Valkyria Chronicles 2 Review

Ah, yes, the PSP. The Playstation Portable. The wave of the future. The thing that was going to usher in a brave new era of high-end, high-performance handheld gaming, but then… well… didn’t. And it’s funny to think of it. With its claim to superior graphics and better technology, it would seem that the PSP took the safe route to commercial success (as opposed to the DS, which had the inexplicable desire to bridge the gap between Gameboy and Palm Pilot). But oddly enough the high-tech approach never seems to work for handhelds; it didn’t work with the Game Gear, it didn’t work with the Sega Nomad and it didn’t work with the PSP. It faded away over the last few years, so much so that when I moved from Massachusetts to California I left it in storage, never thinking I’d need it.

But then late last year, the PSP kicked back to life. New Kingdom Hearts. New Metal Gear Solid. New Valkyria Chronicles. All in the course of a month. Who saw that coming? And so, finally, I’ve managed to retrieve my wayward device, dust it off, charge it up, return that forgotten copy of Crisis Core to its case and finally make my way through the latter of those titles. The first PSP game I’ve played in three years, the first return to that old “power of a console in the palm of my hands” mentality and quite possibly the renaissance of high-powered portable gaming. So how was it?

Eh, it was alright.

The original Valkyria Chronicles is possibly one of my favorite games on the PS3 for the simple reason that there quite literally is nothing else like it. A strange hybrid of third-person shooter and turn-based strategy with a story that mixes war movie clichés with wacky anime hokum and an illustrated visual style all wrapped up in a beautifully-handled history book format – different doesn’t even begin to describe it. Even now, the only thing vaguely similar to itis its sequel. But Valkyria Chronicles II is a prototypical inferior sequel. It’s not that it’s bad, but it shows that the developers said everything they needed to say in the previous installment and are just shouting it out louder in case people didn’t hear them the first time. It’s a common occurrence, a criticism that can be equally lodged against Iron Man 2, Paranormal Activity 2, The Matrix sequels, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and so, so much more. But a good message is a good message no matter how many times you hear it. And, despite some missteps, Valkyria Chronicles II does a few have a few nice twists of its own.

The game opens with Avan Hardins joining the Lanseal Military Academy, which starts us off nicely with a fresh perspective on the narrative. The first game had us following draftees in the fight for liberation. But now we’re following volunteers, and a bunch of kids at that; and so they aren’t just focused on civic duty, but also on more mundane concerns. You control Class G, the bottom rung on the social ladder. They’re taunted by the famed Class A, their teachers think they’re useless and they themselves lack motivation. But eventually they develop self-esteem, face their rivals in the local talent show (or in this case war games simulation) and slowly but surely climb that ladder.

Sound a bit familiar? It should because this is the same basic clique war formula used by nearly every high school/college movie ever. But it’s surrounded here by a story of civil war and racial persecution, a war movie epic that sees these high school dopes achieving glory and writing history; and that is encased in another story of ancient feuds and lost magical mysteries. It’s a narrative layer cake, each piece adequate by itself, but together combining into something unique and delicious.

As much as I love the first Valkyria Chronicles, I think it gets too much credit for its story. While the setting is unique, the plot itself is your basic JRPG setup of lost girls, unknown power, ancient evils and hapless but well-intentioned heroes. It was a nice, emotional little tale, but it was patently obvious what was going to be awakened in whom and who was going to betray who and why well in advance. The sequel however constructs a world where its cast can at any moment be fighting for their lives or thwarting racial purges or trying to muster their confidence to put on a show for the school or wrestling with teenaged hormones or cramming for tests or unraveling secret human experimentation. The high school setting and the melodrama that sort of thing incorporates helps make the little stuff feel every bit as important as the big stuff and allows the two conflicting scales to play off each other to great effect.

It’s because of this that the characterization feels more relaxed and more varied. In the first game, you had a huge selection of characters to choose from, but most of them were little more than game pieces with a touch of personality; only five or so had any role in the story. Here, they all make occasional appearances in major scenes and they all have their own subplots to explore, which open up as you use them on missions (effectively allowing you to choose your own supporting cast).

And another nice touch is the protagonist. One JRPG cliché the first game did blessedly avoid is that of the whiny spiky-haired hero. Welkin was such a huge dork and I do love the way he effectively won the war through his dorkiness. By contrast, Avan is a moron. But he’s an affable moron. And he really embodies that tradition of being the heart of his team. He unites them, encourages them and – through these subplots – he helps them overcome their problems and makes them into a true fighting force.

