Quasi-critical enthusiast of books, games, movies, music, anime, stories in all kinds of formats. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I have no idea what I'm doing anywhere. I have no idea what I'm doing at all.
This is a master post for a sort of playing-journal I've been creating for my most recent attempt at Square Enix's (at the time, just Enix's) fascinating and unorthodox 1999 role-playing game Vagrant Story. I'll update this post as I make new entries.
So now that I’ve made my way through the first Chapter of the game, a few random thoughts that didn’t seem to come up naturally elsewhere.
I.
I’ve mentioned before that my last serious run through the game stopped because I got off track when it came to reaching Ending A.
I’d been following a guide, but it was, per my preferences, a little vague on the details. Just, “In this chapter, send up character X or Y, but not character A or B, and do this and that here and there.” Again, this vagueness was a matter of preference on my part, the result of a lesson learned the hard way, years ago.
The first traditional Japanese role-playing game I ever played was Final Fantasy VII, in the very end of 1998.
A couple of days after I started the game, I bought the official Brady Games guide, thinking I might miss something if left to my own devices. I meant to use it just if I got stuck or lost somewhere, or to check in periodically to see if I’d missed anything. Instead, I started following it religiously.
Now, you’d think that what would have happened would be that I would find myself maxed out and ready to kick ass at game’s end. But what happened instead was that I beelined for every objective, and because I didn’t explore in a more free-form way, what happened was that I rolled up to the final boss encounters with Cloud, the main protagonist, leveled somewhere into the mid-forties, with the rest of the party in the upper thirties to upper twenties.
If you’ve played Final Fantasy VII, you will recognize this configuration as being not ideal.
The problem was slightly more multifaceted than this, but what I’ve described here is the root of it.
I still bought the odd guide here and there, but for the most part I swore off of them, and I swore off entirely the practice of following them to the letter.
So for Valkyrie Profile, I chose a guide that would point me toward the main goals I needed to hit, but would avoid walking me through every little step of the journey by virtue of not having those details to tempt me in the first place. But the vagueness of the guide was my downfall to getting where I wanted to go at the time. I didn’t pay attention enough, and I only kept a single save file, and when I went back to the guide, I realized that I’d either forgotten a step or done something out of order or misunderstood a task I needed to complete — I don’t recall exactly which of these things it was at the time — but the upshot was that I’d gotten off-track and already saved the game past the point where it was still possible to do whatever thing it was I needed to do.
At that time, I was torn between finishing the game in its current state, getting the B ending, and then restarting to go for the A ending; or else just taking it from the top and trying again for Ending A straight off. The problem was that the former option seemed disappointing to me at the time, and the latter option was galling because I was far enough that it was going to take me a lot longer than I wanted just to get back to where I was. The fact of it was that there was no good answer, and I spent so long stuck with indecision over which one was less shitty that I eventually just lost track of what I’d been doing altogether. And then I had to restart. And that was more work than I wanted to deal with at the time.
I’ve since had a bit of a change of heart, though.
I’ve begun to wonder if all three endings aren’t valuable for themselves.
A few years ago now, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my wife and one of our friends. The talk had lulled, and so I hauled out a notebook and was writing in it, notes for a story I’ve been working on for an amount of time that’s frankly a little embarrassing to think about now.
Cody, our friend, asked me what I was working on, and I told him it was a scene from a story. When he asked for more detail, I said — honestly, not trying to deflect — that it was a little hard to explain, and in fact the scene in question might never show up in the actual finished story, assuming I lived long enough to get it finished.
He seemed genuinely puzzled by that idea, pretty understandably I think, and asked me why write scenes that won’t appear in the story? And it took me a moment to answer him, because it was one of those things that made sense to me without ever really having to think about it. But now I did have to think about it, because the alternative was to say I don’t know and invite him — nicely — to fuck off about it, and that didn’t really seem warranted.
What I eventually told him was that even if the scenes never appeared in the story proper, they would tell me something about the tale that I might not have known. That it was useful to know how the characters would act in a particular situation even if it turned out to be totally hypothetical, because that knowledge could inform my ability to accurately capture and depict them in the scenes that did happen, that did turn out to be “real” within the framework of the finished story.
They’re also just fun to think about.
So I think it may be something similar with Valkyrie Profile. I think each ending may have something to say about the story and its world, its themes, its ideas, and what it all means. Not that all three endings are “true” in the sense that, say, certain of the endings in NieR or NieR: Automata are mutually inclusive because they occur in sequence with each other. But rather that all three may represent logical outgrowths of the game’s themes and story, just taken in different directions, based on differences in how events play out.
In short, I think all three endings may be valid, thematically, and may help me understand things about what the game is really all about.
This is part of my resolve to play the game more organically, knowing this will probably bar me from the more desirable Ending A and the less desirable Ending C in my initial run, both of which seem a little obtuse in terms of their requirements to earn.
We’ll see how it goes.
II.
An interesting thing to note about the stretch of the game I’ve just been through is that it breaks from Norse mythology a bit.
Now, to be clear, I’m not laboring under the illusion that the game has any obligation to adhere to Norse myth as we understand it. The world of the game is pretty clearly not Earth, and so we should probably think of the concepts it takes from Norse mythology to be inspirations, not a one-to-one transposition of the concepts into a new setting. But it’s interesting nonetheless to see where it differs.
The Einherjar of myth were warriors who died honorably in glorious battle, and who in their afterlife would spend all day in Valhalla fighting, only to arise from their deaths every evening to go into the hall, where they would spend all evening and all night feasting and singing and merry-making before going out in the morning and doing it all over again. This was meant to be training for the Big Day.
But the Einherjar of Valkyrie Profile so far do not fit the image we might have in mind of the glorious dead. Arngrim was capable of facing long odds and going the distance, but said “screw this” and killed himself rather than attempt it. Jelanda was fed a poison that turned her into a monster and had to be put down — not exactly a heroic end. And as for Llewelyn…
The game doesn’t tell us outright, but look at his traits. Notice how “Can’t Swim” has those two dashes by it at the end? That means a trait’s been maxed out He starts with this. Why list a trait we can’t advance? Well, mainly because it’s a clever way of telling part of his story without having a lengthy cutscene about it. We see that he can’t swim — not only that, his inability to swim can’t get any worse! — but the only way this would even be a fact worth bringing up would be if it was relevant in some way. And you can’t swim in the game proper. So does that mean…
Did Llewelyn drown?
Apparently, some official sources outside the game confirm that this is indeed how he dies. This also squares with comments made by other characters during his recruitment vignette about having to bury an empty coffin, since there was no body to bring back.
But there’s nothing inherently heroic in death by drowning. That’s strictly a matter of mistfortune and incompetence. It is a little funny that they chose to tell a part of the story in this way, though.
Meanwhile, Belenus up and trades his life away for someone else. Which is certainly noble, especially considering that the “someone else” in question is a slave, someone we might reasonably guess is his social inferior to such an extent that he owes them no obligation — certainly not his life. But that nobility doesn’t really square with the whole “blaze of glory” which is how an Einherjar is supposed to go out.
Out of all four of the Einherjar I’ve met thus far, Jelanda, the spoiled princess, most accurately fits the traditional understanding of the role. She goes down fighting (albeit transformed and unwilling), whereas the others willingly give up their lives or are the victims of their own bad luck.
Not exactly what I’d expect of Einherjar.
This will be something to look out for as I play more, I expect.
III.
A neat little bit of synchronicity between the game's presentation and its narrative is the way party members appear and disappear from the player’s view. This may sound odd, so let me explain.
It’s a long-standing tradition in RPGs of the retro persuasion (which it pains me to realize Valkyrie Profile now is) that the player would see just a single character, typically the party leader, onscreen at any given time to represent the entire party. This was the case whether they were roaming towns, fields, or dungeon areas, and to the best of my knowledge was done partly to ease the burden on the processor (by reducing the number of sprites or models the game needed to draw and keep track of), and also partly to make navigation easier by reducing the visual clutter and confusion of having a number of other characters trailing behind the party leader in tight quarters.
For narrative scenes which required the entire party, games which did this would have the party’s members simply “walk out of” the party leader, as if that character was some kind of clown car containing all the other members. They would then “walk into” the party leader when the scene was done and the player once more took control of the character for roaming the environment.
This is the kind of thing that fans of RPGs pretty quickly come to accept as normal — just one more abstraction of the fantasy adventure experience, much the same as hit points and experience levels and politely lining up to take turns whacking each other in battles — but which seems awfully strange to people who don’t play these kinds of games regularly, or at all.
But in Valkyrie Profile’s case, Lenneth quite literally does contain all the other party members. While their souls are independent entities, their ability to manifest physically is strictly dependent on Lenneth, who quite literally summons them into material existence at the beginning of each battle, intoning phrases like “Come to me, dark warriors!” as the combat begins. Outside of battle, or other situations where it’s dramatically necessary, they really do reside within Lenneth’s person. Watching one of the Einherjar walk out of her during a scene is not just some abstraction of appearances, and Lenneth wandering the world as a lone character isn't meant to be seen as representative of the party. This is literally what happens — this is one-to-one what other characters in the setting would see.
In combat, each character has their own hit points, referred to here as DME, for Divine Materialization Energy — basically, the energy necessary for them to take and maintain a physical form — and if they’re downed by an enemy, they can be raised gain using an item called a Union Plume. This is all fairly bog-standard stuff for an RPG, and while it’s neat that the developers went to the trouble to rename the characters’ hit points to reflect their nature in the setting, what’s really interesting is the way they’ve taken this to its logical conclusion.
Lenneth is the linchpin of the party.
As the person responsible for manifesting all of their physical forms, if she goes down, the party has just three rounds of combat to either revive her or flee the battle, or else, without her to sustain them, the entire party gets wiped in short order and sent back to the field screen, having wasted the number of periods required by the dungeon.
This introduces an element of risk, since Lenneth must be in the party, and as a physical combatant, she’s going to be pretty well in the thick of things. I want to say there are other RPGs which have used similar game mechanics, where a single character absolutely must be present and whose loss is therefore an instant game-over. But I'm having trouble thinking of any of them at the moment.
Another thing worth noting is that once an Einherjar is recruited, it's often worth going back to a place they knew in life. If they're in the player's active party, they may find an item or piece of equipment of some significance. Llewelyn finds a keepsake of Millia's if he returns to the forest where they spent time together, and if Belenus is taken to his home, he'll find a pressed flower — presumably the one he gave to Asaka in his recruitment vignette. Meanwhile Arngrim, ever the practical mercenary, finds a sword in his home. This is one we saw put to incredibly effective use in the previous update: Dragon Slayer.
