Blasphemer of Souls! How dare thou not buy this game!
Written: Sep 26 '02
Product Rating:
Pros: Multiple endings, superior soundtrack, innovative battle system
Cons: For the most part, horrible character development, kinda bad voice acting
The Bottom Line: Valkyrie Profile is an excellent 2D RPG with a memorable soundtrack and a very fun battle system. Its plot is quite interesting as well.
C_A's Full Review: Valkerie Profile for PlayStation 1
Note: This review is old. Very old. I can't be held responsible for the length or redundancy of this review. Oh wait, yes I can. Darn.
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Intro
Valkyrie Profile is a game that was released by Enix sometime in 2000. I senselessly got this game a few months ago, without knowing much about it. Some reviews said it was great, some said it sucked because of 2D graphics. To hell with that, complaints about 2D graphics aren’t enough to draw me away from a game. Graphics don’t make a game. After playing through this game, I realized I was right (for once).
Plot [3.0 to 8.0] (varies between endings)
The basic plot of Valkyrie Profile is centered around Lenneth Valkyrie, a servant of Odin, King of the Gods. In the original storyline, basically the plot is for Lenneth to send people to fight in a huge war. However, if certain actions are taken, the story defers from the original and goes on a much more bizarre course of love, deceit, and outpourings of emotion. The actions Valkyrie takes leads to three separate endings. One of the endings is based on the general plot, which utterly sucks. The other ending occurs if you screw up and do absolutely nothing right. The final ending, the best ending, is very touching, and builds up starting at about the half-way point of the game (if you do the right things, anyway.)
Gameplay [8.0]
Ah, let us take a huge-assed spork and plunge into the main chunk of this game. As somewhat mentioned earlier, the basic purpose at the beginning of the game is for Valkyrie to wander Midgard (think Earth), looking for dead souls of strong warriors and sorcerers to join in a battle at Ragnarok, or “The End of the World.” You are given a limited time to do all of this though, as you only have a set amount of “periods” before you have to leave Midgard. Once Valkyrie is through training a character’s mental attributes, he or she may be sent up to fight in the war. At the end of every chapter, which occurs at the end of 16 or 24 periods, depending upon what difficulty level you have, Valkyrie is informed of how well her characters in Ragnarok are doing, and is given a general evaluation of how well she is doing herself. This is an interesting/bizarre/confusing concept, is it not? There was plenty to do in this game, but it mostly involved killing monsters as gruesomely as possible. Since I’m in a monster-hacking mood, I’ll get on to the battle system first.
Battle System
Enix never ceases to entertain me when it comes to battle systems integrated into their games. I had hours upon hours of fun knocking the hell out of monsters in Star Ocean: The Second Story and this game is not much more different. The battle system may not be better than Star Ocean’s, but it is less buggy at least.
To engage in battle, all you have to do is thwack an enemy with Valkyrie’s Sword, walk into an enemy, or have one try to bite your head off when you open a rigged treasure chest. If you hit an enemy with your sword, you are at least guaranteed to have the first turn in battle, rather than having a 50% chance if you run into an enemy carelessly.
The battle starts with your party of four characters in a diamond-like formation. Unlike Star Ocean’s battle system, you don’t get to move your people wherever the heck you want them to. Actually, this battle system is far less complex than that of Star Ocean’s, so you can actually see most of the action that’s going on while controlling all four characters with the simple push of the square, triangle, circle, or x rather than just controlling one character while your teammates are getting the hell knocked out of them far off the screen.
Each character can attack up to three times per round, depending on what weapons they have. Each hit builds up a “special” meter near the bottom left of the screen, which also tallies up how many hits you’ve had on the enemy in that round. Once it reaches 100, one of your characters may do a special attack. The great thing is, as the special attack is going on, the special meter is building again, which means if you reach 100 again, another character can do a special attack. Having all four of your party members do a special attack for about 60 hits and 200,000 damage to a boss can be really helpful and entertaining.
The only true problem I have with the battle system is the sorcerer. Is there really a point to make it so that after they attack once, they have to sit there and do absolutely nothing for three to ten rounds!? At later levels, you would think that your character would have enough experience to be able to blast the hell out of somebody with a spell and charge up quickly afterwards. I hate the fact that the only way I can attack round after round is to give away 25% or so of my DME (explained below) with some special skill learned later in the game
Hit Points
This is a pointless tidbit, but notable nonetheless. You don’t have Hit Points in this game, you have DME, witch stands for Divine Material Energy. Also, unlike many RPG’s, the maximum HP—er, DME you can have in this game is 99999. You can also do around that much damage, I believe. There was actually a review somewhere condemning this game because of these facts. Ridiculous.
