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Valkyria Chronicles
Jun. 21st, 2014 08:34 amI remember liking the demo a long time ago, so I finally picked up a used copy on ebay. It's sort of a game and anime series rolled into one (I guess they did ultimately create an anime series). You and your plucky squad of vaguely WWI-era soldiers carry out bigger and bigger battles against the enemy. And in between, you click through story elements and movies. The action is sort of first-person shooter/strategy, which is kind of cool. Your squadmates each has a limited amount of action points for movement, and each can only fire a weapon once during a turn. So you have to run for cover, or make sure you end your turn hiding behind your tank, and so on.
The variety of battles is good, but one of the annoying things is that usually there's a stupid trick to a battle that only becomes obvious after you've lost (possibly many times). I think the worst case is one where there are some gun emplacements on a cliff-face that will just kill your dudes as they run up the beach. The trick is that you only place a couple scouts, who can move far & fast enough to avoid the guns, take a poorly defended enemy base, and then use the base to summon the rest of the troops once you're past the guns. Why didn't they do that at Normandy? Anyway, it does teach you the lesson that you don't have to fill up your roster at the start of a battle, which can be a valuable tool.
The story's not terrible, and although Dr. Pookie didn't care for the pastel anime Photoshop-filter look of the artwork, I appreciated that at least it looked different. All told, I liked it, and it's too bad the sequels were made for PSP instead of PS3.
The variety of battles is good, but one of the annoying things is that usually there's a stupid trick to a battle that only becomes obvious after you've lost (possibly many times). I think the worst case is one where there are some gun emplacements on a cliff-face that will just kill your dudes as they run up the beach. The trick is that you only place a couple scouts, who can move far & fast enough to avoid the guns, take a poorly defended enemy base, and then use the base to summon the rest of the troops once you're past the guns. Why didn't they do that at Normandy? Anyway, it does teach you the lesson that you don't have to fill up your roster at the start of a battle, which can be a valuable tool.
The story's not terrible, and although Dr. Pookie didn't care for the pastel anime Photoshop-filter look of the artwork, I appreciated that at least it looked different. All told, I liked it, and it's too bad the sequels were made for PSP instead of PS3.
