Valkyria Chronicles™

A tactical turn-based RPG that overreliance on RNG and inflexible tactic are both unfun and frustrating.

no autosave, when my game crashed suddenly, when I relaunched i am still on the prologue, lost almost 8-10 hours of progress. 1 out of 10. will not replay to completion due to loss of progress.

Strange game this like, 3rd person XCOM, real time reaction fire from your own troops and enemies gives a more immersive feel. Tactics are varied but sadly the game seem to awards you more for bumrushing than taking a more clinical approach. Still you can play it however you feel and story is compelling enough to keep it moving, and being moving in places too. All of this underscored with a beautiful soundtrack and aesthetic it's worth giving a try. I strongly recommend bashing your head against a wall first time through and finding ways to a rank and seeing what secrets (Enemy Aces and hidden recruits) you can uncover then using what you learned to smash it on new game plus. Only real problems I can think of are a few missions where ambushes are lobbed on you via trigger points you had no way of knowing existed. Some of the mechanics in a couple missions are poorly/timed obscurely too. But this only happens a couple of times throughout and you can generally save yourself from any of these situations.

Un juego que me salvó hace muchos años de pasar un verano de aburrimiento terrible. Me encantó hasta el punto de hacerme fan de la saga cuando nunca había jugado a un juego parecido.

good，but no chinese

Juego muy original dentro de su género, y con una personalidad muy marcada. Mezcla el rol estratégico con el shooter en tercera persona. La historia es sólida y presenta personajes muy entrañables (aunque varios secundarios caen en la irrelevancia). Trata temas como el amor surgido en medio de un conflicto, el racismo, la conquista o el deber. Seleccionas los capítulos, escenas y diálogos a través de un libro con viñetas. Puedes acceder en todo momento al cuartel general para subir de nivel a tus tropas, comprar mejoras y recibir condecoraciones. Los mapas de las batallas son bastante variados y permiten una buena gama de estrategias. Tienes un número limitado de medallas que gastar para que tus tropas (los tanques gastan 2 medallas) se muevan o ataquen. El apartado gráfico es muy bonito y resultón: gráficos cel shading estilo anime con colores acuarela. La música orquestada acompaña bien. Como únicas pegas: La dificultad a veces es algo injusta, los diálogos no se pueden acelerar y hay caídas de frames en algún nivel.

[h2]Story[/h2] I would summarize the story as Anime WWII in alternate Europe. It's rather fun/entertaining, although it's only somewhat good. Only few members of Squad 7 are shown in the story, which prevents you from getting overwhelmed and helps character growth. On the other hand, it has some common tropes found in JRPG/Anime which makes it predictable. On the technical side, it uses a combination of 3D pre-rendered cutscenes and pseudo VN as the storytelling approach. You can choose between English and Japanese VA. The Japanese ones have good casting, although I notice there are few discrepancies between Japanese VA and English subtitles which may annoy you. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] [b]TLDR:[/b] Fun gameplay with unique mechanics, but held back by some issues. I really like the gameplay, it combines turn-based and pseudo real-time mechanics. There are various ways to finish the operation, although the game encourages you to finish it quickly by giving lots of EXP (to upgrade unit squad/classes) and DCT (to upgrade weapon, armor and tank). Overall I would say the gameplay is decent. However, few mechanics don't feel intuitive while few operations simply have terrible design. For example, [spoiler] Diverting the Marmota [/spoiler] has very confusing mechanics where I believe you need several retries while [spoiler] Final Showdown has an HP sponge boss who can "respawn" 3 towers on each turn which makes him  invulnerable [/spoiler]. Some unit squads/classes also feel unbalanced. Just like other players, I also heavily rely on Scout to kill majority of enemies and fulfill some of operation's goals. Lancers also feels very tanky, especially against explosive-type damage. I almost never use Engineer either. The difficulty of combat operations in the main story is heavily varied. My result varied from getting A-rank in one try to having to use a guide after failed a few times. I didn't perform any grinding though, which means you don't have to do it either if you're good at strategy games or use a guide. This game also lacks some quality-of-life features. There's no auto-save feature or at least reminders to make a manual save. More importantly, there's no 2x/4x/8x fast-forward during enemy turn on the combat operation. That means you'll be forced to see many enemy moves and transition animations which could take few minutes on each enemy turn. It's even more annoying since the game will pause if you Alt-Tab or have had to restart the combat. [h2]Side story[/h2] There are 2 side stories, which can be accessed by choosing "Extra" on the main menu. Both of them are very short, where you should see them after finishing the main story. Each of them also has exactly one combat operation. I find both of them are harder than combat operations in the main story, where I had to use guides. [h2]Other[/h2] This game runs well on my Linux device, without any manual tweaking or configuration. Other reviewers mentioned crash issue, although it never happened to me. [hr][/hr] If you're a fan of tactical RPG games, you probably will like this game if you don't mind some flaws. However if you happen to own PS4 or PS5, you should know there's a remastered version exclusive for PS4. You may want to do some research to see which version is better for you.