Valkyrie Profile 2: SilmeriaTri-Ace/Square-Enix
Anthony: It’s official - Norse mythology is awesome. It inspires tons of weapon names in just about every RPG ever, it gives Amon Amarth something to continually rock out about, and it spawned Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, arguably the best game of the series and quite possibly a top five game of the best PS2 games I’ve played. Valkyrie Profile 2 truly took the series to the next level, with incredible graphics, a gripping story and some rather fun gameplay to boot.
Valkyrie Profile 2 combines 2-D dungeon crawling with 3-D RPG battles, an upgrade from the 2-D battles from Valkyrie Profile, but keeping many of the same elements. The story takes place in an alternate history from the original, and plays out almost the opposite of it too. The original Valkyrie Profile had you loyally serving Odin as Lenneth, seeing very detailed stories of the Einherjar you’ll train and send to Valhalla, while offering little in the way of a main storyline. The sequel has you playing as Alicia/Silmeria, defying Odin by attempting to send Einherjar back to Midgard, and instead has a broad main story and only snippets about the Einherjars' lives. While there was nothing inherently wrong with the original, the change in design is welcome.
What’s good:
- The story is very intense and engaging. From the opening scenes to the end, scenes are presented in wonderful 3-D animation and aided by excellent voice acting. This really helps add to the experience, as many of the events in the game will be very sad and tense in nature; at times I felt more like I was watching a suspense movie than a plot scene of an RPG. It comes together very well and had us very eager to see more scenes.
- The graphics are stellar, and represent quite possibly the best I’ve seen on PS2. Granted, this is not quite the graphical achievement of say, Final Fantasy XII, in that the world isn’t 3-D. However, because they’ve kept the world 2-D and saved the battles for 3-D, the environments, character models, enemies and their animations all look incredible. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a PS2 game that looks as pretty as this, and it really helps the experience.
- The decision to keep the exploration in 2-D was a good one, in that they were able to expand on the dungeon mechanics from Valkyrie Profile. While there were puzzles related to Lenneth’s ability to make crystals in the original, they’ve expanded on this to make puzzles where Alicia can freeze enemies/objects and switch places with them. This leads to a lot of navigation puzzles that surprisingly can be pretty fun to pull off. Further, the controls are tight and it’s fairly easy to avoid getting ambushed by enemies as a result.
- Battles are, in a word, satisfying. You can move your party or split two parties to move around a 3-D map, strategically moving and dashing to avoid enemy attacks and start up combos. The game has no active time system, as the enemies will never move when you don’t, and using this factor in combination with your AP gauge for dashing, attacking, casting spells, or using items makes up the bulk of the strategy. Further to the point - it’s really fun to attack. Characters have a set of attacks based on their weapons and your choices, and by timing them in your own preferred pattern, you can set up strings of combos, ground attacks, juggles, and more to punish enemies. When pulled off correctly, the combos look vicious, are highly effective, and are fun to watch.
- The sound package is great as well, as the music is good, the voice acting is great, and the sound effects really add a punch to the battles. There’s a lot of great voice acting to be found here, including some bonus dialog available when some Einherjar that have story links to other characters are placed in battle. Between that, the aggressive cries of characters in battle, and the resounding “thud” from critical hits and breaks, the battles get quite a lot of personality.
- Allowing a second player to take control of characters in battle was a genius and very simple inclusion that more RPGs should try to utilize. It was a blast to fight cooperatively.
- The bonus dungeon, the “Seraphic Gate” was great this time around. It’s well balanced: tough, but you’re able to level up and get good items within, and it’s full of very funny scenes.
What’s neutral:
- The game is nicely balanced in being functional regardless of the party you choose; once you realize that many main characters are added and taken throughout the game, the appeal of utilizing Einherjar (who never leave unless released) becomes obvious. Depending on your tastes and how you set up skills/abilities, you can make useful parties out of tons of different character combinations. However, the average player may be disappointed to find that he/she may have been shafted in Einherjar selection. The game doesn’t really make it clear, but when you find Einherjar in the world, you may be getting a randomly chosen Einherjar from an invisible pool. Further, the only way to get a different one is to save prior to finding them, and reload until you get the right one. This is a strange mechanic, as some Einherjar are clearly superior to others, yet that fact is not readily apparent when you receive them, and someone can blissfully go through the game not realizing he/she missed out on some of the better characters by luck.
