Valhalla Knights 3 marks the return of the gritty action RPG series, now taking full advantage of the powerful PS Vita hardware to provide intense real-time battle and smooth seven-on-seven party-based combat. After creating a main character and field-worthy party members from one of seven races such as human, elf and beast with a myriad of customizable physical traits, each character is assigned a job class from the twenty available such as fighter, mage and priest. As battles are won each customized character earns various loot from the countless items, weapons and armor available, as well as skill points towards unlocking job-specific skills. Powerful pre-existing warriors can also be persuaded to join your battle party by showering them with gifts and creating a strong personal bond.
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The setting and story setup have some interesting bits to it. Some parts of the story itself and sidequests are laughably dumb to entertaining degree. There's a couple of pretty good tracks in spite of getting overused. It was fun to make extensive melee attack chains for a while, and much as I hate to admit it the general gameplay loop was functioning enough in the portable handheld space to keep me hooked to finish the game.
That's all for the positives!
Game runs terribly. Few action areas in which the framerate remains somewhat stable, and the amount of load times combined with the amount of load screens make it hardly bearable to snail through the game... especially if you save-scum after getting screwed by game's RNG parts like I did :)
UI is a slog by itself. Eventually you start to manage at least 6 other people in the clan. Hooooooooo, having to constantly take care of each of them and protagonist while everybody's elements are massively decentralized + also take some seconds to load up makes me wonder how this passed the green light...
At least half of gameplay elements feel like they don't work properly at all. From lacking enemy spawns to poor item drop rates required for grindy quests, to general AI quirks, battle initiation and skill balance.
At least when you have to run 10 laps right around the enemy unit for them to notice you it's a bit funny, but when you realize the uncontrollable nature also applies to your own team as they willingly burn through all the valuable resources you spend HALF AN HOUR to equip them with on skills that will never perform better than just mashing attack chains. WHY!?
Writing's very rough in execution and morally bankrupt in themes. It's like a massive circlejerk of assholes all around trying to one-up each other while game tries to convince you they're good people behind the pile of shit that represents their actions. The few folks that aren't explicitly awful are just idiots, which doesn't help... So yeah, that could be entertaining at times, wish story leaned into the irony more.
Valhalla Knights 3 is pretty bad! It does not have any distinct qualities to make it stand out besides being bad at most of the regular qualities.
All things considered, if you're down bad and horny in a wacky way for mostly poorly-written fantasy women and swiping their degen SEXY TIMEs, and/or you really want to really sink your time into grinding an RPG on the go, there are probably worse games to try. I say that, as I leave my lowest game rating yet on the platform...
If you happen to have a good level of Japanese language skills you could also try Valhalla Knights 3 GOLD which does some balancing and performance fixes, adds more content, unique gameplay elements, voice acting (very cool concept by devs btw, to release a broken mess then make a separate release that fixes a lot of it and still make you pay for it), but I don't think it'd fundamentally become good.