(This is yet another reference to Berserk, being the same name as the most iconic sword the manga’s protagonist comes to use).
Belenus and Llewelyn’s keepsakes confer stat bonuses or status resistances on to the characters who equip them, and in what I suppose is a bit of sentimental role-play on my part, I usually equip these kinds of items on the characters for whom they have significance.
In the case of Arngrim's Dragon Slayer, it's a little more amusing. Its name in Berserk is something of a cynical joke on the part of its maker, since there are no dragons in the setting, and the sword barely qualifies as a blade due to its ridiculous mass making it impossible to really sharpen. But the weapon in Valkyrie Profile is good against dragon-type enemies, though. Jaw-droppingly effective, in fact.
IV.
It's a little hard for me to think of Valkyrie Profile as old-school in some ways, in the same way I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that bands I loved from the 90s are now considered classic rock. They don’t sound old to me, the way music from twenty to thirty years before my time does.
But when it comes to JRPGs, there's been close to 30 years of evolution in the genre since Valkyrie Profile came out, and it's hard to argue that it's current.
At the same time, though, because it differs in so many of its fundamentals from everything else in its notional genre — whether before its time, contemporaneous, or since — there is a feeling of it neither being old nor new, but simply different. Presentationally, at least, I suppose you can say that it's of its time. Pixel art in general remains pretty evergreen, but most of the games that use it these days tend to be angling for the 8-bit or 16-bit look for a variety of reasons, nostalgia being one of the major ones.
But nostalgia for Valkyrie Profile's time — the late 1990s and the fifth generation of consoles — tends to be more for the colorful, blocky 3D. The gorgeously refined pixel art of games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or Legend of Mana, or something like Guardian Heroes over on the Sega Saturn, tends for whatever reason not to be a target of nostalgia, at least in my own observation. People will marvel over the craftsmanship, to be sure, but when it comes to recreating it or celebrating it...? Nah. I see lots of love for pixel art, but when I go to the artist's alley at a convention, and I see the people selling perler-bead pixel art magnets or standees or whatever, it's just wall-to-wall 8-bit and occasionally 16-bit characters, or more modern characters rendered in those styles.
It occurs to me as I write this that, when it comes to the screenshots I’ve used, I’m not sure I’ve presented Valkyrie Profile in the best light. The dungeons so far have all been a bit on the drab side. Lots of browns and grays and stone and steel. The Forest of Woe is an exception, being a natural environment that’s covered with snow, and so contrasting with everything we’ve seen so far by way of a color palette full of white and light blues and whatnot. Naturally, I’ve failed to get any screenshots of that one.
Everything we’ve seen so far is pretty visually oppressive, but thematically, that works. Ragnarok is on the horizon; the atmosphere should probably be heavy and grim. If you want light and cheery, maybe look into Pokemon. This is more like Pokemon with dead people; Lenneth has to recruit ‘em all.
But what I’ve shown doesn’t really get across the truth that this is a frankly gorgeous game. If the animation isn’t quite as buttery smooth as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, well, I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison for me to be making, if we’re being honest. Symphony of the Night is at or near the high-water mark for 2D graphics on the original PlayStation. But Valkyrie Profile is still a fantastic-looking game.
I believe the backgrounds are pre-rendered, in the same vein as the Final Fantasy and Resident Evil titles from this generation, based on how smoothly the background elements such as doors and gates animate. But they mesh well with the character sprites, which while still not quite realistically proportioned, nonetheless stand taller and more detailed and more articulated than in the RPGs of previous generations.
But really, the only thing that really dates the game is its pacing. And even that is a pretty “soft” dating.
A lot of older RPGs had a fairly episodic flow. There was a kind of loose "cycle" to a lot of older RPGs. You'd be in a town getting information and gearing up; then you'd roam the field for a bit fighting monsters and exploring; then you'd enter a dungeon to fight harder monsters, find treasures, and take out a boss; and this might also provide the climax and resolution of a particular segment of the wider story, allowing you to move on to the next thing.
A lot of more modern games don't have this same structure. They just... go, and then they keep going, and the urge in the player is to keep going right along with them. To binge, basically.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this at all. And when I was a kid and a young adult, this kind of cycle didn’t really stand out to me, because I was content to just keep playing as long as time allowed. But now, as a... let's say “definitively adult person” with two kids of my own, this episodic structure is actually kind of ideal.
I don't usually manage one whole episode of the game before I have to quit for the evening. Yet that structure makes the game a little easier to manage. The episodic approach means that rather than working toward a single major climax at the very end, however may dozens of hours over the horizon (the days of hundreds-of-hours-long games were still somewhere the future) the game offers a number of smaller climaxes, whether narratively or just mechanically, leading up to the overall climax. Even if I can't reach one in any given evening, I know I only have one or two sessions to go until I do hit a point of climax and resolution. So instead of slogging away through God knows how many evenings before there's any kind of relief in sight, I have a pretty good idea how long I need to go before there's some sense of release.
In a weird way, it's reminiscent of the test-and-rest cycle of the Hero's Journey.
But when it comes to gameplay... As I've said before, there was nothing like it before or at the time, and there are only a couple of games I can think of that have played this way since. One of them is Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. The other is Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky, a PlayStation Vita and PS4 title which was published by Spike Chunsoft... with assistance from tri-Ace.
And that's it.
As 2D games often do, Valkyrie Profile has aged gracefully. Mechanically as well. Its snappy combat sets it apart from the more ponderous games of the turn-based persuasion at the time, and its dungeon exploration is fun by virtue of requiring the player to run and jump and slide, and more generally requiring the player to really think about how they’ll traverse its challenges.
The result is a game that is truly timeless. Valkyrie Profile is a game of no time, and at the same time, for that very reason, a game for every time.
Frankly, the biggest reason nobody can figure out how to make a Duke Nukem reboot work is because they think the 90s edgelord bullshit is the main reason that Duke Nukem 3D was such a breakout hit, when the truth of the matter is that it succeeded at least partly in spite of that. Duke Nukem 3D legitimately pushed the envelope in terms of what it was possible for a first-person shooter to be – in many ways it's just as foundational to the genre in its modern form as Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. You can't recapture that with dick jokes, and if you're not willing to take risks in terms of basic game design, dick jokes are all you have.
Ultimately, what the franchise really needs to shake off its creative rust is to stop trying to iterate on its established formula and shift genres entirely. To this end, I have a proposal: make the next Duke Nukem game a side-scrolling metroidvania. In this essay
No, the Duke is actually quite keen on double-jumping in principle. Whenever you find a new gadget he's like "come on, double jump, daddy needs that boost", only to be vocally (and vulgarly) disappointed each and every time when it turns out to be some other, more specialised kind of mobility upgrade, complete with unique dialogue about why each non-double-jump upgrade sucks ass.
(The actual much-hyped double jump upgrade is obtained during the post-final-boss escape sequence, less than two minutes before the end of the game, which really sets him off.)
This is a master post for a sort of playing-journal I've been creating for my most recent attempt at Square Enix's (at the time, just Enix's) fascinating and unorthodox 1999 role-playing game Vagrant Story. I'll update this post as I make new entries.
In this post, we recruit two new Einherjar and uncover two new dungeons — three dungeons, if we count the Cave of Oblivion, which is to some degree randomized, and which it is generally advised to tackle with caution early on, if at all.
In the last update, I mentioned that Freya takes off, leaving Lenneth to tackle the task of recruiting and sending up various Einherjar on her own. I may have forgotten to mention, but Freya also points out a fairy NPC who hangs out at the entrance to the first dungeon. In addition to providing you with tips on how combat works, the fairy also explains the plan for recruiting Einherjar, meaning in particular what Freya’s requirements are from chapter to chapter. In this case, she’s just looking for one Einherjar with a Hero Value of 40 or greater.
Neither Arngrim nor Jelanda will satisfy this requirement, and anyway, sending them would be a bad idea. Arngrim won’t be accepted, as Freya told us before she left, and you really won’t want to drop Jelanda from your lineup until you get another magic user. So from the world map, we hit Start once more and look for new Einherjar. We’re down a unit anyway, now that Freya’s fucked off, so we might as well.
Our newest recruit is Llewelyn, a young archer from Crell Monferaigne who has a local sweetheart named Millia. They often meet at the edge of a forest just outside the city wall, where Millia says the wind through the leaves sounds to her like the ocean waves lapping at the shore.
They’re young, and in love, and because Valkyrie Profile is basically Pokemon with dead people, we know already that at least one of them is therefore doomed.
It’s Llewelyn, of course.
They lament that he has to go overseas and fight in a war, but it’s at least a war they’re sure to win, so he should be back in no time. Llewelyn, whose character portrait always makes me think of a toddler on the verge of tears whenever it shows us his serious face, is less optimistic. He knows he could still be killed even in an easily won war, and tells Millia that perhaps her parents’ suggestion that she leave him is right. Perhaps she should turn her affections elsewhere, so as not to lose her love.
She won’t hear it, of course. Young people never do. And so the inevitable thing happens, and Llewelyn dies. We’re not shown how. We just get a black screen, and then Lenneth talking to Llewelyn about needing to help Millia let him go, because hanging on to him is hurtful.
So he does, meeting her as a ghost one final time in their forest meeting-place. And though Millia seems to remain fixed on him, there is a sense that she’s achieved a measure of peace with his passing. If she hasn’t moved on, exactly, she has learned at least to find some sense of contentment where she is.
Unfortunately, Llewelyn’s going to remain useless for a bit, though, since I don’t have a weapon for him. He uses bows, and I haven’t found one yet. Perhaps I’ve been insufficiently curious. He can still do damage, just at fractions of what he might, and also of what his companions can manage, being equipped with actual weapons as they all are. Still, even if he doesn’t dish out much pain on his own, he can get my hit count up and help pull out the Purify Weird Soul attacks, which will help make up for his individual lack of damage output otherwise.
Once I have Llewelyn, I can use Lenneth’s ability to search for a dungeon.
The next one that comes up is the snow-covered Forest of Woe, to the north.
This dungeon is a lot more plain than the first, featuring much less exploration, no real puzzle-solving, and no verticality. Not unless I’m missing something. It does try to teach us about elemental vulnerabilities, though.
