of course). And on top of all that, you can stop the
action with Triangle to access a battle menu, which in turn lets you shoot,
cast magic, use items, or give your party members orders.
All right.
So here’s where the problems start.
Superficially, the combat resembles Dynasty Warriors; if you look at a
screenshot, you’d be forgiven for assuming Koei Tecmo had a hand in it. But if you watch gameplay footage (as I did
prior to release), you’ll notice something odd.
Button-mashy as they may be, the Warriors
games have all put a furious flurry of attacks in the players’ hands, with
promises of action and combos within seconds of starting the first level. That’s not the case with VR. Whereas you have at
least two buttons for your standard attacks in a Warriors game -- the combination of which can create new strings --
VR gives you one button. From that button, you only get one basic
combo, and one that (near as I can tell) doesn’t change. Ever.
Certainly not across the seven hours I put in. No launchers, no
knockback, no stagger -- maybe you
can knock foes down, but that’s about it.
And sure, you have access to magic that can do the
trick -- and can be changed, more importantly -- but there’s a problem with
that, too. See, your actions in VR are beholden to a sort of Active Time
Battle gauge; with the exception of defensive moves like blocking and
dodge-rolling, you can only use offensive or support moves once that gauge
fills up. So the problem doubles
down. It’s borderline impossible to feel
the rush of battle because the flow is broken up every few seconds; you hit X
to launch your basic combo, then have to wait for your gauge to fill back up,
then hit X again, then wait again. X,
wait, X, wait, X, wait.
The end result is the game’s second problem: it’s so goddamn slow.
The default movement speed is slower than frozen
molasses. It takes so long to get
anywhere in this game -- from the next objective on the map to an enemy unit a
few paces away -- that I’m thankful that I have a gun so I can murder enemies
from afar. The alternative is to walk up
to them, slowly, and whittle away at their health, slowly, while I run through
the loop of X, wait, X, wait, X, wait, slowly. There’s too much downtime and waiting for
everything, which is a death knell for what’s roughly one-half action
game. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if
things died quickly, but they don’t.
Mechs of varying sizes crop up on a regular basis, and you have to
whittle away at them, slowly. Just like
with anything above a basic grunt.
And maybe that
wouldn’t be so bad if the strategy half of the game was in good shape, but
it’s not. You can use cover, but it’s
entirely unnecessary. Enemies will let
you walk up to them and slice them to death, which is compounded by the fact
that their ATB gauges fill up at a much slower rate than yours -- so once they
fire their guns, they’re open for days.
Even if you can block and roll, there are virtually no instances where
those defensive options feel like a necessity.
Why? Because there’s no challenge
to the game, and no pressure to be felt.
The only time when I feel like I have to stand up and take notice is
when I’m chipping away at a boss and he uses some random big-damage attack to
knock out my AI partners.
Other than that, VR is a cakewalk. I’ve
coasted by using one of the default spells to instantly kill clusters of enemy
soldiers in one shot. Who would’ve
thought that a rock could prove more useful -- and spam-worthy -- than a
grenade?
Damned if the ally AI is any help, though. Part of the reason why I say cover doesn’t
matter is because -- setting aside how inconsistently it appears -- if you try
to hide to launch a sneaky sniper shot, your partners will rush in anyway to
smash whatever’s in their field of vision.
Near as I can tell, their self-preservation instincts are MIA; they’ll
pick each other up if someone gets KO’d and fire off healing spells, but it
doesn’t change the fact that they’ll put themselves in mortal peril to begin
with. At least, they’ll do that when
they’re not busy getting stuck on walls.
And since this is a Valkyria game, they brought back the innate talents for each squad
mate -- buffs and debuffs that trigger depending on the battlefield
conditions. Fair enough, but the problem
is that the negative ones seem much more likely to trigger than the positive
ones. There have been times where I’ve
taken a single step -- including when I first got to try out the game/my party
of choice -- only to have one guy get debuffed instantly because he was
drunk. If you so much as step off the
road with another character, her “pollen allergy” will kick in. Well, I say as much, but the consequences are
so negligible that you can ignore them and go back to fighting your
battles. Slowly.
