Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria (PS2)

Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria
Tri-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.

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (DS)

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume
Tri-Ace/Square-Enix

Review by Lauren

Oh, Covenant of the Plume, where do I begin? This game has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me. If I were to write about it after one hour, three hours, twenty hours, and sixty hours, my views would be drastically different. I loved the game, then hated it, then tolerated it, then liked it again. I will now attempt to tie all of that together in something resembling a review. This is going to be long.

Do you like the Valkyrie Profile series? And tactical RPGs, you say? Great, but I'm still not sure I can recommend this game to you. Depending on how you play it, it's either frustratingly cheap and difficult, or easy to the point of being boring. But if you tough it out past the initial learning curve, or even the whole first playthrough, it just might be worthwhile.

The graphics are decent for the DS, but nothing spectacular. It's actually fairly hard to tell the difference between some of the character sprites. The FMV sequences are gorgeous, of course, though there are only a few of them. The music consists mostly of themes from the original Valkyrie Profile, which are all quite beautiful. There are a few boring filler tracks, but no RPG is free of those. The bits of voice acting are also decent, but some of the repetitive lines and odd accents can get a bit grating over time.

The game consists of five chapters, with three different moral "paths" from which to choose. Each will lead to different characters, battles, and endings. There's the Good (A) path, the Normal (B) path, and the Bad (C) path. In order to go from A to B or C, you must use a certain item in battle. This item, the Destiny Plume, allows you to sacrifice an ally in order to gain an absurdly powerful ability. Obviously, the downside is permanently losing that character and going down a path that clearly won't end well.

But what really matters here is the gameplay. It's a mix of classic VP-style battle combos and a tactical RPG. I thought that sounded pretty cool. Until I played it.

If you're experienced with tactical RPGs, toss most of that knowledge out the window. After beginning an attack on an enemy, all characters in range enter the familiar VP-style battle screen, where you can carefully time all characters' attacks in order to produce combos. As for the tactical RPG side of it, you still get to move on tiles and choose an action during your turn, but you won't be planning all of your characters' turns strategically in order to maximize damage through different actions. No, get ready to do the same thing over and over for the entire game. That is, you'll be surrounding each enemy on all four sides with your characters, and then choosing to attack. This will result in a powerful group attack called a Siege, which provides a guaranteed treasure drop and bonuses to the attack gauge, which help you achieve a long enough combo to pull off your special attacks - the familiar Soul Crushes. Doing so will become extremely important, because absolutely brutalizing an enemy is the only way to fulfill a certain important quota for each battle. Of course, there are different siege formations (two or three people surrounding the enemy from different angles), but none will provide the same combo bonus and guaranteed treasure drop of the four-person attack. The result is a lot of dashing around trying to position your characters correctly so that you can actually kill an enemy safely. Bear with me - it gets more complicated.

The aforementioned quota is called the "sin gauge," and it's increased by continuing to damage an enemy after you've reduced its HP to zero. It's an important part of the main game, and you'll likely spend a lot of time and frustration trying to meet and beat said quota, at least if you decide to take the "good guy" path. Beating the quota by 150% and 200% will gain you additional rewards, with very useful items available at the 200% level. If you don't meet the minimum requirement, difficult enemies called Realmstalkers will begin to seek you out in an attempt to force you to use the Plume. Again, if you're being a good guy, you don't want that to happen. It's not difficult to meet the minimum in most battles, but if you want those items (which do become important considering the lack of money for most of the game), you'll be aiming for a frustrating goal.

Of course, you can certainly try to whittle an enemy down before going in for the kill, but there are a few problems with that. First, it can be difficult to estimate how much damage your characters will do to an enemy, and killing one by accident can sometimes be worse than a game over, if you're going for maximum sin. Just barely killing an enemy without doing any Overkill will net you a whopping zero sin points. They usually allow you one mess-up in a battle when it comes to the 200% quota, but even a tiny accident after that will probably mean you'll want to start over. Secondly, in most cases, the enemy will have a counterattack. As you progress through the game, enemy stats become absurdly high, and this can often mean a one-hit KO for said character, further complicating the battle. You get to counterattack too, but you'll probably opt out more often than not, out of fear of ruining the sin requirement by doing too much or too little damage.