Being as this is a snowed-under forest, I get advised to think about what vulnerabilities an ice-elemental enemy might have. Enemies such as the bosses, a trio of white, ice-elemental apes.
I’ve been through this section of the game before, and this fight is usually kind of a slog. It’s not typically hard; I’ve usually got the First Aid skill on everyone leveled up sufficiently that it triggers often enough and restores enough life each time to mostly keep on top of the bosses’ damage output. Failing that, Jelanda has a healing spell I can use in lieu of her fire attacks, which are the main damage-dealer here. The only other spells I’ve found this far into the game are a different fire spell and an ice spell, the latter of which seems likely to be worse than useless in a snowy forest full of ice-themed enemies. And, push comes to shove, I have a few Elixirs and Union Plumes — healing items which can restore health and raise a downed character, respectively, and which anyone can use during the player’s turn.
The main difficulty is… not really even a difficulty per se, it’s just that, as I said, the fight is a slog. Staying on top of the enemies’ damage is simple enough, but dealing damage of my own is a slow process, and what normally happens is that I gradually chip away at these three boss enemies, to the extent that it feels like I spend more than half my time in this otherwise simple dungeon scraping away at these bastard ice-apes.
Usually.
This go-around, I have a pair of flare crystals I’ve found somewhere. I’m pretty sure one of them is in a chest in this very dungeon, in fact, if not both of them. Or maybe I got them as item drops after a battle. Either way is fine. Great, even.
A thing that might help to know about me and how I approach RPGs, which explains why the experience I’m about to relay is novel to me despite having owned this game for two decades now and having made at least a half-dozen attempts at it over all those years, is that I have a borderline phobia of using consumable items in RPGs. If I can’t easily find or readily buy them to replenish my stores, I hoard them like a fucking dragon right up to the very end of the game. And even then, I’m still too terrified that I’ll burn through them before reaching a point where I might really need them. So they just sit there, occupying space in my inventory and accomplishing nothing, like weird trophies earned through my stubborn, teeth-grinding determination to do everything the hard way.
Well, that’s a habit I’ve long decided I want to try to break, and although it’s easier said than done, I do manage it here. I use one of the flare crystals on the bosses, expecting it to maybe shave down the HP of the one I target to a significant extent.
It ends the fight, right then and there. One shot. Boom. One Shot. All three of the ice-apes register damage numbers I won’t manage with regular attacks for a long while yet, then blink out of existence. Battle over.
This can’t be right. This feels like a hack of some kind, or failing that, a bug. Like just an absolutely colossal fuckup somewhere in the game’s code. This is more ridiculous than the damage calculation error in the first Halo that puts the pistol on par with a sniper rifle for damage.
Whatever. I’ll take it.
With the dungeon settled, Lenneth exmaines a magical orb lying on the ground, which seems to be responsible for what we’re told at the dungeon’s outset is an unseasonable and unreasonable amount of snow. She destroys it, naturally, and the snow stops falling.
Back to the world map, and on to our next character.
Belenus.
Ohhhhh boy. Belenus.
I do not like this guy.
Now, I dislike him because he is a good character, but in the sense that he is very well characterized and I dislike the person he’s shown to be.
Belenus is a noble or some other well-to-do elite who looks constantly dour and dresses all in black with lace at his collar, with very well-turned speech and a tendency to rail on about the unfairness of his destiny, which is wildly ironic given the other major thing about him.
Which is that he’s a slave-owner.
We first see him in the company of his slave Asaka, one of the Yamato.
Let’s rewind a second.
It used to be a fairly common thing for Japanese RPGs to have one region in the world that was just straight-up medieval Japan. Japanese names, Japanese writing, Japanese architecture, the Japanese works. You might also see a China-equivalent, but Japan shows up more often in this way.
It’s not even all that weird, in one sense. Most fantasy games are set in a broad analogue of medieval Europe, after all. It’s just that they use an array of weapons, armor, architecture, modes of dress, accents, cultural practices, legends, and mythologies that are drawn from all over the geography and chronology of Europe before being tossed in a blender. The oddity of these Japan analogues — Japanalogues? — is really just in how narrowly defined they are, in that they all seem to be pretty specifically Edo-era Japan and nothing else, utterly unmixed with the cultures surrounding.
Anyway, Asaka and Belenus are on the way to a slave auction. Asaka is understandably reluctant to go, and so Belenus reminds her (and thus explains to the player) that his wife and the head maid of the household have both died, and another servant is needed. He requires Asaka’s presence here because she speaks the slaves’ language.
This is also an odd little detail. We know from the optional prologue that not all slaves are Yamato, because Platina surely wasn’t one, yet was going to be sold. And we know that not all Yamato are slaves, because there is a Yamato restaurant in Artolia, and there is no indication that its owner and chef is a slave to anyone. (This is, incidentally, where Jelanda gets drunk on accident while trying to offer Arngrim a job, not understanding that the drink she’s been swilling is sake, and not some kind of foul water.)
Anyway, Belenus tries to ease Asaka’s anxiety by comparing choosing a slave to picking a flower, asserting that there is no difference.
And I mean—
I just—
Okay, so we are pretty clearly meant to see Belenus as a good person in this recruitment vignette. A flashback to Asaka’s introduction to the household shows us that she was bought by the head maid, Maria, out of pity and a desire to help her. Belenus in turn tries to soothe her fears and make her feel welcome.
This is all quite nice of him to treat slaves well, and it would seem to reflect well on his character, until you remember that it means he is still on board with the whole “owning other human beings” thing. And to do a terrible thing in the kindest and most merciful way possible is still to do a terrible thing.
Now, it’s possible that there’s more nuance here. Belenus refers to Asaka as a servant in their dialogue, which suggests a couple of different possibilities.
One is that he hires servants by buying them and then freeing them in order to work for him as paid help, or perhaps that he makes no real distinction between the two conditions and treats his slaves so well that they’re indistinguishable from servants. The other possibility is a matter of a sloppy interchange of terms in either the original script or the English translation.
Either way, it’s a moot point. There are no slaves at the auction site when Belenus and Asaka arrive, so they return home.
That night, Belenus is accosted by some manner of specter. In short order, Lenneth appears and drives it away, but warns Belenus that the thing appeared because his home is under a vampire’s curse. Belenus’s first thought, once he is able to think, is for Asaka. He rushes from the room to find her.
Alas, he arrives too late, and an elder vampire has sacrificed her to some dark entity named Beliza. This is the first mention of a character by that name in the story, though I suspect we’ll be seeing or hearing more bout her as we go. At any rate, Belenus laments that he couldn’t arrive in time to save Asaka, and bitterly complains about being a slave of circumstance. Interesting how he openly uses the word “slave” here, but not for the actual person he literally owns.
Lenneth appears again and offers him an alternative, explaining that she can, if he wishes, trade his life for Asaka’s. Belenus accepts without hesitation, and thus Lenneth gains her fourth Einherjar.
The dungeon I find from here is the Solde Catacombs, which is a more involved and puzzle-oriented place than the Forest of Woe, but still a bit less involved than the Artolian Ruins. According to a carved slab found near the entrance, there are four “Guardians,” that need to be destroyed, with “burial tools” to be offered in their places. These Guardians are actually statues, not particular monsters, and what this puzzle will boil down to is breaking the statues and then moving what look to be giant headstones into their positions. I suspect that “burial tools” is a bit of a translation gaffe. But there is a lot of exploring to do yet.
To the right of the starting place is a pit I can drop down into to find a skill book which lets all party members learn a skill called “Attack Power” which increases their damage output — always useful. Once out of the pit and moving toward the main body of the dungeon, there’s a fairly easy to reach Short Bow. I probably ought to have come here with Llewelyn in my party rather than Belenus, then, but I was in the pattern of recruiting a character, then going into a dungeon, then recruiting another character, then… You get the idea.
I can equip the bow on Lenneth, but the problem is that it’s a mortal-forged weapon.
Let me explain a bit.
Weapons forged by the gods are basically eternally durable. I have Lenneth using a Jeweled Sword named Grimrist (one of the artifacts I got from the Artolia Mountain Ruins) for exactly this reason, since it’s a divinely forged weapon. But weapons forged by humans in Midgard, on the other hand, have a certain percent chance of breaking after any given round of combat. Which naturally makes me gun-shy about using most of them unless they can be easily replaced or they have a very particular utility. Magic users’ wands, at least, work a little differently. These never break from normal use, but do have a chance of breaking after performing a Purify Weird Soul attack. So there’s an element of risk here, and while it isn’t exactly an uninteresting facet of the game’s challenge, I’m more afraid than I usually am of losing weapons here.
Valkyrie Profile isn’t like most other RPGs — I suspect I’ll wind up having said this a lot by the end — and there aren’t traditional shops in towns that I can visit to restock on weapons and other supplies. There is a shop of sorts that will open up after this Chapter, but its stock will be limited, and the only currency I earn is doled out at the end of each Chapter. So for now, everything I have, I’ve found. So even a generic sword with no special abilities has some value, since it’s uncertain when I’ll find anything like it.
This is also why the Attack Power ability is so handy at the moment. Any other RPG, your characters’ combat capability increases along two axes — stat increases and equipment upgrades. Stats increase when you level up, and equipment gained throughout the game generally trends upward in quality and utility.
But in Valkyrie Profile, new gear is scarce. In most other RPGs, I’d have been steadily increasing my party’s damage output with a succession of new weapons I’d be buying periodically. But with new weapons thin on the ground, and no way to just buy them at the moment, I need other ways to boost damage output.
All of which in roundabout fashion is to say: Lenneth is still rocking a sword.
Also in the dungeon is another skill book, this time for Avoid, which increases a character’s likelihood of evading enemy attacks once learned and leveled. It’ll be a thing to spend some skill points on next time I level anyone up; the most recent level-up my characters got was just prior to finding this, and I went in on Attack Power and First Aid in a big way.
Near the dungeon’s end, there’s a fifth Guardian statue, which merely needs to be broken; nothing needs to go in its place.
The boss is a drow shaman — actually a pair of them once the fight commences, along with an ape monster that has high endurance. I’ve been ripping through everything else in this dungeon, especially once I pumped a few levels into Attack Power for everyone, but the ape takes scratch damage from my attacks. This is a problem, because the drow shamans hit hard with Fire Lance, which is the magic attack I have Jelanda using at the moment.
Let’s back up a minute and explain what’s happening here, because the game is using this encounter to teach the player about how combat formations and range options work.