All of that is bad, without question. But somehow, things manage to get even
worse. How, you ask? Well, let me answer that with a question: is this game even finished? Sometimes I can’t help but wonder. Like, even if I held the disc in my hand at
this very moment, I’d have doubts that it was real. VR is
a game loaded with oddities; it’s not broken or buggy or anything, but there
are all of these issues that pile up and become hard to ignore. Some of those grievances are pretty minor, to
be fair; it’s annoying as hell that you can’t warp from one section of town to
another and instead have to walk slowly to
one of the exits to do anything, but I guess I can deal with that.
But the more you look at the game, the more you
realize something is amiss -- and it’s downright distracting. It looks like there are missing animations in
some instances, whether it’s the main character powering down his giant sword,
or just raising your guard to block incoming attacks. There’s a distinct anime style at play here
(as you’d expect), but everybody’s faces look kind of off. Janky, even.
The resident fanservice character -- a spy and intelligence expert -- is
supposed to use her looks to worm her way into tight circles, but it doesn’t
matter how low-cut she keeps her jacket.
I just can’t get over the fact that her eyes look too wide for her
head. Or how her bangs make it look like she has no eyebrows. It’s distracting, to say the
least.
Then you get to some of the cutscenes, and you run
into a problem that’s almost impossible to ignore. Since this is a war drama with thousands (if
not millions) of lives on the line, you need to have people thrown into the mix
besides the core cast. Even if they only
show up for a bit, crowds help emphasize the stakes and impact of the conflict,
and what it means for the innocents who can’t fight back. But then you have scenes where people gather
around for a big rally or speech or funeral service or whatever, and suddenly
you can’t pay attention to a single word because you notice that they
copy-pasted the same model eight times in a row, AT LEAST. And the camera will pan just enough to show
that there are only four or five different models, period. Jesus, I’m facepalming just by thinking about
it. How did this game even happen?
The real killer of the gameplay is a baffling
stylistic choice. See, there’s a lot of
talking in this game. A lot of it. A whole lot.
So you would expect, then, that something would be done to spruce things
up. Sometimes you have to have
exposition, but a savvy creator has to use the tricks at his or her disposal to
spruce up the scenes and keep them from being slogs. The VR devs
didn’t get the memo.
Think of it this way. You know how in Persona 5, there are lots of little touches to make a relatively
basic-looking scene come alive, even before you get to the beefed-up cutscenes?
The text boxes move, the character portraits
emote, the camera angle changes, the HUD shifts slightly, the characters
actually do stuff…even if you zone out and ignore the words being spoken, Persona 5 does its best to get the most
out of its audiovisual aspect without (presumably) breaking the bank. Conversely, everything in a VR cutscene is almost completely
static. You’re lucky to get a slow pan
over a scene, characters stay stone-still, there’s nothing to look at but plain
white text, and you’re more likely to surf on a passing comet than see some
actual spectacle. Characters just drone
on and on and on, and fight their hardest to stay as immobile as possible no
matter the situation.
And “the situation” is basically setup for the
next big conflict in a war that barely comes off as one. You steamroll enemies until it’s time for a
damage sponge of a boss to wall off your progress. Your reward for beating that boss is the
chance to watch bland, interminable cutscenes that dish out setup,
world-building, and exposition, characters don’t develop outside of token
efforts, relationships are barely established, and the game grievously
misunderstands what its audience is here for.
And those grievances -- those dull, dull, dull, dull, dull cutscenes can go on for 15 to 30
minutes. Your reward for getting through
them is 1) the chance to slog through more gameplay, slowly, and 2) unlocking additional, optional cutscenes that barely
add anything.
I’m tapping out of this game so hard that my hand
has created a new fault line. Because as
bad as the gameplay is, there’s something even worse. The cutscenes are awful because of their poor
direction, but they could have been saved if they actually had anything
interesting to say. They don’t.
This story is not good. And not even Brunhilde’s behemoth bosom can
save it.
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