Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP)
Every time I think I’ve officially retired my PSP, I discover I game that is exclusive to the console that PULLS me back in.
Valkyria Chronicles II, developed by Sega for the PSP in 2010, certainly pulled me back in and then some. The game takes place a couple years after the first, with the country of Gallia in the midst of a civil war which erupted after the revelation that the Gallian ruler, Arch-Duchess Cordelia, is a Darcsen. The Darcsens are a race of people with dark-blue hair, which history wrongly vilifies for the destruction of the world thousands of years ago until the godlike Valkyrur defeated them. While the civil war rages, a young man named Avon enrolls into Lanseal, Gallia’s most prestigious military school, to follow in the footsteps of his heroic brother Leon and hopefully uncover the secrets surrounding his death. However, the curriculum barely begins before Avon and his class of cadets are drafted into real military engagements.
That’s where you come in!
The game plays exactly like the first, with missions split between an overhead tactical map showing you the positions of your troops in relation to enemies and 3rd-person turned based action sequences where you move your troops into position before attacking the enemy. You have a finite amount of Command Points to use up before it’s the enemies turn to retaliate, which you can use to move/attack or to issue “Orders” that can increase defense/offense, give you a more thorough area reconnaissance of the map, or even call-in an artillery strike against the enemy.
After each battle, you return to Lanseal to level up your troops, develop new weapons, or just interact with your squadmates in little character vignettes that eventually lead to special missions that can increase your relationship to that soldier as well as awaken new “Potentials” in them. Potentials are battlefield statuses that are specific in each character and can be triggered while in action, with sometimes good effects, like automatic ammo or health refills, and sometimes bad effects, like one called “Stage Fright”, which causes your character to suddenly lose all Action Points while you’re in the middle of moving. Sometimes your characters are racist pricks, and will refuse to assist a comrade because they’re a Darcsen. However, if you spend the time to complete these character missions, they learn the error of their ways and a more helpful Potential replaces their racism.
Speaking of characters, the story of Valkryia Chronicles II is actually very decent and I enjoyed it more than the first game’s more generic plot. I’m a sucker for stories like this where a group of misfits in an academy setting are forced to overcome their differences to slowly bond in order to survive the war that is slowly encroaching on their doorstep. I mean you’ve got the heightened drama of being in high school, plus the life and death stakes of war! It’s why the Harry Potter books are so good! It also helps that the characters are so well defined, all with interesting quirks and backgrounds that set them apart from each other. If you take the time to watch the little skits in between missions, some of which are genuinely kind of funny, you begin to get attached to these characters.
Which makes it kind of a shame that the game “nerfs” the usual perma-death consequences typical in turned-based tactical games like this, and was in fact part of the first game. In the original Valkyria Chronicles, when a teammate falls in battle, you have a certain amount of time to extract them from battle before they die for good. These types of stakes really get you invested in the welfare of your squad, because you don’t want to lose your favorite sniper or that funny weird scout whose dialogue makes you laugh during every cut scene. In this game, though, there is no perma-death - if your squad mate expires on the battlefield, they are simply hospitalized and are unplayable for a brief period of time until they are discharged. I get that having characters drop dead during a tightly scripted narrative like this would have been a pain in the ass for the developers to factor in. Not to mention it would suck for the player, since you can’t simply just pluck a new sniper from an infinite pool of rookies to replace your fallen one, which could eventually result in a soft game over if you get far into the game but don’t have enough classmates left to have a reasonable chance of winning a mission. So I get why perma-death wasn’t brought over into this game, but I still missed the ominous cloud of it lingering over every battle, keeping me from being too reckless with my soldier’s lives.
My only other complaint is the computer AI can be rather... capricious. It vacillates between rock stupid to shrewdly opportunistic, which I can only assume levels out more if I played the game on a harder difficulty. The computer also has the unfair disadvantage of playing with one arm tied behind its back, so to speak, in that it can only use an action point for one character per turn (with the exception of Valkyrurs and boss characters). So for example, there have been many moments when an enemy scout made it within a few feet of my basecamp before its action points ran out, and would have won the battle had the computer been able to select that unit again to close the rest of the distance, but it couldn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I was GREATLY relieved not to lose, but this feels a little like playing chess with a patronizing opponent who could have checkmated you several moves back but wanted to give you a chance. Fuck that shit - I want to win because I’m good enough to win, not because my opponent was stymied in some way.
This is a very minor complaint, though, as the game is plenty challenging, and I racked up enough game overs where I threw my PSP once or twice.
With bright, crisp graphics and a excellent soundtrack to round out the experience, Valkyria Chronicles II was well worth dusting off the PSP for. The game can be pretty pricey, but if you can snag it for its retail value or cheaper, it’s absolutely worth it, especially if you’re a fan of the first game or of this genre of games in general.