Combat parties in Valkyrie Profile are divided up into front row and back row combatants. It’s pretty similar to old-school Final Fantasy in that regard, except the player’s party is always in a diamond formation (on account of lining up with the controller’s face buttons), and enemies tend to likewise form up in diamond or rhomboid shapes. But you still get a sense early on for what combatants tend to count as “front row” and “back row” even so.
Melee fighters on either side of the battle are incapable of attacking their opponents’ back row until all the opposing front-row fighters have been taken out first. So a good strategy in general is to stick your squishy mage on the back line where they can only be targeted by long-distance attacks, which make up a minority of the damage you’ll be receiving thus far.
Up to this point, the various enemy parties I’ve been mixing it up with haven’t really put that strategy into practice themselves, but that changes in this fight.
The big gorilla, posted in front of the shamans, is the literal definition of a meat shield. Melee fighters can’t target the shamans behind him, and he, again, takes scratch damage from them. I could try to just steamroll him by targeting all of my party members’ efforts at him, but there are problems with this approach.
The most immediate issue is that the drow continuously hit me with the same Fire Lance Jelanda’s been using to help me cut through the enemies all dungeon long, and it hits like a truck. Long before the ape goes down, my party will be barbecue.
Jelanda can certainly hit the drow, since magic attacks are long-range pretty much by default. But that’s a problem because she’s also my only real healer. As I’m reminded the first time I try this fight in my current run, this battle is the first one where the enemies’ damage output consistently outpaces the frequency and effectiveness of the First Aid skill — and I’ve even leveled that up! Three of my four characters have it at level seven (and it tops out at eight), and even Belenus has it to level six.
Characters can use elixirs for greater healing, but a character can use only one at a time, on one party member, and that’s their one action for the turn. There’s no option to attack before or afterward. Jelanda’s healing spell, meanwhile, restores 80 percent of the party’s HP to every member at once, which will probably come in handy, considering how damaging the enemies’ Fire Lance is. But the way magic works, she can’t cast magic every turn. Magic users normally have to spend a turn or two between spells recovering stamina, though the other fighters can speed this up based on their actions. But realistically, what will happen is that Jelanda will only be able to heal every few turns, which she’ll have to do on account of the massive damage I’ll be taking from the drow, leaving the other attackers only one thing to do, and that’s to focus their efforts on the bastard ape. Now, once he’s down, the fight will basically be over. But I don’t have all night.
So what I really need is another consistent ranged attacker.
See, ranged attacks don’t have the same restrictions as hand-to-hand weapons when it comes to battle formations. Ranged attackers can sit safe and comfy anywhere in the formation and take potshots at the enemy, and they can target the enemy’s back row regardless of how many enemies remain in the front rank.
Despite my earlier reluctance, that means Lenneth is getting the bow.
Or it would, except I already equipped it on Llewelyn in anticipation of future need. Which is the kind of thing that seems smart when you do it, but turns out to have been short-sighted.
Valkyrie Profile is kind of unique in that it allows a player to change a character’s equipped weapon during combat, at the cost of preventing them from attacking in the turn they do it. The catch is that they can only change to a weapon that isn’t currently equipped on another character.
Now, if it was equipped on another party member, I could have them drop it and then have Lenneth equip it. But since I gave the bow to Llewelyn, and since he’s not in my active party right now, it’s untouchable in this battle. So it’s either reset and re-load my last save, or suffer a total party wipe first, then re-load my last save.
Well, I’m not one to stick around and fight the good fight in vain.
Alternatively, I suppose I could swap Llewelyn in for Belenus. Swapping him out for Arngrim is out of the question; Arngrim’s damage output is the best of all my melee fighters at the moment, and so I expect I’ll need him to chip away at the ape while Jelanda and my archer take shots at the drow. And between Llewelyn and Lenneth, the Valkyrie will deal more damage more reliably with the bow equipped, and can take a hit better than Llewelyn can.
I haven’t been focused on leveling Llewelyn because my main goal once I got Belenus was to get rid of him. Much as I gripe about him being a terrible person, I also want to be rid of him because he’s not terribly useful. His damage is mediocre even with a few levels, and the one attack he can perform only hits a single time, whereas Lenneth typically hits twice per attack and Arngrim hits for close to double one of Lenneth’s attacks.
And all that aside, there’s the fact that Belenus comes basically pre-packaged for Valhalla, with his initial skill points being enough to boost him over a Hero Value of 40 (the one solid requirement we get from Freya for a hero in this Chapter), with enough left over to start pumping up his skills.
So Llewelyn’s been on the bench since the Forest of Woe. I’ll probably swap him into the main party after this Chapter’s over, since I expect the total experience payout for the rest of the Chapter will be more than enough to get Belenus into a position where I can send him on his merry way. And if Llewelyn’s too badly behind after all this, I’ve earned something like 9,000 party XP in this dungeon before the boss battle, plus what I’ve received elsewhere in the game. I can catch him up pretty handily, I think.
So, I re-load my previous save, give Lenneth the short bow, and roll up to the boss again to see what happens.
What happens is that this fight, like the boss in the Forest of Woe, is also trivialized.
It’s not quite one and done like the earlier boss battle, but Lenneth hits harder with the short bow than she does with her sword, the bow appears to hit twice per attack, and she can attack twice per turn. Between Lenneth’s bow skills and Jelanda’s Fire Arrow spell, the drow shamans drop in two turns, leaving me to focus all my party’s efforts on the big ape. It doesn’t last much longer.
The drawbacks to Lenneth using the bow long-term are that, once again, it has a five-percent chance of breaking after any round of combat where it’s used. Also, it means Llewelyn has no weapon to use when I swap him in. Lenneth is unique in being able to use different weapon types, probably a hedge by the developers against the player getting themselves into a situation they can’t overcome for lack of ranged attackers.
The equipment situation will be something to think about. At any rate, everybody levels up after this battle. That means Lenneth, Jelanda, and Arngrim max out First Aid, and we also find the Magic Power skill. As a sort of complement to Attack Power, it does the same thing as that, but for magic users.
After exiting the dungeon, I find that there are no more Einherjar to recruit for this Chapter. Which is just as well, since only five Periods remain in it. I could go to the Cave of Oblivion and see what’s there. As a semi-randomized dungeon, there may be something worth my time, assuming it doesn’t kick my skull in, which is always a possibility in the early going. Otherwise, I may just use the remaining Periods to rest (another thing the game lets you do) and finally send Belenus to Valhalla and make him Odin’s problem.
I figure it can’t hurt to at least try the Cave of Oblivion, so I go there next.
Across a gap early on, I come across a dragon zombie and what looks like some kind of harpy. This looks like all kinds of trouble, but it’s worth seeing just what they can do, I suppose.
The dragon zombie’s fire breath attack does over a thousand points of damage to Arngrim, and it takes so little damage in turn from a combined assault from Lenneth and Belenus that its life bar doesn’t even drop by a pixel. But Arngrim has a sword called the Dragon Slayer in his inventory which, as its name implies, is especially effective against dragons, so I equip that.
One combo from Arngrim — one hit, really, but I do the whole combo just for grins — is all it takes to wipe the dragon zombie out. The second and third hits deal over 12,000 damage each, which is absolutely bonkers. My average attacks against normal enemies are in the one- to two-hundred range.
Arngrim’s Dragon Slayer is a mortal weapon, so there’s a chance of it breaking — however…
However, a quirk of the coding can minimize or eliminate this risk. See, the chance for breakage is only calculated when the combat round transitions from the player to the enemies. If all the enemies are wiped out, then there’s no transition, and thus no breakage calculation. So since the dragon dies in the same turn that I use the Dragon Slayer, there’s nothing to worry about.
The harpy, which is a separate encounter, goes down with a little more trouble, but not too much. It’s actually harder than some of the boss encounters I’ve faced thus far, making it a pleasant challenge. I also get an item called the Bracelet of Zoe, that will increase a character’s hit points significantly over the usual amount with every level up. This seems like a companion piece to a necklace I have, which drastically increases the skill points I can earn from leveling up. These most likely are meant to be used on newly recruited Einherjar to help get their skills up faster, so they’re probably going to Llewelyn for a bit in the near future.
It’s worth mentioning also that each fight in this dungeon has seen me level up at least one character.
Let’s keep going.
Halfway down a deep shaft is a Dragon-Tooth Warrior, who looks like another tough fight, but once again, Arngrim’s Dragon Slayer takes him down in a single hit.
The only remaining fight in this iteration of the dungeon is against a trio of monstrous birds that party-wiped me on a previous attempt. To give you an idea how bad it was, each individual hit in their multi-hit attacks landed for more damage than the maximum hit points of any of my party members, so that was clearly a non-starter.
Since this fight isn’t winnable and there’s no other gear to find in the dungeon, I chooose to dodge around this fight altogether, and ultimately to leave the dungeon.
At this point, I’ve used up 21 periods of the total 24 in the chapter. I’ve yet to send anybody to Valhalla, though Belenus is ripe for it. At a hero value now of eighty-something, he’s well over the requested forty. So I send him up, then spend the remaining periods resting to restore my remaining characters’ hit points.
When I leave the menu, Lenneth is summoned to Valhalla, where Freya lays out the situation.
This is what the game refers to as the Sacred Phase.
Lenneth and the player are given an appraisal of the situation in Valhalla, relative force strength of the Aesir, their enemies the Vanir, and a third faction labeled “Others.” Lenneth also has the ability to check in on the Einherjar she’s sent up to see what they’ve been up to in the battles leading up to the big showdown. Currently, of course, this is just Belenus.
Although Freya claims things are looking grim, Belenus has acquitted himself well. He’s had a conversation with Loki, taken part in the destruction of some barbarians that are harrassing the Aesir, and overall apparently been a treat. Even Thor likes him. I guess somebody has to.
I’m also awarded a few thousand Materialize Points (a form of currency) and some artifacts. Of particular note here are some skill books, and spell books for spells I already have. This isn’t as bad as it sounds with the spell books; unlike skills, which unlock for all current and future party members once the relevant book has been read, a spell book can only confer knowledge of its spell onto one character. So if you want multiple characters to know a spell, you want multiple books. I still haven’t taught Jelanda either of the ice spells I’ve gotten, because there’s been no apparent need so far. But I’ve got a couple copies of each of them now, along with copies of books for the fire spells she knows. So whoever my next mage is can be well-armed in short order.