- Oddly, one status effect that’s meant to be beneficial seems to not work properly. In Valkyrie Profile games, “Faint” was an effect you could give by brutalizing the enemy such that they’d lose a turn. However, this isn’t turn based, so Faint literally wears off after taking one step, and the enemy can immediately attack then. Chances are, once you’ve caused Faint, you’ve used up most if not all of your AP that you’d need to attack anyway, so that was an odd inclusion.
- Though the music is great, the same battle music plays through basically the entire game. You can change this in a New Game+, but still, mixing it up would’ve been nice.
What’s bad:
- This game is very guide-heavy. What this means is without an adequate walkthrough, the game may end up extraordinarily challenging and confusing to players attempting to venture out on their own. Skills are a good example... by linking various accessories and pieces of equipment, characters can gradually learn abilities over time that they can set to a character. These affect stats and performance in battle and have very significant effects. While the game gives you some vague guidance on how to unlock skills, most of these will only be unlocked by finding the correct type of rune combinations in equipment. This may amount to repeatedly breaking a specific body part of a random enemy until a rune drops and seeing if it helps you. How would you know this? You wouldn’t. Granted, it’s pretty fun to thrash enemies and see what drops, but some parts are very difficult to target and have low drop rates too, so a guide is extremely helpful in trying to figure out where to find runes. Similarly, you may find you’re suddenly up against a cluster of bees that you can’t do any damage to. Little did you know, the bees are ghost type, which means unless you have elemental attacks (a mage or some very specific archer attacks) or the Ghost Buster skill, you’d best run. Without significant experimentation or a guide, that would likely be very confusing. Further still, dungeons often require the manipulation of “sealstones” that can have beneficial or negative effects on your party and enemies in the dungeon. They can also be unlocked to bring into other dungeons. Difficult bosses may be scaled down significantly in difficulty by having the right sealstones set or carried, but unless you fight the boss yourself to figure out its attacks/characteristics, you’re in for a very tough ride without a guide to help you through it. And some extremely beneficial items for carrying sealstones are unlocked by doing optional dungeons that are missable and opened by speaking to a specific NPC at a specific time? Wow.
What we have here is a very rare RPG indeed. I can’t remember the last time I was actually feeling very tense about what would happen in a RPG’s scene, but this game made it happen. When you combine the great story with a gratifying battle system, a beautiful graphical package and excellent sound to boot, what you have is... well, one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. Valkyrie Profile 2 is an incredible sequel indeed. I just strongly recommend playing with a walkthrough on hand.
Lauren: Valkyrie Profile 2 was a pleasant surprise. The original VP was one of the many PS1 RPGs that I never got around to playing, so I didn't know what to expect of its sequel (technically a prequel). It ended up being such a gorgeous and well made RPG that I was left wondering why I'd never heard people talk about it. After finishing it, I'm even more baffled about this.
The graphics were astounding for the Playstation 2 - definitely up there with FFXII and MGS3. Backgrounds were incredibly detailed, and character models looked nearly flawless. The beautiful lighting effects throughout added an ethereal touch to the game as well. I also very much enjoyed the music all throughout Silmeria, from calm piano melodies to rocking dungeon themes.
Anthony already described the gameplay, and I'll leave it at that, since he actually "played" the game while I backed him up in battle with the other two characters. The co-op option was a lot of fun - not enough RPGs have a feature like that, so kudos to them for including it.
I can easily say that I have never, ever encountered an RPG as depressing or unforgiving in terms of removing characters from your party as VP2. There were several parts throughout the game where Anthony and I looked at each other in shock at what had transpired in a cutscene. The plot twists are done very well, and the story is excellent overall, but I can't say it's the happiest of tales.
The classic bonus dungeon was present here, and it lived up to the usual expectations. It was challenging and absolutely hilarious. The humour was especially welcome after the downer of a story, much like Covenant of the Plume. The scenes defy description, so it's probably best to experience these bizarre moments for yourself.
It may not be perfect, and it's certainly challenging, but there's really no reason for a traditional RPG fan to pass over this title. Hopefully we'll see a re-release soon like we did with Lenneth, because a solid RPG like this definitely deserves more players.
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