After capturing the hearts of a relatively small audience back in 2008 on the PS3, SEGA has decided to have another crack at bringing Valkyria Chronicles, a unique piece in their collection, back in remastered form for the PlayStation 4. By bringing Squad 7 back once again to recapture their homeland of Gallia, has SEGA faired in remastering this little known title? Or has the Imperial Alliance made a mockery of them? Despite its massively disappointing sales worldwide, and its sequels subsequently moving to the now defunct PSP, has SEGA’s previous successful test of sales on PC helped rekindle the much-loved cult classic in the manner it so richly deserves?
Valkyria Chronicles is about a squadron of hardened soldiers and new cadets ordered around by the Gallian Militia. Often made fun of and used to go on suicide missions, you take control of Squad 7 and take to the battlefield to push back the Imperial Alliance away from your homeland and take the fight to them.
After loading the game, the opening FMV doesn’t impress. I feel like SEGA missed an opportunity to make the resolution of the FMV higher. While having 720p FMV on the PS3 is fine, I’d expect a higher resolution for a game running at 1080p on the PS4. You can see the thick aliasing amongst all of the characters and objects in every FMV you see, so initial impressions are disappointing.
But once the FMV ends you are quickly patched up and sent on your way into the battlefield with a gun in one hand, a Ragnite grenade in the other, and your trusty tracked companion beneath your feet. The lack of the FMV’s upgrade was disappointing, leading me to think that the port would be a disservice to the franchise, but, thankfully, SEGA surpassed my expectations with an enormously accurate mortar shell exploding at my feet.
I am shell-shocked at how SEGA has made the CANVAS engine look even more stunning than before, and this time it’s made the transition to 60FPS and 1080p. Not only has this improved Valkyria Chronicles in graphical quality, but the game now feels completely different too. The transition to 60FPS has made controlling the game more fluid and responsive, characters feel more natural in motion, and everything looks more crisp and vibrant. A notable improvement are the textures. Whether the textures are up close or further away, the use of AF (Anisotropic Filtering) has improved the cleanliness and sharpness of the textures.
This level of beauty transitions over to the great character development and storytelling. The wealth of characters is numerous and each of them all have their own personal story behind them – even if most of them are in text form. While they have their own personalities, they also have friendships, and having their closest friends on the battlefield with them can boost their traits, but there are also some others that prefer to be alone and hide in bushes giving them extra accuracy.
The conditions on the battlefield can also affect the traits of your companions as they traverse the landscape. If a character doesn’t like the desert or sand, then you should not use that character in the mission at hand. Once you change one character then you are forced to change your character roster to suit the needs of all of the members in use. It is critical to choose the correct members as you don’t want to be left with negative traits such as lower accuracy, slower movement speed, and lower defence.
To help boost your army you can train them when back at base, and it’s a must to spend these points wisely as each of the classes (sniper, engineer, shock trooper, scout, and lancer) have their own set of characters that get upgraded, but leaving another class behind as you raise another’s will have a large cause and effect later in the campaign.
But the characterisation isn’t limited to your army, as it also includes other side characters which play a big part in the story. Some are whimsical such as Leon Schmidt upgrading your tank and weaponry, Calvaro Rodriguez that tells you to hit the deck and give him 10, and the shy and protective Cordelia Gi Randgriz of Gallia, but nothing comes close to the interactions between all of the main characters during the visual novel elements in between the missions. Your characters go through so many emotions from one extreme to the next that at times you don’t know whether to be angry at a character or feel sympathy. It is masterfully done.
With the characters you have chosen for the missions, you are given a tactical overhead map where you can place the characters in certain positions. Once they are placed you then spend your command points for movement. There are certain characters that give you extra command points to use per turn so it’s always beneficial to have these characters on the battlefield at all times. Lose one of these characters and you’ll have less command points per turn.
Each turn you use your command points until you no longer have any left. When using a command point you spend one on a character and two on a tank, you are then switched to that character and you control the movement like any other third-person game, except you are limited to the movement bar; once that reaches zero then your character can no longer move further, and during this cycle you can use one action point – this is either firing your weapon, healing yourself, or throwing a grenade.
Positioning your characters is vital as line-of-sight can be the difference between life and death. Having the enemy run in front of one of your characters on their turn can have them killed with a bullet right between their eyes. But clumping your characters together could mean a well-positioned grenade or tank mortar shell wiping your party.
Once your turn ends then it’s the computer’s turn to try and prevent you from accomplishing your goal – which typically involves capturing flags. If the enemy downs one of your characters then you have a few turns to try and get another character to reach them in time, which takes them off the battlefield, and you can bring them back via one of the captured flags. Leave them there and they will die, and once dead they can no longer be used throughout the rest of the game.
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You can boost your characters to make things easier by earning “order shouts” from a gentleman that frequents the graveyard. These orders can give your character’s bonuses similar to if they had friends around them, but instead they are party wide and are critical to success, but they use up two command points.
Having your band of brothers (and sisters) trained up is all well and good, but if the technology behind your weapons and tank is not up to scruff then you feel the pinch. Researching your weapons, armour, and even tank parts is all necessary to making your army tread on the corpses of the enemy – which is exactly what you want to do. While an enemy has been downed and out of action, you can get extra research options by touching their bodies.
All of this research and training requires a lot of work and money, and the way to earn it is via completing missions. The higher your rank the more money you will receive at the end of it. Often it will be impossible to complete a mission with an S rank, so included is a Skirmish mode where you can set, not only which mission to try and get an S rank on, but what difficulty as well.
Included with the remastered release is the two DLC packs initially released for the PS3 -The Challenges of Edy Detachment, and Selvaria’s Mission. In Edy’s Detachment, Edy Nelson and her detachment are separated from Squad 7 and are trying to get back with the group, however they come across Imperial soldiers attacking a village. You have to defend the village from the enemy. For Selvaria’s Mission you are given a mini campaign akin to how the main story plays out. You are given several missions, each with their cutscenes and voice acting, plus bonus missions. Playing through her missions allows you to unlock bonus weapons.
Welkin can’t always protect everyone and make every mission perfect, and this is also true about this remaster. SEGA has put an immense effort to bring this game back into the limelight, and I can say with confidence that the developer has almost perfectly done this. The FMV quality is already known to be using its original PS3 offering, but the lack of PS4 features is a real shame. While the control system for the game is already spot on and did not require anything to be changed, it would have been nice to see SEGA try something different with the PS4’s touchpad, even if it’s another controller preset (this is very nit-picky and doesn’t detract from the experience at all).
FMV and lack of PS4 features aside, SEGA has dug Valkyria Chronicles out of the grave and given its marching orders to conquer the hearts of many tactical RPG players’ hearts. Its gorgeous tactical warfare will keep players coming back for more. The characters are amazingly well developed, and the story is fitting for a king – with lots of tear-jerks and tissues needed along the way.