The skill books are a little more interesting to me. One of them is my first combat skill, which, if I understand it right, lets characters who are counterattacking hit with their full combo rather than just a single hit. The other is for mage characters, and lets them attack with a familiar during turns when they’re waiting for their stamina to recharge for a proper spell and would otherwise be unable to do anything. These are both extremely useful, since they’ll boost my damage output considerably.
I also get an Elemental Edge, a sword that only Arngrim can equip for the time being. It deals less damage per hit than any of his other weapons, however, it allows him to hit three times per attack. This is clearly a win. That works out to more damage per round overall, and also makes it easier to raise the combo meter enough to trigger the Purify Weird Soul attacks.
With the Sacred Phase done, we’re into Chapter 2.
I spend some time getting everybody geared up. Llewelyn goes back into the party, and he gets the short bow so he can deal some damage worth a damn, and Lenneth goes back to being a swordswoman. Now that I have Materialize Points, the “Divine Item” section of the menu opens up. This is essentially a shop, thus far the only one of its kind in the game, which allows the player to buy items and equipment. There’s a Lightning Sword that Lenneth can use. It deals less damage per hit than anything else in her available arsenal, but, like the Elemental Edge I gave Arngrim, it lets her hit multiple times per attack. Twice in this case, rather than three times for Arngrim’s weapon, but that’s still more hits per attack than before, and it will, again, help raise my combo meter.
I also siphon enough Party XP into everyone to gain them a level, mainly to confer the skill points needed for them to learn the new skills I’ve gotten. And then it’s time to leave off for this session.
Beyond this point, I’ll be pretty well in the dark.
It’s true that I’ve been farther than this in the game — once. And that was years ago. The Einherjar I’ve met now, I know pretty well from previous attempts. The ones yet to come, I remember only a few, and then only vaguely. Just a smattering of details about their name, or appearance, or background. Nothing more.
For all intents and purposes, I’m about to embark on really new territory.
Role-playing games, whether table-top or in video format, are in general pretty deliberately paced experiences — a trait they share with the epic fantasy novels that have often served as their source of inspiration. Games like Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim stand as exceptions to the rule, tossing the player into the action straightaway, but being Western-developed RPGs, they belong to a somewhat different paradigm, and in any case were still a decade or more away from where we are at the moment.
As a Japanese RPG at the turn of the century, Valkyrie Profile's slow beginning is pretty well par for the course. What's unusual here is the general lack of player input.
Most other games would at least give you something to do during the very beginning of things, even if it just amounts to wandering around the starting village and talking to non-player characters, finding or buying some starting gear, and things of that nature before embarking on the first steps of the quest and digging into the meat of the game. Valkyrie Profile, though, starts out with lengthy dialogues between characters where the game is in control.
There are a few brief sections where you control a character's movement for a few minutes, and a very stripped-down and simplified battle, but for the vast majority of it, you as the player have no agency, and no illusion of it. You'll simply be tapping the X button to advance dialogue, and it's long enough that you'll be asked about halfway through if you want to save your progress.
This is actually a little misleading to the player, since you'll never have to sit through a story sequence this long and uninvolved again. But this one is doing a few different things together: introducing us to our protagonist, the Valkyrie Lenneth; likewise it's introducing us to both the setting and the general pattern of things, as Lenneth finds and recruits characters; and it's also introducing us to not one, but two of the many Einherjar we'll recruit.
So let's break this all down for a minute.
Actually, let's back up even further.
Before any of this, right on the main menu after first booting up the game, there’s an optional prologue the player can watch, separate from the main game. I suspect it was made optional for the benefit of players tackling the game a second or third time to get a different ending — or maybe because the game really is just That Good.
The prologue concerns a young peasant girl with silver hair, named Platina. Her mother, the sole parental figure of hers we actually see, treats Platina as if her life’s great ambition was to be the wicked stepmother in a fairytale. We first see her as Platina is returning home from an errand, and a couple of men dressed in black leave Platina’s home. Then the abuse begins.
Late that night, a boy Platina knows named Lucian comes to her window to warn her that her mother actually plans to sell her into slavery. He explains that the same black-clad men from earlier that day showed up at his own home not long ago, and shortly afterward, his sister was no longer with them. So the children decide to run away together that very night, only to come to grief in a field of flowers whose pollen first puts its victims to sleep, then kills them, albeit peacefully.
Platina, after a lifetime of confusion and abuse, seems to welcome this end, and we fade to black on an image of Lucian cradling her and crying to the heavens.
This is all fairly sober stuff, and it tells us things about the world already. This is a place where slavery is common enough that men can buy slaves openly. More, they can buy them as children, and it doesn’t seem to spark much discussion.
Abuse happens. Far from the loving parents most RPG protagonists have — when they have any at all, it being a well-worn trope that RPG heroes and heroines are often orphaned by the plot, if not before the story even opens — Platina’s one visible parent is nasty and hateful, perfectly content slapping her around out in the open and then ultimately selling her into slavery.
The vocal performances mar the drama a little, admittedly. The English voice acting very often seems a little off, not as if the actors are incapable of delivering their lines well, but more as if they were given the lines to read in isolation, without really being given any idea as to the context or meaning behind them. The result is lines that seem to miss the intended tone. Some of it come through just fine, but often enough, it jangles a bit in the ear. You get the impression that nobody would say these things in this way, with this inflection, in this situation.
The fault for this isn’t really with the actors — and in fact, I’ve heard some of these actors give fantastic performances in other works, so I know it’s not them — and more with the direction. But most of the game’s dialogue is conveyed through on-screen text; only certain scenes are voiced. So it’s hardly a dealbreaker.
Starting the game proper, we meet the Valkyrie Lenneth, dressed in "civilian clothes" and standing in a meadow filled with wildflowers. We see, briefly, a still shot of what looks like her standing alone in a chapel wearing a wedding gown, before this image fades. Presumably, this will make sense later.
In appearance, it seems likely that Lenneth is Platina all grown up, somehow. The game doesn’t explicitly say so at this point, but the resemblance is striking. But though the connection between Lenneth and Platina seems clear, the exact nature of that connection is elusive so far. Clearly, this is one of those situations where the “what” is obvious, but the “how” and “why” remain a mystery to be revealed much later.
As the opening credits roll, Lenneth makes her way across Asgard toward Odin's palace, where she is greeted first by the god Frey and later by the goddess Freya, who brings her before Odin. The Allfather lays out the basic situation: Ragnarök is coming, and Asgard needs Einherjar recruited from the mortal dead to help fight. Lenneth, as a Valkyrie, is on duty to find and train these undead warriors up to the task. To that end, she is armed and armored and sent to Midgard, where Freya proceeds to get cryptic about whether any of this rings a bell for her.
It doesn't, of course, though the fact that Freya asks tells us there's reason it should.
Freya’s overall tone when it comes to mortals is condescending, referring to them as “locked in cages of flesh,” as if this makes them inherently less worthy beings, properly seen as beneath notice.
Yet I keep thinking of Captain Kirk in one of the better moments of the worst Star Trek movie: “What does God need with a starship?” If humans really are so far beneath the notice of the Aesir normally, why do they have to fight in the final battle? They sound like they should be the least qualified — so why are they going to be in the front line?
It’ll be something to think about as we go.
Another thing: What sets Lenneth apart? It’s her job to profile these mortals for their fitness to serve in Valhalla. Why not another god or goddess?
The easy answer, I suspect, is that she is not a goddess, or at least wasn’t always one. That’s why she can profile and recruit the Einherjar where the other Aesir can’t. She understands mortals because she does not truly hold herself apart from them, and that in turn is because, even if she doesn’t remember it for some reason, she was one until some relatively recent point.
The first of the Einherjar we meet (but not quite the first one we recruit) is Arngrim, the very archetype of a fighter. He's pretty transparently inspired by the character of Guts from the late Kentaro Miura's dark fantasy manga Berserk, what with his mercenary background, close-cropped hair, jacked build, comically huge sword, deeply ingrained cynicism, and severe problems with authority. It’s a reference that was likely to go over the heads of all but the most dedicated of anime fans in 2000, given that none of the Berserk media were due to hit the States for at least a couple of years yet, but it’s become something of a tradition at this point for darker and grittier fantasy RPGs from Japan to make reference to the series. Dark Souls and Dragon’s Dogma have both done it, and even Western games like Blasphemous have made references here and there.
Anyway, as a mercenary, Arngrim is currently hired to fight in the army of the kingdom of Artolia. This is primarily to support his brother, an artist who struggles with an unnamed lifelong illness. The two don't really seem to understand each other very well, but both seem to be happy where they are in life. Arngrim's brother loves to paint, and Arngrim really only feels alive when he's fighting. So much so that he takes jobs under the table between battles.
He manages to earn the ire of Artolia's princess, Jelanda, when he very deliberately and very publicly insults her father by condescending an award for his battle prowess (in fairness to Arngrim here, the king's thoughts make it plain he doesn't think too highly of the mercenary). Consummate daddy's girl that she is, Jelanda swears revenge.
She approaches him in disguise with the intent of offering him some kind of job, presumably one which will humiliate or injure him in some way, but manages to drink herself into a stupor on accident before she can elaborate on what that might be. While she's unconscious, her disguise slips, and Arngrim recognizes her. He decides to apologize to her when next they meet.
Sadly, Jelanda's scheme and Arngrim's apology both go unrealized. Before Arngrim can meet her again, he's approached by an agent offering him a job to escort a large parcel to the bordering kingdom of Villnore, which Arngrim accepts. Accompanied by a shifty thief named Badrach, the two are stopped by Artolian soldiers before crossing the border. They ditch the package and escape, only to discover as they watch from a distance that the "package" was Princess Jelanda herself.
The long and short of it is that the Artolian king's minister, Lombert, is secretly a necromancer and an agent of Villnore, whose plot to spirit the princess away to the enemy kingdom would have maneuvered Artolia into a position of extreme vulnerability. And to cover his tracks if the princess was recovered before crossing the border, he provided medicine for the soldiers to give her upon being recovered. Yet the “medicine” is a trap; it turns the princess into a rampaging demon that slaughters the Artolian soldiers. Arngrim confronts the creature, and is aided to his surprise by Lenneth, finally re-entering the narrative.
She helps Arngrim slay creature that was once Princess Jelanda, and while Arngrim makes his escape, Lenneth recruits Jelanda as the first of her Einherjar. Somewhat surprisingly, the princess urges the Valkyrie to save Arngrim despite their differences.
