For my circle of friends in college, there were just some things that could be quoted at any opportunity, and it would work. One of them was Valkyrie Profile. It wasn't just that we all enjoyed it and consequently played it constantly. It wasn't just having a really interesting storyline. It was the fact that it had halfway decent voice acting and the kind of writing that is so campy and over the top that it feels fun to say. "It shall be engraved upon your soul!", "My soul burns, my power has awakened!" and "Thou must desire respite from thy empty existence… thou shalt have it!" were just some of the lines we'd end up reciting ad infinitum to entertain each other. Anyhow, it was undoubtedly a gem, and we all hoped desperately for a prequel – so much backstory was in there to make another game, and too many questions were unanswered until Square Enix finally released Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria. But in some ways, you can't go home again.
The game begins focused on Alicia, who has sealed within her the spirit of the valkyrie Silmeria. Ordinarily, a valkyrie that isn't active is sealed resting in a human, but something went wrong when Silermia was to be sealed, and she's able to speak with Alicia. This might be related to some sort of rebellion Silermia was planning against Odin, as Odin sends the active valkyrie, Hrist, after Alicia to kill her and take Silmeria's soul back. On top of this, Alicia's father, King Barbarossa of Dipan, is planning on making war against Odin in retaliation for what was done to his only daughter. Throw into the mix that Dipan has a time machine, and Alicia's race to stop Odin and save her father's kingdom is a nexus of intrigue between heaven and earth.
The story is fairly solid, but it requires quite a bit of grounding in the original game – and the ending that's nearly impossible to find without a walkthrough – to get the full appreciation of. If you've played the first game, then you know what the deal is with Lezard Valeth and his true intentions. If you've played the first, you know who Brahms is beyond "lord of the undead," and you know what part he is to play in Silmeria's existence. If you've played the first, you know what happens when Odin goes to war with Dipan, and the fate of its three wizards. But within this game, it's all extremely poorly explained. It keeps to its own story well enough, but this game is very specifically made for fans of the original.
Now, if you are a fan of the original, you do get quite a treat in terms of the plot. Many of the hinted plot points from the first game are made clear – the cause of the upcoming Ragnarok, the purpose of the Dragon Orb, the reason for Hrist's obsession with Brahms, and even the discovery and uses of ghoul powder. On top of that, many of the game's plot points are handled well. There are a couple of surprises involved late in the plot, but overall it's a fairly predictable ride for veterans of the first, albeit an enjoyable one.
The characterization in the game is a bit uneven. For the primary characters, the characterization is much better. The central characters of Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria are rounded out much better than those of the original. In fact, in many cases, the characterization for some of the divine characters improves the first game. After clearing through this game, I can appreciate Hrist much more in the first. Odin and Freya are much more fascinating now. And as for Lezard… he's shot right up the ranks into one of my favorite characters to watch in a game. Even as you figure out what he's doing – and those of us who beat the first game should already know why he's doing it – can’t help but give him full due for it.
The flip side, however, is that the random recruits aren't handled nearly as well. As in the previous game, you can get the spirits of fallen warriors – einherjar – to fight alongside you. However, they are drones in every sense. For one, several of them are random – you can't get to see them all until you run through the game at least two or three times (and more likely than not, more than that). For another, you only get to see some of their history if you look at the status screen and read their biography. This is in opposition to the first game, where you'd see vignettes of the characters' life and the circumstances of their death, plus you had interaction with them as they prepared for the afterlife. On top of this, you could do side missions to get them extra story (and usually, items). No such luck in this game, although you can release them and get items that way here. While I'm glad to see even more development for main characters, I wish the ones not central to the plot got as much development as they did in the first Valkyrie Profile game.
The game's engine is a bit tweaked from before. In this one, you move on a map, and you can see both your attack range and your opponents' attack ranges. Once you close in enough to be able to attack, you can input your attacks as in the first game. Namely, you have each member of your active party (up to four) assigned to a face button, and you attack in sequence to wear away at your opponents' health. One twist to the previous game is that action points now determine how many times you can attack, not how long before you can unleash your best attacks. This part, admittedly, is an improvement – especially as there are multiple ways to regain AP quickly and prepare for fighting.
On top of this, you can target your opponent's specific parts to disable their attacks or have a chance to break off an item. On top of that, you can sometimes activate Break Mode, in which you can just wail relentlessly with unlimited normal attacks for a short while on an enemy, often three to four times as many attacks as you could normally manage. That, admittedly, is the most fun the battle system can ever deliver, and I invariably built my party's skills and items to activate it as often as possible. Break Mode is also really useful against large and powerful enemies, but let's face it – its biggest appeal is wanton destruction of evil spirits. Who can argue with that?
However, as much as they've added fun new aspects to combat, they've also added some huge downside to draw away some of the fun. Honestly, I find the moving around to bring enemies into your range doesn't play well with the timed group combo setup preserved from the first game. Often, you find battle time wasted trying to maneuver around your enemy trying to get the perfect shot or avoiding their powerful attack. Perhaps this is realistic, but I don't play Valkyrie Profile to be realistic – I play it to unleash holy might upon the undead and show foes the mercilessness of a goddess of fate.