Items/Weapons
At first I thought that the only way you could get items in this game was that you had to find them in treasure chests. Almost 10 hours later I realized you could buy them at a save point or on the world map with the “Divine Item” button. Before that I had always wondered what the hell “MP” was. Turned out it was Materialize Points, not Magic Points, and it was money used to create items and weapons. After repeatedly thwacking myself in the head with a signpost for my stupidity of not realizing this sooner, I decided to learn more about these items.
Items can be gotten in a variety of ways. You can create them with the “Divine Item,” you may find them in treasure chests, or you may transmutate items to created other things. By transmutating I mean that you can take an item, like an elixir (recovers 50% of HP) and make it into a short sword or something. I found this very useful in the sorcery section, as you could transmutate a weak spell into a very strong one with ease.
Weapons in this game vary quite a lot. Some weapons allow you to take two or three times, and others are strong against demons, beasts, or toasters and such. However, some special weapons actually have a chance of breaking (especially sorcery scepters), so you have to watch what you do with some weapons. If you have a Dragon Slayer, which does ultra-damage (5000 to 25000) on a dragon while all other attacks do “1” damage, then dammit only use it on a dragon in battle and don’t waste it on other idiotic creatures!
Exploration
I have various mixed feelings toward the exploration offered in this game. In one hand, it is not much of a linear game at times, for you can go anywhere you want at anytime. However, there’s not much to look at when you can go anywhere. The towns 95% of the time are utterly lifeless, as there are about two or three screens to walk across and four empty houses and the only thing almost remotely useful you will see/hear is a guy in a bar saying, “{sigh} Times are tough.” Some of the dungeons are good to explore around in, but some of them have to many recurring screens, which means they just use the same screen over and over again on different parts of the dungeon map. The dungeons do have secrets hidden all over the place, however, which is quite a good thing. Some dungeons are also challenging, forcing you to solve somewhat simple puzzles with your damned ice shooting powers or jumping abilities.
Skill Points
Similar to Star Ocean: The Second Story, characters in Valkyrie Profile can learn skills to make them stronger or smarter in various categories. However, unlike Star Ocean, you find items that allow you to learn these skills one by one, rather than easily buying them from a local shop. Skill Points are earned after every level-up, which can be redeemed to heighten a particular skill level for a skill, like “Attack Power” or “Auto-Item”. Some of these skills are utterly useless in battle, but are needed at times for people that are sent to fight in Ragnarok.
So, the gameplay was good. Exploration may have been lacking much, but the battle system’s fast-paced fun and mayhem made up for that easily.
Graphics [7.4]
Surely, this is the aspect of the game that made most gamers say, “BLECK!” at this game. Feh to them, I say! The graphics are a tad under par for a Playstation-quality game, however.
The FMV sequences are mostly anime-based, and are nicely detailed. The in-game graphics however resemble much more of a hyped up Super Nintendo game. As mentioned before, roughly everything in this game is 2D. Towns, dungeons, shops, floating cities in the sky… all 2D exploration. The details of these places are mostly plain at times, though. But, there is one small bit of 3D exploration, although it is not much. In the world map, everything is in 3D as Valkyrie flies across the world to the next town or dungeon. Airships? We don’t need no stinkin’ airships! (Sorry for the moronically bad pun.)
The character sprites seem slightly deformed to me, but they are all very well detailed and designed, with each of the characters having distinguishing traits and such. Sometimes they look a tad..erm…odd, though. The character “Jelanda” looks like she has a seal face.
The graphics in battle aren’t too bad, but they sort of reminisce upon the old Saga Frontier battle engine in a way, I believe. I cannot remember. The enemies are designed quite plainly in battle, and end of recurring later in the game with different colors and more hit points. That means the variety of enemies is not much at all. This is one of those typical RPG clichés.
The special attacks looked quite “flashy and purdy” but sometimes you can’t even tell what the hell your character is even doing to your enemy. In Arngrim’s special attack, he’s all over the damn place and the next thing you know he’s back in place and the enemy is a rotting corpse (unless it was already one to begin with). “Um, yay, I beat the bad guy. When the hell did I do that?”
Music/Sound [9.0]
Music [9.3]
Motoi Sakuraba has greatly increased his music composing talents since one of his previous work displayed throughout Star Ocean: The Second Story. He retains the same, unique style used in previous games, but takes it to a new level of enjoyment. Few themes in this game are flawed in my opinion. This game features around 75 tunes from Sakuraba, most of which are excellent displays of music. The battle theme and boss battle theme are very upbeat and well conducted, and themes played in towns and moments of sadness also bring out a large flow of emotion. The music displayed in this game has made Sakuraba my 3rd favorite game music composer, next to Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda..