Back in Artolia, Arngrim confronts Lombert over the kidnapping and death of the princess. The treacherous minister falls easily enough under Arngrim's massive blade, once again with Lenneth's timely assistance, but a greater challenge comes in the form of the horde of soldiers that arrive to cut Arngrim down, knowing nothing of their deceased minister's treachery.
Lenneth offers to show the mercenary another path through existence, in theory a nobler and more fulfilling one. Arngrim, recognizing Lenneth for the Valkyrie she is and what her presence before him must mean, decides that it's probably not worth cutting his way through half the Artolian army when they’ll still ultimately take him down anyway through sheer numbers. And so, never having been one for half-measures, he tosses aside his sword, draws a knife, and commits suicide on the spot.
Now a spirit, he sees that Jelanda was responsible for coaxing Lenneth to take him, and is amused at the development. Together with the goddess Freya, the player now has a full complement of four party members. Freya then shows Lenneth how to find one of the game's many dungeons which need cleansing, the Artolian Mountain Ruins, which are currently rumored to be the lair of an elder vampire.
Lenneth takes her newly formed party and heads into her first dungeon.
The purpose of the Artolian Ruins dungeon is twofold. In addition to being a dungeon unto itself, it also exists to teach the player the basics of how dungeons work.
Lenneth has the standard repertoire of moves you’d expect from a side-scrolling game. She can run and jump, climb ladders and stairs, and slide through low passages. She can pick up chests and certain other objects, and either throw them or set them down beside her to create platforms to jump from, and several puzzles as a player goes will require doing this to access otherwise impossible areas.
The maps are multi-layered, so that in addition to the side-scrolling action, there may be multiple layers front to back, which can make the map somewhat confusing to read at first.
This is actually less difficult to read than it might look, since you have the ability to move it around and look at it while playing, to help show how the different areas all connect.
Lenneth also has the unique ability to create blocks of ice rooted either to the floor or walls, which can serve as limited-use platforms that will allow her to climb shafts and other areas that would otherwise be out of reach.
Monster encounters are not random. Shadowy creatures roam the dungeon, and coming into contact with one initiates combat against a group of monsters. Lenneth can swing her sword while exploring, and if she hits one of these shadow creatures, it initiates a battle without the risk of giving the enemies the initiative. She can also use her ice ability to temporarily freeze them, creating yet another platform she can stand on to reach hard-to-access areas.
Experience levels, whenever a character reaches a new one, represent a fairly minor increase in capability in themselves — or perhaps none at all on their own. The real benefit to leveling up a character is the allotment of skill points they receive at each new level.
Each character has a suite of abilities they can learn. Most of these simply increment various characters stats upward, although some, like Counterattack and First Aid, will enable the characters to take additional action during battles. These can be performed by the player when prompted (such as with Counterattack) or trigger automatically (as with First Aid).
Characters also have Traits, which describe the most prominent aspects of their personality. These can be positive or negative, but this is irrelevant in terms of game mechanics, because — somewhat counterintuitively — they all simply increase the character’s Hero Value, whether the Traits are described in positive or negative terms.
Hero Value is a score which represents a recruit’s overall value to Odin’s war effort, and when it comes time to send up an Einherjar, one of the requirements will be that they cross a particular Hero Value threshold.
Solving the various navigational puzzles in a dungeon may also award the player Party XP. In addition to the usual experience each character earns toward their next level during combat, party experience can be doled out by the player to give characters a boost toward their next level. This can be useful in getting a new recruit up to scratch, as they start with no skills learned or traits advanced, and their initial complement of skill points may not be enough to bring them on par with your other characters.
Freya joins Lenneth, Arngrim, and Jelanda for the first dungeon, though when it comes time to confront the dungeon’s boss — an elder vampire — she hangs back, telling Lenneth she needs to see what the Valkyrie can do without the training wheels on.
To this end, she loans Lenneth a sword which allows her to strike up to three times in a single round of combat.
See, while magic-users can only cast a single spell during a combat round (and then have to regain their stamina over the course of one or more turns before they can do it again), physical combatants may attack up to three times during a single round, depending on what their weapon allows. Each one will show the player how many attacks can be executed per turn. Weapons which allow two or three strikes per turn are ideal, since even if they’re weaker than other weapons on a per-hit basis, the combined damage of multiple hits can offset that. Further, more consecutive hits, timed right, raises your combo meter, and can trigger the Purify Weird Soul special attacks mentioned in the first introduction, which really let you pour on the damage. So although Freya ducks out of the party, the three-hit sword she gives Lenneth more than makes up for her absence by making it almost trivially easy to rain pain upon the boss by using these special attacks.
Once the boss is beaten, Lenneth is confronted with a couple of unique treasures, known as Artifacts. The game tells us that these are the property of Lord Odin, and must be returned to him or else Lenneth will suffer a drop in her approval rating. This is not a joke; there really is a statistic that expresses the degree to which Odin does or doesn’t approve of the job she’s doing, and holding onto the Artifacts permanently drops Odin’s approval by five points each time she does it (the points can be restored by later sending the Artifacts up to Valhalla).
This is largely not a problem. Doing enough other things correctly will offset the cumulative drop in approval you’d receive if you never sent an Artifact for the entire game, and in fact, some of them really aren’t worth keeping. In addition, I’ve read ahead a little, enough to know that having a less-than-perfect approval rating with Odin is the key to getting both the best “A” ending and the worst “C” ending. A lot of the particulars, though, escape me. Presumably this will make more sense the more I play.
Anyway, after all that, Lenneth has to navigate back to the beginning again. This is a little unique, since dungeons are often a sort of passage in RPGs, a zone of transition between one region of the game and the next. But since we’re literally flying all over Midgard recruiting fighters, there’s basically none of the land navigation that requires dungeons to be used that way in the game’s design. So it makes sense that they’re mainly “pockets” on the map.
Upon arriving once more at the dungeon’s entrance, Freya advises that although Jelanda has the makings of a good Einherjar — not that the player will be willing to part with their lone mage any time soon! — she’s not convinced about Arngrim. She also points Lenneth to a fairy character who appears at the entrance, who she explains will lay out for Lenneth what Asgard is looking for in an Einherjar. This is meant to help guide the player in how they should build their characters before sending them along, and determine which ones need to be sent.
Then Freya heads back to Asgard, and the player is given a final bit of explanation before being given the reins completely.
The game is divided into eight Chapters in total, with each Chapter being made up of a number of Periods. It costs a certain number of Periods to enter a town or a dungeon, and it likewise costs a certain number just to rest between dungeons and refresh the Einherjar. When the player uses up all remaining Periods, the Chapter ends and they must transfer Einherjar who meet (or mostly meet) the stated requirements. When all eight Chapters have passed, then Ragnarök is on.
So now we have our pattern: Search for a new Einherjar, watch a recruitment vignette, search for a new dungeon (or dungeons), and take the Einherjar through the dungeons to level them up and get them prepped for the end of the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But before we put a lid on this essay, there’s something else I want to revisit.
Arngrim.
Arngrim feels to me like a major key to understanding, if not the specific steps to reach the “A” ending, then at least the intended mindset. His presence in the game seems to gesture in the general direction of that ending. He’s a signal that not all is as it should be, and seems to foreshadow that you may yet come to cross the will of Asgard.
This is a hunch, not real knowledge per se, and my thinking here is unavoidably informed by the fact that Valkyrie Profile is a Japanese RPG from the 1990s.
If you weren’t there at the time, then please understand that I’m not exaggerating (much) when I say that, back then, it felt like every scenario writer currently working had just read Nietzsche for the first time and was positively alight with an idea. The same idea.
The net effect of this was that in the 90s, killing God or otherwise thumbing the party’s collective nose at the resident divine will was pretty well du rigeur.
But much more than my snide summations, there is a genuine sense that Freya steering Lenneth clear of Arngrim is a clue. The man tends to come across as if he was purpose-built for this destiny. His strength aside (and Freya comments that strength is not all an Einherjar needs), Arngrim possesses skill, courage, and a willingness to fight on behalf of others. He has the insight necessary to understand, after some reflection, Jelanda’s outburst and vow of vengeance against him. And he has the empathy necessary to be enraged on her behalf when he finds that she’s been set up to die as part of a political maneuver, so much so that his first act after the dust settles on that is to run directly into the lion’s den, where the danger to himself is greatest, to confront the architect of her demise personally. He may be crude, and fight for money, but he absolutely has a sense of morality and justice.
So why bar him of all people from Valhalla?
Interestingly, Freya doesn’t say, leaving it as a question for Lenneth to ponder rather than provide a reason of her own. And yet while nothing in the narrative gives a ready answer at this point, my hunch is that it’s his problem with authority.
This is only demonstrated once this far into the story, but it’s a defining moment for him, and it’s directed at the king of Artolia, who he views as weak and cowardly. He denies the king’s authority over him by rejecting the monarch’s rewards and publicly humiliating him without regard for how such an act might come back on him. So he knows either that the king will do nothing, or that nothing the king could do would actually harm him. Either way, his point is proved. Yet when confronted with characters whose authority seems to him to be more earned, he shows respect.
You have to wonder, then, what he would make of Odin or any of the other Aesir ordering him to fight on their behalf. Especially with the way they seem inclined to condescend mortals.
As before, there is an audio version for whoever wants it. Original post linked here: https://www.tumblr.com/lechevaliermalfet/818377585430036480/epic-poem-to-sacred-death?source=share
And here we have a second introduction, because I am pathologically incapable of understanding the concept of “too many words.”
It’s a little odd to me that I so rarely feel compelled to talk about my favorite games here.
I love Final Fantasy VII, for instance. Yet I’ve never written about it anywhere. Meanwhile, I’ll spend days working up an essay for Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, a game of such divisive reception that it killed its entire franchise largely on its own.
I suppose in some sense it feels as if anything I could say about one of the classics feels like it must surely have already been said, somewhere else, by someone else with better insights and observations than me. Let’s look at Final Fantasy VII again. On top of the mountain of critical thought expended on one of gaming’s most enduring and influential classics, the endless fountain of words and ideas and images created in dialogue about it, what more can be said? What more can I say? And I know, I know, everyone’s perspective has value, and you know, I agree. I do. But at the same time, it’s daunting. What am I, some nobody from nowhere, going to show up and say about Final Fantasy VII in the year of our Lord 2026, almost three full decades hence? What’s next; am I going to weigh in critically on Dickens? The Odyssey? Because if gaming has anything approaching a canon, Final Fantasy is in that category for the medium.