And finally, the worst problem of all, which baffles me to no end - you absolutely must use every single attack at your disposal, after you choose to perform an attack or counterattack. If Wylfred has three attacks total and so-and-so has two attacks left, you must use them all. No cancelling, no waiting until they go away. That sometimes means barely killing said enemy and therefore possibly destroying your chances at maximum sin, which obviously wastes a lot of your time and efforts. Or if you're trying to do a launching attack followed by a knock-down attack in order to faze an enemy (which becomes very important later in the game in order to minimize character deaths), sometimes you'll randomly get a gem which "grants" you one or two more attacks. Usually this is a good thing, as VP veterans know, but in this case, an extra attack that you absolutely must use is going to un-faze the enemy, ruin your strategy, and probably get said character severely damaged or killed. Thanks, programming.

Those who played VP2 can probably understand why this is confusing. Often the problem was the opposite - you'd want to continue your juggling combo, but the enemy would begin to fade and therefore the game would stop you from continuing your attack. Now all attacks are mandatory despite the fact that this can severely cripple the player's battle strategy. To make things worse, the Soul Crush menu causes even more interference with the combos. It'll pop up when you least want it to, and if you cancel it in order to do regular attacks instead, sometimes you seem to be able to continue your regular attacks, while at other times, it'll stop letting you attack. Obviously, this is another big problem for the sin gauge. I have absolutely no idea what the rules are for its timing even after 70+ hours with it, or its forcing/denying you to attack, and thus far I've found no information on it. Simply put, it's annoying and feels arbitrary. It also would have been helpful to have a Practice Mode for combo testing like VP1 did. Limited battles and no random encounters means you have to practice your timing in real battles which often have very little room for error.

Now, I've been speaking from the perspective of someone who chose the A path on the first playthrough, which is apparently not recommended. Most of this frustration is negated if you go for the C or even the B path on the first playthrough. Doing so allows you to gain some game-breaking abilities that will make most battles absurdly easy. I had heard that the game was too easy when done this way, so I opted for the A path instead. Your "reward" for choosing to be the good guy is a tougher playthrough, fewer characters, less rewards, and a pretty mediocre ending. Better to have the challenge once, though - all subsequent playthroughs are very easy since all items, equipment, and abilities are retained. It's clear from the plot that the programmers want you to go C-B-A or B-C-A, though, considering how much easier the game is with those Plume Tactics and absurd rewards available only on the other paths, such as earlier Expert's Experience scrolls and the Shackle of Sin (increases Sin gained by 20% - obviously incredibly useful).

Therefore, your best shot is to do the Grand Cross (four-person) siege. Over and over again. On every enemy, whenever possible. For the whole game. You can usually do something else with the character's turns as they move into position, but often they'll be required to use Dash, Transpose, or Encircle in order to get the positioning right for everyone involved. (Especially in later stages where many sections are only one panel wide, therefore making sieges by regular means impossible.) Sorcerers mix things up with their incredibly useful spells, but you'll start to feel that they run out of their vital AP far too quickly.

As I mentioned, there are no random encounters in CotP, and the extra battles available outside of the plot are very limited. Say goodbye to your chances of grinding experience points in order to make the game a bit easier. It's either going to be tough and frustrating (A path, first playthrough), or ridiculously easy (any other path or second playthrough). Imbalance is the name of this game.