Sound [8.8]
Well, for once, Enix didn’t do a poor job in the English dubbing department. Most of the characters don’t sound like robots, and some emotion is actually put into it for once. Valkyrie is a stone-cold servant of Odin (well, at first, anyway), Arngrim is a “big” tough guy, Jelanda is a …er, a word that rhymes with itch, and Lezard Valeth really is a narcissistic and devious bastard thanks to how well of a job the voice actors/actress were. There is much more voice acting in this game than that of Star Ocean: The Second Story, and it was quite professional in my opinion. Only a few of the characters had pointlessly awful voices {cough}Lawfer{cough}, but that was easily redeemed.
Important dialogue is voiced in the story, much like that of the Lunar series. Voice-overs in the anime is not so bad, as the English voices mostly matched the mouth movements. Hey, at least it’s better than Xenogears’ dubbing. Ew.
Control [7.0]
You may think an RPG doesn’t need a review on control factors, but not in this case. Valkyrie Profile is kind of like an RPG but with Mega Man-like dungeon exploration. Valkyrie jumps, slides, climbs, hangs, and jabs things with her sword. I roughly have no problem with this most of the time, but the one thing that truly gets on my nerves is shooting those damned ice crystals.
Valkyrie has the power to shoot ice crystals with the square button whenever she needs to get past a certain obstacle in a dungeon, or receive a secret treasure or two. However, this can become a royal pain in the panda’s rear. The crystals occasionally break if you stand on them too long or jump on them too much, and sometimes you have to measure where to shoot your crystals to the exact millimeter so that you can make your jump from the crystal to whatever platform you’re trying to get to. I once got stuck for roughly 20 minutes trying to get onto one simple platform with a save point. That save point was taunting me, I tell you. “Ha ha! You can’t save your precious game in me! You can’t reach me! You can’t reach me! Na na na na na na!” {punches Valkyrie Profile jewel case} …Ow.
Another general problem with ice crystals (yeah, they’re that evil) is that if you’re too close to an ice crystal when firing another ice crystal, you’ll be launched upwards or side to side. Sometimes this may work to your advantage, but most of the time it launches you into a bad guy or a room that locks behind you or into a damn semi-bottomless pit. That taunting save point always laughed as I was launched into a room that locked behind itself. Arr.
Any in-game control problems are roughly the player’s fault, in my opinion. When having all of your characters attack at once, it’s your own damn fault if one character misses a huge attack. It all depends upon timing in the battle system, much like that of Star Ocean: The Second Story. I cannot really have any complaints about this section.
Difficulty [3] or [11]
The challenge in this game is very inconsistent. Sometimes you’re plowing your way through a dungeon with no problems at all and killing a boss in 15 seconds, and sometimes a simple group of enemies knocks the hell out of you and kills your party before you can say, “Supercalldammiticious.” You are especially screwed if you decide to fight a dragon in a boss fight without a “Dragon Slayer” weapon. Augh.
Although there are three different difficulty levels in this game, easy, normal, and hard, that has nothing to do with the varying difficulty. The only difference I saw were more dungeons, less experience, and more skills to learn. Do not even bother playing easy mode, for it offers far less dungeons and characters, and only the two (of three) lame endings can be achieved.
Character Development [3.0]
OK, this is the largest problem with the game, hands down. This problem tends to occur within RPG’s far too much. If a game has many characters, it tends to leave most of them without much development at all. In this game, there were roughly 20 to 25 characters, yet only five or so had much development. In most character’s cases, they only had the story told of how they died, and then they became a lifeless battler for Valkyrie. If the creators of this game did not intend on developing most of their characters, they should not have bothered to even put them in the game.
Replay [9.0]
Valkyrie Profile offers three different difficulty levels and three different endings. What more do you want; a bonus dungeon? Yeah, they’ve got one of those, too. Although it takes roughly 16 to 20 hours to complete one game, I managed to rack up about 65 to 70 overall before I finally quit. This game is definitely worth playing over and over again if you intend to discover all of its secrets and plot-sequences.
Overall [8.5]
For the most part, this game is an excellent RPG. The graphics may be a tad far from the caliber of Final Fantasy (hell, what game isn’t?), and it may have too many brainless robot characters no development, but the variety in gameplay, the superb battle system, the multiple difficulty levels and endings, the stupidly-long bonus dungeon, and the marvelous soundtrack make this game and excellent one that should be added to your gaming library as soon as possible. Well, maybe after it goes below forty-five dollars.
S ONY P LAY S TATION Title: Valkyrie Profile Manufacturer: Enix Year Of Release: 2000 Grade: VGA 85 (NM+) Description: This game is sealed with the wh...More at eBay
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