But a contentious game, an odd and imperfect game, or one that’s little known… Or one that’s just unorthodox? Now there you have some rough edges, some odd loose bits, that you can grab hold of and look under and see into. There is a game you can have a fucking dialogue about.
And art is at its best when it’s in dialogue with something.
More below the cut.
There’s a Youtuber I like named Yaz Minsky, who sadly seems to have hung up his mic and gone off to do… I don’t know, whatever Youtubers do once they leave the Youtube game. Anyway, he has a video that everyone who wants to have a public opinion about video games really should watch, which I’ll link at the end of this post, which talks about ludonarrative dissonance and Japanese RPGs, using Sega’s 16-bit masterpiece Phantasy Star IV as an example.
The teal deer here is that there has long been an opinion that games of this sort were for many years among the worst examples of this dissonance, with the gameplay and story having only a tenuous connection to each other. You roam a dungeon, you wander over the world, you fight some monsters, and then some story happens. Occasionally, a boss monster will impact the plot in some way, or be given a reason for existing by the plot, but mostly the story is just kind of a thing that happens after you’ve crossed certain thresholds.
You do, and then you watch, and the doing and the watching have nothing to do with each other.
Now, Minsky rightly calls bullshit on this entire school of thought and dismisses it as (basically) the product of guys with big opinions on video games but who largely slept through and/or failed any literature courses they might have taken, and lack the perception and (what’s worse) the curiosity to look any deeper than the surface to find any real meaning or resonance. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but I like to think it was there, unspoken, near the heart of his thesis.
At the end of his video, he invites the viewer, next time they fire up an older game, to “turn your critical brain on, read too much into it […] and really try to unpack what you’re seeing.”
Now, I have never, ever, one single time in my entire life required an invitation to overthink things. My brain is wired to do that the same way it’s wired to work my heart and lungs. But it’s comforting to think I may not be alone in my desire to overthink, to analyze, to read deep where others maybe don’t care to read at all.
So let’s do this. Let’s take some time and think “too much” about Valkyrie Profile.
* * *
Before we do all that, though, some history.
Games are products of their time, just like any art or entertainment media. The decisions that went into how they were made and why they were made that way — or at all — are informed by the circumstances around their making.
Valkyrie Profile is, as alluded to earlier, an unorthodox game. The phrase “Japanese RPG” conjures up certain ideas of how the game will progress and what will be expected of the player, the way “first-person shooter” does. But Valkyrie Profile is a Japanese RPG in roughly the same way Killer7 is a first-person shooter. It does most of the things you expect a game in that genre to do, but frequently does them in such a radically different way that it seems like it almost shouldn’t belong.
Incidentally, this is part of what I love about it. Japanese RPGs, especially in this era, had begun to get a bit stale and predictable. Having a developer willing to change up the formula wasn’t just enjoyable — it felt necessary.
tri-Ace, the developer in question, had been formed by a group of developers spun off from Wolf Team, a studio under Telenet Japan. They’d made several games up to this point, but the one which brought them lasting fame was a little Super Famicom game you may have heard of called Tales of Phantasia. That game was ultimately published by Namco, in part because Telenet Japan as a studio lacked the kind of resources and clout to get a game as ambitious as Tales of Phantasia was shaping up to be published.
But Namco had their own ideas about how that game should ultimately turn out. And since Namco had the money, Namco had the final say. And this sat poorly with three of the developers in particular: per Wikipedia, that would be programmer and current tri-Ace president Yoshiharu Gotanda, director Joe Asanuma, and game designer Masaki Norimoto. These three “aces,” as they saw themselves, were so thoroughly cheesed off by Namco’s meddling that they packed up and left Wolf Team to form their own studio.
tri-Ace was born.
Less than a year after the publication of Tales of Phantasia by Namco, tri-Ace managed to release Star Ocean for the Super Famicom in 1996.
The original version of Star Ocean never made it out of Japan, though not for lack of quality. I suspect the reason mainly has to do with the timing. In 1996, the world was firmly into the next generation of console gaming. Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn were already out, and the Nintendo 64 was forthcoming. Nintendo in particular was keen to shift their audience’s attention to their newest console.
Things would ultimately go poorly for Nintendo in Japan. Many of their third-party developers had hightailed it for Sony’s greener pastures, or at the very least were no longer exclusively making games for Nintendo. Of course, in the U.S., we remember the N64 as coming in at a distant but respectable second place behind the PlayStation. But in Japan, it came in third, behind both the PlayStation and the Saturn.
This bitter reversal of fortunes put Nintendo in a difficult spot, and splitting their audience between the older hardware and the new would do them no favors. Nintendo seems to have considered their best move to be pushing their audience toward the newer hardware, which could compete technologically against the PlayStation and the Saturn, at all costs. Given the gap between a game’s original Japanese release and its U.S. launch in those days — often months, sometimes a year or more — role-playing games which required large amounts of work (and therefore time and budget) to translate late in the 16-bit era languished in Japan, to be ogled and drooled over by kids looking at import news in magazines… and to be left largely to the imagination, at least until the fan translation scene picked up steam toward the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium.
Star Ocean was one of those left-behind Super Famicom RPGs, along with the likes of Trials of Mana and, well, Tales of Phantasia itself.
The Western world’s introduction to tri-Ace came with their second game: Star Ocean: The Second Story, a direct sequel to their first game that nonetheless stood alone well enough. It hit the U.S. in early June of 1999, as the demand for RPGs on the PlayStation was hitting a fever pitch. It was published by Enix, who would go on to publish the lion’s share of tri-Ace’s output until they merged with Squaresoft in the early aughts to form Square-Enix.
Both of the Star Ocean games borrowed Tales of Phantasia’s broad concept of RPGs with active, non-menu-driven combat, giving the player direct control over one character and putting the others in the hands of the game’s AI, though the player could pause to issue direct commands to the other characters at need. But where Tales of Phantasia was side-scrolling in battle, the Star Ocean games gave each battle a small arena for characters to rush back and forth. It was fast, frantic, and offered a more immediate and hands-on experience than anything else on the market.
Then came Valkyrie Profile.
If I can keep on top of this project and not get distracted from it too badly, we’ll get to see all the things that set this game apart, so I’m not going to spend too many words on it right here and now. There will be plenty of time as we go.
Suffice it to say that it’s tempting to say of the game that they don’t make them like this any more. That’s not really true, though. And the reason, to paraphrase a dialogue from Ghostbusters for just a moment, is that nobody ever made them like this. The developers were either certified geniuses or authentic wackos.
Given that I plan on throwing quite a few words at this project over the next little while, you can guess which way I lean.
* * *
A few final notes about my play-through:
There are four different releases of Valkyrie Profile for a player to choose from.
The original PlayStation version comes first, naturally. When it was brought to the U.S. in 2000, some quality-of-life improvements were added. These mainly come down to being able to sort inventory items and switch freely between characters in the equipment and skill menus, rather than having to back out to the main character menu to do so. The Japanese version lacked these options, which is by no means a dealbreaker, but does make the U.S. version play a little more smoothly.
The PSP version in Japan was, as you might expect, a port of the Japanese PS1 release. As that featured none of the U.S. version’s quality-of-life improvements, the Japanese PSP version likewise lacks them. This means the U.S. PSP version also lacks them, since the developers simply took the Japanese version, applied the original English translation, and then added or re-recorded a few lines as needed for the new CGI cutscenes which were otherwise probably the most notable difference.
The image of the PSP version is also horizontally stretched, since the original was designed for the 4:3 aspect ratio which was standard for its time, and the PSP features a 16:9 display. This resulted in screen tearing, which by no means made the game unplayable, but was ultimately unpleasant wherever it popped up.
When the iOS and Android ports of the game came around in 2018, that issue was fixed. However, being currently free-to-play, the mobile ports feature the exact kinds of in-app purchases you should expect. Also, a side-scrolling platform game seems unlikely to be well-served by touchscreen inputs.
Meanwhile the 2022 version for the PlayStation 4 and 5 seems to be a port of the PSP version as well, judging by the presence of the CGI cutscenes and the graphics for the on-screen button prompts, which resemble the PSP’s buttons rather than the original PS1 controller’s. However, issues with screen tearing appear to have been fixed.
In terms of pure ease of acquisition, the mobile versions are probably the most accessible, given that almost everyone owns a cell phone these days, and it’s hard to argue with free. However, the PS4 and 5 version would probably be the easiest to play and closest to the original experience, given that it uses the same controls as the original version, on an actual controller, and without microtransactions. And the price is at least still reasonable.
Pricing for the PSP version is also pretty fair for a copy complete in box, assuming you have a working PSP. PS1 prices, however… not so much.
Nonetheless, that’s the version I’m playing, because I bought that version of the game when prices were merely unreasonable, as opposed to downright silly; because I dislike the stretched image of any of the other versions; because I’m generally allergic to microtransactions; and also because playing it via emulation makes it trivially easy to grab screenshots as I go.
Lastly, this play-through is intended to be “organic,” in the sense that I don’t intend to follow a guide.
I generally find playing according to a guide to be more tedious than fun, as I discovered when I was playing Final Fantasy VII that way, years and years ago. It eliminates the aspect of exploration and discovery that’s a large part of what makes RPGs fun, and in that instance in particular also resulted in me reaching the end catastrophically under-leveled, because I hadn’t gotten into nearly the same amount of encounters as I would have if I’d been exploring on my own, chasing my tail trying to figure out some dungeon puzzle or running into the occasional dead end or what have you.
I have made attempts at Valkyrie Profile before, and I have looked over a few guides in those efforts, so I have a little knowledge of how things are meant to work. That said, I’ll almost certainly wind up with the B ending, because you just about have to be trying to do everything wrong to get the bad “C” ending, and the best ending, “A,” is also a little unintuitive. I plan to go back through and at least get the “A” ending afterward if I can keep focused on the game long enough, but mainly I want to experience the game as naturally as possible, without laboring under a sense of what I’m “supposed” to do.
In the end, after all, it’s a game. And the point of a game is to be entertaining. If it was work, I’d be getting paid. Well, that or going on strike if I wasn’t.
So.
Next time, we’ll dig into the game proper.
In the meantime, here’s that link I processed a couple thousand words ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A5yY8hIYmo
Tiger found caged in abandoned home gets second chance at wildlife sanctuary: ‘He seems to be so happy’
The estimated 350-pound tiger was transported to the facility, an affiliate of the Humane Society of the United States, on Wednesday afternoon, and is settling in well, Almrud said. There, he will have the chance to roam in enclosures of up to three acres.