And then there's the matter of the AI. Of course you'll have to deal with "Save the Suicidal NPC!" battles, as is always unfortunately the case with tactical RPGs. You'll especially enjoy the feeble mage who tends to make some very poor choices, often getting herself killed by choosing to attack something, and then getting counterattacked to death before you can even get near her. It brings back memories of Rafa and Malak in Final Fantasy Tactics, except I don't recall them ever dying within a single turn. Another rescue battle got me to the point where I had to restart, because the NPC kept attacking the boss of the area, which destroyed my shot at the sin quota since I had to keep the guy alive and worry about positioning in a cramped area. On the plus side, the enemy AI is pretty bad, too. They'll usually leave you alone until you get close to them, which allows you to recover before engaging them. Sometimes they'll get stuck behind a fence and just wander back and forth, back and forth, on every turn until you approach them. It's sad, in a way.

Let's take a look at the plot. Angry human seeks vengeance against the valkyrie for taking his father to an honourable afterlife. Said human is tempted by Mistress Hel and then has to choose whether to use the Destiny Plume for his vengeance or ignore the will of the dark side. Sounds pretty cool, actually. And again, I thought the same, until I played the game.

Yet another problem with playing on the A path is that you really don't get to see much of that side of the plot. Instead, you get bombarded with generic tactical RPG political drama. It was very boring for the most part, and I found myself feeling incredibly disappointed with the first ending. However, on the second and third playthroughs, the plot is much more interesting, as you see different sides of each scenario (allies become enemies and vice versa) as a result of your choices. In addition, you get to see more of the Valhalla/Niflheim story on the B and C paths. I was much happier with the plot after seeing all of the possibilities.

The script deserves a special mention. The dialogue is very well localized, and even poetic at times. I enjoyed reading through the scenes, even if I had no clue what the characters were talking about.

If you beat all three paths, the classic Tri-Ace bonus dungeon opens up - The Seraphic Gate. If you've played this dungeon in other titles, you'll understand that they tend to make the scenes amusingly non-canon. Apparently to offset the downer of a story, they made the scenes absolutely bizarre and hilarious in here. I genuinely laughed out loud at numerous scenes, and that alone was worth at least one playthrough. However, you can complete up to ten "laps" of the Seraphic Gate in order to find more rewards, different scenes, and of course, tougher battles. You can keep restarting your lap in order to build your characters up, but you can't jump back a floor, and that proves to be a problem if you have difficulty with the first battle. And it is indeed fairly challenging as you progress through its many levels and laps. You'll encounter some very cruel situations, such as an enemy sorceror casting Invoke Feather, of all things. Not only did this repeatedly revive an enemy that I took a full turn to kill, but it revived him with full HP. That, of course, never happens when you revive an ally.

All that hard work in the main game surely pays off in the bonus dungeon, right? Nope. All of your items, levels, equipment, money, and abilities are gone. You start from scratch, picking a party and gradually building it up again. It sounds unappealing, but in all honesty, I enjoyed the Seraphic Gate as a game on its own more than the regular game itself. Why? No more sin gauge. This allows you much more freedom to be genuinely strategic, much like a traditional tactical RPG. Sure, the gameplay flaws are still there, the stage layouts make it difficult to move around, and some very cheap tactics will be used on you, but at this point, you'll be used to it. Beyond that, it's a lot of fun.

After so many hours with this game, and so many curses uttered (or yelled) at my DS, I'm not entirely sure how to sum up the experience. It was not classic Valkyrie Profile, it was not a classic tactical RPG, nor was it a perfect blend of the two. I cannot recall a game that frustrated me as much as the first path did in this title, with its many confusing elements, cheap tactics, and limiting requirements. Admittedly, if I knew exactly how to do the battles right off the bat, I would have encountered fewer problems, but no one's an expert after simply reading the manual. I'd recommend anyone who plays this to consult an in-depth FAQ to learn what you'll really need to do in battle, because the game itself doesn't tell you much.

Again, it's either easy with continually awesome rewards, or it's tough with extra punishment and less rewards. Either way, all subsequent playthroughs are entirely too easy. It's one of the most imbalanced games I've ever played. But despite all that, the plot becomes intriguing, successful battles are very satisfying, and the Seraphic Gate is great all-around. I'd recommend getting this game used, if you can. The person who played my copy before selling it apparently only played for three hours. Now I understand why.