As a general rule I try to avoid believing the hype around a game when making a purchase. If a game reviews well I will look a little deeper and maybe pick it up. If a game has so much hype behind it, be it on the internet or word of mouth, I’ll probably avoid it at first and pick it up later so I can play it without having to account for any inflated expectations on my part.
Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that, whenever it comes up in conversation, gets talked up to the point of sounding too good. It hasn’t been an issue avoiding it up to this point, though, as I only recently acquired a PS3. Like most people with multiple consoles I have been using my PS3 to play platform specific releases, and finally decided to pick up a copy of Valkyria Chronicles. The problem with that was that I was informed the game is no longer in production, and all of the EB Games/ Gamestops in my area let me know they rarely saw used copies come through their stories.
So to cut a long story short, I traded my Nintendo DS for a copy of Valkyria Chronicles — and it was totally worth it.
As of this sentence I have started, stopped, deleted and restarted this article four times. I opened trying to talk about the art style, but that didn’t work. So I tried talking about the gameplay with similar results. I tried opening with the story which didn’t work out the way I intended but left me with an idea for how I would actually start this article.
I’m going to talk about something I’m admittedly not very good at talking about: the tone of the game. Don’t walk into this game expecting your normal JRPG setting of “Oh, the world is in trouble and we’re going to save the day and stop the evil from blowing it up,” because this game takes it both a step further and a step towards a more real story.
Set in a fictitious country on the edge of “Europa” in the year 1935, the game takes place during an event known as the Second Europan War. The Autocratic East Europan Imperial Alliance (Imperials) invade your country of Gallia because of rich deposits of an ore that can be refined into fuel and other things, prompting the citizens of Gallia to form into militia squads to assist the army in defending from the invaders.
Where the tone sets in is in the uncomfortable parallels to World War II. The pilot of your commander’s tank, who also happens to be that commander’s adopted sister, is from a group of people known as Darcsens; a race of people populating Europa who are persecuted for a catastrophe everybody believes they caused centuries prior to the story. This prejudice comes into play time and again as another member of your squad displays blatant distaste for “dark hairs.”
I played my way through the first handful of missions watching through the cut-scenes and occasionally watching scenes between these two characters and thinking “Well, this is uncomfortable.” But after sinking nearly two days into this game I came across a mission in the story that really sinks in the fact that Valkyria Chronicles doesn’t hold back on the parallel to our own history. After completing one particular mission your squad is sent back to the start of the level, only to find that the Imperials rounded up all the Darcsen people they had been using as forced labor and locked them in a building, then set the building on fire, killing them all.
The game has a very gritty story to it, which clashes against it’s anime JRPG art style. It’s unsettling to be making your way through a game that looks like it should be your average feel-good adventure to save the world while the story unfolding is one of a country on the brink of destruction with a people living within that country facing prejudice from all sides. You can play other kinds of games and kill people and hey, it’s just a game. But when you really get into Valkyria Chronicles and find yourself in a pitched battle to save your homeland the tone adds a level of depth that makes it feel like you really are killing people and your squad mates really are being killed around you.
Comments