While there a handful of things that Valkyria Chronicles does well in isolation, the final product ends up feeling incredibly disjointed and awkward to play.
The story doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a semi-serious war story that pays attention to the horrors of conflict or a quirky and fun adventure with your ragtag squad of buddies, oscillating between the two in such a weird way that I stopped caring about the plot before it had even reached the halfway point. One scene you'll see civilians gunned down as they try to flee the invading army, the next minute a woman gives birth from inside the tank you were hiding in your garage. You'll get a bit of exposition about the geopolitics and history of the region that led up to the war, then follow it up with the crew adopting a pet pig as their mascot. It all just felt uncanny to play through and simultaneously made me lose interest in any of the serious aspects of the story while making its humor feel out of place rather than endearing.
But the plot isn't the only area where the game feels disjointed. Unfortunately, the gameplay is similarly troubled. Valkyria Chronicles uses a blend of turn-based strategy and real-time combat for its gameplay, with a very specific scoring system layered on top. And while none of these are outright bad in isolation, they really never felt like they were integrated in a natural and satisfying way. Each turn, you get a specified number of moves which you can distribute among your soldiers or bank for the following turn. Each move a soldier gets lets them move a given distance (with that amount shrinking for each additional move) and use an item/weapon once (with limited supplies constraining your actions). And as for the real-time aspect, units will shoot enemies that enter their line of sight and aiming your weapon is done manually rather than with a target select.
Combine both of these and you end up with a combat system where attackers are disadvantaged, defenders gain a decisive advantage, and recklessness is heavily punished. But that makes for a poor gameplay experience. So to facilitate the faster and more fluid gameplay where the game might perform better, it uses two main levers. First, the missions themselves require proactive action on your part to complete, forcing you to go on the offensive in order to ever win. But with this alone, the player is stuck in an awkward zone where they need to go on the offensive against enemies but do so in a very slow and methodical way to avoid their frontline units getting slaughtered. So the second lever comes into play with the game's scoring system. The rewards you get at the end of the battle (needed to upgrade units and equipment) are determined exclusively by the number of turns it took to complete the mission. But because of how combat works, the only way to complete most missions with a high rank is to utilize cheese strategies that ignore everything but the victory condition. Have a few scouts rush the enemy camp and ignore everything in between, buff your lancer as much as possible so it can kill the enemy tank commander within a single turn, preemptively move your units so they can ambush enemies that spawn later in the fight. If you want that A-rank then your only choice is to ignore 90% of what's going on in the mission and beeline for whatever the victory condition happens to be. And if you choose to ignore the rank and just play the game with conventional strategies, have fun with your units being underleveled and underequipped as the game proceeds.
Valkyria Chronicles felt like the developers had a lot of different ideas for how the developers wanted the game to work. But rather than integrate those ideas into a single cohesive vision from the beginning, they were all worked on separately with some last minute additions awkwardly weaving the pieces together. And for me, the end product felt neither fun nor fair to play through. For the side of me that enjoys strategy games, Valkyria Chronicles was simultaneously too barebones to engage as well as too awkward and unwieldy to feel fair. For the side of me that cares about a good story, the oscillations between serious and comedic made the whole experience feel really strange rather than interesting. Put the two together and there really wasn't anything that I could latch on to as a source of enjoyment.
The story doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a semi-serious war story that pays attention to the horrors of conflict or a quirky and fun adventure with your ragtag squad of buddies, oscillating between the two in such a weird way that I stopped caring about the plot before it had even reached the halfway point. One scene you'll see civilians gunned down as they try to flee the invading army, the next minute a woman gives birth from inside the tank you were hiding in your garage. You'll get a bit of exposition about the geopolitics and history of the region that led up to the war, then follow it up with the crew adopting a pet pig as their mascot. It all just felt uncanny to play through and simultaneously made me lose interest in any of the serious aspects of the story while making its humor feel out of place rather than endearing.
But the plot isn't the only area where the game feels disjointed. Unfortunately, the gameplay is similarly troubled. Valkyria Chronicles uses a blend of turn-based strategy and real-time combat for its gameplay, with a very specific scoring system layered on top. And while none of these are outright bad in isolation, they really never felt like they were integrated in a natural and satisfying way. Each turn, you get a specified number of moves which you can distribute among your soldiers or bank for the following turn. Each move a soldier gets lets them move a given distance (with that amount shrinking for each additional move) and use an item/weapon once (with limited supplies constraining your actions). And as for the real-time aspect, units will shoot enemies that enter their line of sight and aiming your weapon is done manually rather than with a target select.
Combine both of these and you end up with a combat system where attackers are disadvantaged, defenders gain a decisive advantage, and recklessness is heavily punished. But that makes for a poor gameplay experience. So to facilitate the faster and more fluid gameplay where the game might perform better, it uses two main levers. First, the missions themselves require proactive action on your part to complete, forcing you to go on the offensive in order to ever win. But with this alone, the player is stuck in an awkward zone where they need to go on the offensive against enemies but do so in a very slow and methodical way to avoid their frontline units getting slaughtered. So the second lever comes into play with the game's scoring system. The rewards you get at the end of the battle (needed to upgrade units and equipment) are determined exclusively by the number of turns it took to complete the mission. But because of how combat works, the only way to complete most missions with a high rank is to utilize cheese strategies that ignore everything but the victory condition. Have a few scouts rush the enemy camp and ignore everything in between, buff your lancer as much as possible so it can kill the enemy tank commander within a single turn, preemptively move your units so they can ambush enemies that spawn later in the fight. If you want that A-rank then your only choice is to ignore 90% of what's going on in the mission and beeline for whatever the victory condition happens to be. And if you choose to ignore the rank and just play the game with conventional strategies, have fun with your units being underleveled and underequipped as the game proceeds.
Valkyria Chronicles felt like the developers had a lot of different ideas for how the developers wanted the game to work. But rather than integrate those ideas into a single cohesive vision from the beginning, they were all worked on separately with some last minute additions awkwardly weaving the pieces together. And for me, the end product felt neither fun nor fair to play through. For the side of me that enjoys strategy games, Valkyria Chronicles was simultaneously too barebones to engage as well as too awkward and unwieldy to feel fair. For the side of me that cares about a good story, the oscillations between serious and comedic made the whole experience feel really strange rather than interesting. Put the two together and there really wasn't anything that I could latch on to as a source of enjoyment.