Valkyria Chronicles II is a PSP only sequel to the turn-based action strategy hybrid game from the PS3. It retains the unique blend of turn-based strategy tactical combat, where each turn begins with a 2D overhead map that lays out the terrain, visible enemy placements, and your own troops’ placements. You have a certain number of actions in the turn where you can select a character, at which point the view then shifts to a third person perspective. You move the character around and can target enemies this way to shoot them (which is based off a variety of factors such as aim, stance and accuracy). You can keep using an action on the same character, though they’ll slowly lose movement range each time. The lack of the PSP’s right stick is painful for the camera as left / right movement is mapped to the shoulder buttons, while up / down is mapped to the triangle and X buttons. This means that even if you have a Vita, you can’t map all four directions onto the right stick. You’ll have to settle for either horizontal or vertical movement only for the right stick, and horizontal is the better choice.
There are five classes. Scouts are flexible with a large movement radius, average attack and high accuracy, however they have low defences. Shocktroopers are the opposite, with more limited movement and low accuracy but high attack and defence. Engineers help refill ammo and heal others. Lancers are heavy units that can do big damage to tanks. And lastly, Armored Techs have shields so they boast massive defence but only has a melee weapon. You can easily swap characters in and out during a level, and thus different classes, at will so you’re not locked into something that you’ve picked at the beginning. This provides a lot of flexibility in the strategy that you use, as well as changing it on the fly. You get experience and money after every battle but the amount is affected by the ranking you receive based on your performance. Higher rankings can be achieved via completing the battle in a low number of turns, or you’ve defeated tougher enemies, or a lot of them.
The area maps are smaller than the first game, something necessitated by the lower end hardware of the system. As a compromise, there are separate areas instead that you swap between. It’s more annoying since it’s not one big seamless map and breaks the immersion quite a bit. There is a limit on how many units you can have overall and in a specific map at any one time. This is artificially limiting and restrictive. Changing areas is also a pain as it feels like you’re forced to manage something you really shouldn’t need to, especially since the first game didn’t have this. There are field effects like night reducing visibility of opponents, or sandstorms reducing accuracy. This ties into vehicles, which you can use to attack and carry troops, as well as attach parts to cancel out certain field effects. While they’re supposed to spice things up and add variety, all the effects are negative, so they are annoying every time you encounter one, only serving to drag the mission out.
The RNG is annoying for the bulk of the game. Accuracy is a killer, limited movement is a killer, enemy evasion is a killer. All this combines to make it harder to get to where you need to, especially at the beginning of the game. Reloading isn’t fast as you cannot save during a mission anymore, you have to back all the way out, and then go through all the loading screens in order to retry the mission. A simple restart option would have been nice. Completing a mission will grant you experience points. They are used to level up whole classes at a time, so even if you don’t use a character, theoretically they shouldn’t fall behind as their stats and effectiveness are determined by their class’s level. Unfortunately, each character can specialise in their classes. In order to do this, you are required to use that character in missions to obtain the items used in this process. It means you have to consciously use specific characters to specialise them. This is a terrible system as it awards these items randomly to characters, and specific missions give a specific type. It’s designed for grinding, as it is entirely reliant on luck on whether the characters you like and use the most will get the items required to specialise.
With the story, it keeps the same storybook art style of the original. However, since it’s on the PSP with its lower resolution screen, it’s nowhere near a striking. It still has a lot of its charms though. The story is told with visual novel style cutscenes, with full English voice acting. The story is set two years after the end of the first game with the war over. However, Gallia now faces a civil war, as a group aims to get rid of all the Darcsens in the country. The game follows Avan, whose brother was killed in combat although Avan doesn’t believe that to be true. He enters the same military academy that his brother went to and meets fellow students Cosette and Zeri. The three are in Class G and thus begins their academy life. There is more text in the story than expected, so you do spend quite a bit of time reading. There are key missions that push the story forward, with plenty of optional missions. There are nice animated cutscenes but it’s too bad about the slow pace of the story and school setting as it loses the unique blend of a grittier darker story paired with bright colorful anime aesthetic that made the original so good. The focus on academy life can be cliched if you’ve watched many anime set in schools, while the second half has a higher focus on the civil war which is definitely the more interesting aspect as it has higher stakes.
The game slowly loses its appeal and charm though. Later missions are yes, supposed to be hard. However, they’re made harder with tough armored units with tons of health, while most likely, your own units are still squishy as the game has not been kind in giving you the required items to specialise and class up. Forcing you to go blind in missions is realistic, but it means that it requires trial and error, which is a pain as it blocks your strategizing. It requires you to at least play it once and then once more to get a better rank. Enemy turns will end up taking forever, especially with artillery bombardments as well. It takes a bit over twenty hours to complete the campaign if you’re mostly efficient in each mission. Afterwards, there is a lot of postgame content that is unlocked, as well as all the other optional missions that you may have not yet played. Although these are harder, they reuse everything that you’ve already seen, in a game that already reuses its assets way too much.
Overall, Valkyria Chronicles II makes the successful transition from console to handheld with a few compromises. The controls for one, although they can be gotten used to. The reduction in map size is the bigger compromise and can make you feel cramped at first, especially with the segregate areas which isn’t good as you will quickly hit the maximum number of units allowed to be deployed at the same time. Each mission just feels that bit more restrictive than it should. There are a few common strategies that can get you across most of the missions so by the second half of the game, the variety isn’t great and it can start to feel repetitive. It’s still a fun game, but the forgettable story means it’s not an essential game to play.
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