The angsty high school stuff helps give a personal significance to the wartime narrative; it also covers the usual ground of forming squad cohesion in a way most war stories can’t. And the Valkyria narrative works into this in ways so spoilery that I simply can’t discuss them even this far after the fact. The point is that none of these narrative approaches are independent; they supplement and feed each other so much so that the game would feel incomplete without Marion’s secret lust or Reiner’s treacherous friend or the mysterious warrior girl in the woods or — Christ — even the cartoon bird mascot (which actually does serve a specific, important and established role in the finale). The best you could say about the first game’s story was that it was a standard Final Fantasy narrative set in a quasi cartoon World War II, but the sequel is like Beverly Hills 90210 meets Saving Private Ryan meets Escaflowne. It’s such a bizarre combination of genre tropes (okay, clichés) that it finally feels as though the story better befits the unique hodgepodge gameplay.

Speaking of which, it’s pretty similar to the first game. You take turns with the enemy force, using a limited supply of command points to move your pieces on a board. Movement takes place in real-time, with enemies firing at you as you pass. The game then reverts to turn-based as you line up your shot. There are some minor changes in the class lineup (Engineers have been changed into straight healers, with mine cleanup and sandbag repair being moved to a new Tech class which also add a melee component to combat).

But the bigger change is that the battlefields of the first game have shrunk. Actually they’ve been split into pieces. Missions used to take place on large singular maps, but now they take place on smaller, separate and interconnected maps that you move between by taking and holding base camps. This actually adds an extra level of strategy to the proceedings, because you need to essentially maintain a supply line from maps you control to those that are contested. Basically, you have enemy territory, your territory and the front line in between; and it’s a very skillful way of mitigating the limiting factor of the PSP’s reduced hardware capabilities.

Another such compensation isn’t so skillful however. The PSP doesn’t have the specs of the PS3, that’s true, but it’s also true that UMDs can’t hold as much data as Blu-Rays, so there aren’t nearly as many unique maps as before, not nearly as many crucial missions. To fill the gap, the game does what so many games do when the feel bashful about their… uh… size. They turn to that most odious, hated and all-too-often repeated of videogame flaws: grind.

I find it hard to embrace much of the gaming lexicon (I will never for example accept that anything can be win), but “grind” is such an appropriate term for what it is: the ever-spinning wheel that takes in all the joy and novelty of a game and crushes it into the fine powder of relentless tedium. Valkyria Chronicles II organizes itself into months, each one containing a single “Story Mission” that you must complete in order to progress to the next one. To unlock those, you first have to complete a set number of “Key Missions” that take place on maps you’ve already played, using objectives, enemies and gimmicks you’ve already bested. And it gets old fast.

But at first it’s not so bad. In fact, it actually works adequately into the academic setting as training drills (each complete with a grade). They also serve to space out the character moments and give the story room to feel like its actually taking place over a year. But as the game goes on, the Key Missions get longer and you have to complete more of them and they start to become a drag. After a certain point in the story, the academic setting and school year framework cease to be relevant anyway; so it’s like getting homework after you graduate and it also makes narrative progression far too awkward.

When you add in the fact that after that same point, it becomes painfully obvious that each of your remaining story missions will be devoted to finishing off a villain character you’ve already fought – and who do nothing to mix up their routine (excepting of course the Boy Who Would Be Last Boss) – anticipation wanes and you have to force yourself to finish.

The game doesn’t do itself any favors either. Character storylines all culminate in new missions that are neat, but completely extraneous. Had they been allowed to count toward your Key Mission total, they could have done well to reduce they drain. But as it stands, they’re just more work. Also, gaining weapon upgrades and tank enhancements is no longer tied exclusively to level and story progression, but also requires you to collect random material drops after missions. And some materials are exclusive to certain months, so you’ll have to replay earlier missions (which don’t count toward your current total) in the hope that you’ll get them.

It takes about forty hours to complete this game, but you spend less than half of that doing something vaguely meaningful. Basically, Valkyria Chronicles II is a magnificent short game stretched into an adequate long one. The story’s decent, but it fizzles off near the end when the high school setting starts to feel intrusive rather than supportive and it doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as the first game’s climax did. The gameplay’s more or less the same, but not as varied or as elegant. It’s got the obligatory plus mode, but after the slog of the last three months, I can’t see myself making use of it any time soon.

But the short game at the heart of Valkyria Chronicles II is very good. I like how easily the World War II setting transitions into The American Civil War (suggesting an underlying bedrock of human nature to all wars and prejudices) and I also like how the technology established in the final boss of the previous game seems to have been developed into new enemy types, giving the world of both games a nice cohesion. It’s imperfect. Moreover, it’s imperfect in such an obvious way that one wonders how it ever got past the planning stages, but Valkyria Chronicles II is solid and thoroughly entertaining for most of its substantial length and it was well worth bringing the PSP out of retirement.

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