Almrud, who estimates him to be about 2 years old, described the moment he first walked onto the grass at the sanctuary as remarkable.
“It was just amazing to see him walk out on grass and to see him explore and have that freedom of movement,” she said. “It was just such a reward and fulfilling to us.”
Now, he spends his days rolling around the grass in glee, Almrud said.
“He comes right up to the fence every time a staff member is present,” she said. “He seems very amenable to our presence.”
The tiger is eating well – a combination of chicken, humanely raised non-processed beef and whole prey complete with organs and bones. It appears that he was being fed chicken, which is what owners of exotic cats often feed them, but chicken alone does not provide the complete nutrition they need to thrive, Almrud said.
In addition, caregivers are tasked with keeping the tiger mentally stimulated by creating “pretend hunting” games and rotating him through different areas so he has access to new smells and environments to explore.
“He seems to happy and content,” Almrud said. “Our staff is just falling in love with him.”
Of all the games I’ve owned and only barely played, Valkyrie Profile is one of my all-time favorites.
Lest this come across as me damning the game with faint praise, let me be clear and say that it’s anything but. I just have serious difficulty deciding what to do with my free time at the best of times, and I tend to get distracted by whatever’s new and shiny — to me, if not in absolute terms. Having a pair of very young children just makes it that much harder to invest my time in anything that I either can’t drop immediately without losing a lot of progress, or that I’m familiar enough with that lost progress doesn’t matter or is easily recovered.
I’ve bought every game in this series, barring a gachapon title for mobile devices that was over and done before I ever realized it existed. But of all four of the main games, the first is the one that I feel like I have to play. Like my continued screwing around means I’m really missing out.
It’s funny, then, considering that I slept on the game when it first came out.
More below the cut.
The original Valkyrie Profile was developed by Tri-Ace and published for the original PlayStation by Enix in the U.S. in 2000 (late 1999 in Japan), just a couple of months before I shipped out for basic training in the Army. It was ported to the PlayStation Portable in 2006 with a few minor changes. It was later ported to iOS and Android in 2018, and later still to the PlayStation 4 and 5 in 2022.
Back in 2000, I passed on it because I didn’t have much time left for the games I already owned, and in the case of this one, I thought I’d hate it.
My understanding of the game at the time, based on reviews I’d read, was that you played a Valkyrie who recruited party members from among the recent heroically dead, trained them up, and then sent them on to Valhalla to prepare for Ragnarok. Then you recruited more characters and did it all over again. Lather, rinse, and repeat for forty-plus hours.
This sounded like the unholiest grindfest ever conceived and devised for a role-playing game, and I wanted no part of it. I loved and continue to love RPGs of all types, but one thing I dislike in all of them is a need to grind battles over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, to get characters to where they need to be. But a grind was absolutely what Valkyrie Profile seemed to promise, and reviews of the time were mixed, if I recall right.
So file this one alongside Metroid and Metal Gear as games I disliked at first because I didn’t understand what they were asking of me as a player, and came to absolutely love once I finally did understand. But at least in the case of the other games, I’d played them first.
I’m still not sure where or when I changed my mind. All I know is that by the time the PSP port of the game came out in ’06, I felt like I had made a terrible error in passing on the original version and wanted to correct it. That was the first version of the game that I bought.
I didn’t play it particularly far, but that was mainly because I wasn’t very far along before I felt like I would enjoy the game a good bit more if I was able to play it on the TV, controller in hand, lounging in my chair. I do have a special fondness for portable games, make no mistake — I’ve been toying for years with the idea of running a side-blog devoted to talking about handheld games and systems in particular — but Valkyrie Profile was developed for a console, and its graphics were designed to be seen on a TV. The characters, backgrounds, and effects all benefit from having room to breathe. It’s not bad portable. It’s just better on a TV.
I finally got around to buying the PS1 version around 2014 or so, long after I ought to have, and for a significantly higher price, though not as high as I’m told it could have been. Meanwhile, I bought all the rest of the games more or less on launch, so evidently I learned my lesson.
Over time, I’ll try to post here my impressions as I play through and have things to say. I’ve been through the game’s lengthy beginning a number of times, and so while I could start there, I think instead I’ll just start with a simple introduction.
So:
What is Valkyrie Profile?
In simplest terms, Valkyrie Profile is a turn-based RPG set in a fantasy world based on Norse mythology. You play as a Valkyrie named Lenneth, tasked by Odin with recruiting warriors from among the recently slain to fight on the side of the Aesir (the Norse gods with which most players will be familiar) at Ragnarok, which is now imminent. All of the game’s towns and dungeons are presented in side-scrolling form, with a lot of running and jumping involved in traversing them and solving their puzzles. This provides one possible meaning behind the game’s odd title: You play as a Valkyrie, in profile.
Combat is fast-paced, especially for the time, when even if you don’t take loading times into consideration, the involved attack animations and magical light shows, never mind the possible menu diving, made most RPG combat move at a glacial pace. It works in Valkyrie Profile by assigning each character to one of the PlayStation controller’s face buttons. Press their button, and they perform their pre-assigned action. Actions other than attacking with a character’s weapon or assigned spell are either triggered contextually in battle (such as with counter-attacking) or accessible through a general menu any time during the player’s turn.
Timing your party members’ attacks just right will cause a combo meter to fill, and when it gets high enough, you can execute special, highly damaging attacks with the delightfully Engrish-y name of “Purify Weird Soul.” Time these right, and you can string together multiples, one from each character who dealt damage to the target enemy, for outrageous damage and a chance at earning better items after the battle.
The result is that battles feel faster and considerably more hands-on than in other RPGs, and create an experience that, even just considered in mechanical terms, is more engaging than a lot of other games of the time and type.
The rest of the major engagement comes from the story.
Recruiting one of the game’s many party members involves first viewing a sequence showing how they came to their end. The circumstances are always tragic, noble, heroic, or some combination of these. The kinds of people they are and the various ways in which they meet their ends are linked, as they must be by nature. True tragedy — by which I mean actual tragedy in terms of storytelling, not just as a superlative term for something sad — can never be an accident. Tragedy is calculated, by fate if not by any of the characters, with an almost mathematical precision.
In addition to the usual growth in terms of strength and abilities, each character has a series of traits which break down their personality and comportment, as demonstrated during their recruitment and their circumstances leading up to it. Using the skill points earned from leveling them up, these traits can be increased, which in turn increases the hero value of the character, a number that indicates their fitness to fight for the Aesir. Positive and negative traits alike count toward their hero value, since it’s a combination of these things that made them who and what they are, and determined their worthiness of Valhalla. So this is a second potential source of the meaning behind the game’s title: a Valkyrie, profiling recruits.
But in a more general sense, Valkyrie Profile seems largely concerned with the inevitability of fate. And so even as the game plays so fast and loose with Norse mythology that you should more accurately consider it to be “inspired by” rather than “based on” its source material, it still captures the spirit. It does this perhaps not despite being more inspired by than based on, but because of it. Unshackled from the minutiae of the individual myths, the story is then free to reinterpret the characters and symbols of it all while keeping true to the heart of the mythology.
And there is no getting around it. Ragnarok will happen. Midgard and everything else will be destroyed, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, though they will try. Oh, they will try. The gods will fight, heedless of the impossibility of victory, because that is just What You Do when you’re a Norse deity. The worse it gets, the more certain your destruction, the harder you fight. Not because you really hope to win (although you might, if you can hold out long enough, and if a miracle occurs), but because this is how you assert yourself, how you prove you existed despite it all. This is how you make your mark on the cosmos.
This is the indomitable Northern spirit that J.R.R. Tolkien so desperately loved, the appropriation and perversion of which inspired his incandescent hatred of Hitler and the Nazis — and which dovetailed however surprisingly with his strong devotion to Catholicism, with its (and Christianity’s in general) repudiation of despair in all its forms.
This is a game about dying. More, this is a game about dying well. Those who die exceptionally well, either heroically or for a noble cause, earn the right to die again, even more heroically and more nobly, in an even higher-stakes struggle, which is itself all but certain to end in fire and the ruin of all.
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
Here's the thing, there is a lot of REALLY REALLY excellent, interesting information out there that demonstrates trends and patterns that could be used to help people be less manipulable and more effective and could help people to better understand the world they are actually living in and not the world that is being terrifylingly presented to them by like, three corporations that make earthshaking amounts of money off of their fear.
And that information lives on insecure county websites and university databases that haven't been updated since 2009 and is completely opaque and tremendously difficult to verify if you don't have a ton of time and a ton of skills available to throw at the problem.
In 2024, homicide was the cause of death for 5% of the deaths of homeless people in Los Angeles County.
In 2022, homeless people were 20% of the victims of homicide in LA county.
15% of the homicide deaths in LA county from 2018 to 2022 where unhoused people. In that same time period, 14% of the homicide deaths in LA county were women.
Unhoused people are less than a tenth of a percent of the population of Los Angeles County but are somewhere between 15-20% of the murder victims in the county.
PEH Report on Mortality Trends among the unhoused population of LA county from 2015 to 2024.
LA County Public Health table of homicide victims per year 2018 to 2022.
LA County Medical Examiner's 2024 Annual Report.
The article that got me to start digging here - reporting that homicide was the cause of death for 5% of homeless people got me to ask "if homicide is responsible for 5% of homeless deaths in this analysis, what percent of the homicide total for that year was homeless people [15%] and what percentage of the total population were homeless people? [.077186%]"
Anyway.
The way that we report on crime is absolutely bug fuck insane and I'm forever mad about the way that violent crime is framed in our news media.
If you want to reduce the total number of abortions, the best way to do that is to give free birth control to everyone who wants it and to provide as much education about reproductive health to as many people as early as you possibly can.
If you want to reduce the homicide rate, there are lots of things that could help but one big thing could be immediately housing a population that is tremendously vulnerable to being murdered with no questions about sobriety or work requirements or mental illness.
This could be at least partially paid for by the savings from the county policing and medical systems that have resources tied up by the crime and medical emergencies associated with having a large unhoused population.
But when you look at the reaction that people have to these kinds of statistics, it becomes clear that many people don't want to actually reduce the number of abortions or drop the homicide rate, they want a society in which people are punished for behaving in ways that they find distasteful.
Which is not a problem that can be solved by statistics but is also not a problem that I think is impossible to solve.
Anyway. Housing for all, housing forever, housing first!
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