Oh, speaking of holy might, a huge downside to this game is how they handle weapons. On the bright side, they got rid of weapon breakage, although considering how weak the breakable weapons were they were never used in the previous game at all. However, that is counteracted by the fact that roughly only half, maybe fewer, of the weapons can activate the powerful finishing moves, now called Soul Crushes. Theoretically, it's to make you choose at several points between a weaker weapon with a Soul Crush ability or a stronger one without it. However, as anyone who played the original can tell you, the game is all about these finishers. Sure, maybe you can smack for a few dozen extra damage with the non-finishing weapon. But when you unleash a 10-hit finishing combo worth a few hundred (or later, several thousand) damage (and the damage is modified by how many hits are in the combo), you know that the finisher weapons win every time. Why even bother to have the non-finishing weapons?
One last frustration with the finishing strikes – they were completely genericized. Before, each physical fighter got their own, and mages had a pool of 12 they could pick from. Now, if you're a drone, there's one for each type of drone (archer, light swordsman, and heavy swordsman), and each mage is assigned one of six. One of the advantages of the previous game is that you could pick and choose who to use based on who pleased you – combo capability, quotes used, or how well the finishing strike meshed with your style. But now, everything is just that generic, and you really could just use anyone. It takes away quite a bit from the experience.
I will give the game full credit for rebalancing the skills to make the game less of a cakewalk. Once you knew what to look for in the first game, it was absurdly simple to create an invincible team, in part because the Dark ability (which added insane numbers of hits to your combo at pretty high damage) was so unbalanced. Plus, any character could easily buy it after they got enough levels. The skills are now much better balanced – there's no silver bullet skill like Dark in this one, plus you have to earn a skill by wearing equipment with certain rune combinations (depending on skill) in combat as opposed to getting skill points on leveling. For the most part, this works well, although depending on your level versus what you're fighting the skill gains can be a terrible grind. However, due to one part of the game's build, you'll probably not notice this.
The reason you won't notice is because the challenge is very uneven in the game. Frequently, the game will call for you to make a tremendous leap in the abilities of your team to survive. Thus, in order to advance in some later levels, you'll have to return to earlier levels to slum a bit, and get some extra items and experience until you can handle the new area. You end up doing this frequently early on, to the point that the game's third chapter is almost entirely spent slumming, with brief forays into a new area (so it can be suitable for slumming by the end of the chapter). Given how many areas from the first game aren't present in this one (from towns like Flenceburg and locales like the Tomb of Amenti), you get the sense that this game was rushed and was meant to have more areas to present a more even curve.
Finally, one neat point about the actual dungeon setup – in addition to four accessory slots like before, you also get items called sealstones which can have various stat boosts and penalties if you have them. On top of this, but you can also place them on stands in dungeons and make them affect enemies – this adds a neat little layer of strategy, as you plan out how you want to go through dungeons and what sealstones to inflict on enemies based on your playing style. It's a grander version of what Disgaea does with colored squares and stat boosts, and it's extremely enjoyable.
In terms of graphics… it's odd, but it feels to me like the graphics are better during play than during the full motion videos. Now, I know I'm not a fan of FMVs, but it just seems like characters are too fake looking, like their skin is all plastic during these scenes. It just looks like it moves uncomfortably. The only one who looks at all decent is Hrist, and that's because she often comes across as cold and imperious and her expression isn't hampered as much. In contrast, the textures during the game action look much smoother, and the details are actually animated fairly well, with little clipping and with much more natural movement than it appears during the video sequences.
The backgrounds are still quite lush, and there are some particularly breathtaking scenes – Alicia looking at the statue of Silermia at the beginning of the game is well-done, and the trip across Bifrost late in the game is an excellent practice in transition, so much so that you're quite willing to forgive how dissimilar it is to the original concept. I wish the monsters faired as well, but the game relies very heavily on palette swaps – a bit surprising given how recent the game was released, but not a surprise given the amount of speech in the game. This was developed by Tri-Ace, after all – any place where you can cut corners for more voice acting needs to happen.
However, it's quite clear that this time, the American release just didn't compare to the Japanese version. Now, it's one thing if you're dealing with something like the first game, in which actors play multiple roles but do something different each time. In the first game, Arngrim and Lezard were done by the same voice actress, but you wouldn't know it unless you read the credits. But this time, the drones do literally share a pool of voice actors – there's about four or five voices for drones, and it's actually possible to have an entire party where all your characters are using the exact same voice. Ah, so this is what it feels like when they just don't care to do the project right like they did the first time. The job on these is fair enough, but the repetition is enough to drown out any good in the voice acting.
This is a shame, because the game does have a few gems. For one, Lenneth's classic cry "It shall be engraved upon your soul" is done by four different characters this time, each with their own tone and each equally enjoyable. The performance for Lezard Valeth just adds to the character, and Brahms holds up well compared to the first game. One thing that is rather tragic is that only one voice actor returns from the first game – but if anyone was going to return for one role, it had to be Megan Hollingshead, in what should be her signature role in video gaming. It's an excellent job that gets marred by how much repetition is involved.
One last problem with the game is the ending. Now, I know that a game ideally should be set up for a sequel of some kind, but this one left so much unresolved that I felt like it was half an ending. Given that Hrist is the one valkyrie from the game that doesn't have a starring role in the series (particularly since the first was re-released on the PlayStation Portable as Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth), I know that there needs to be plenty ready to make Valkyrie Profile: Hrist. But a game still needs some resolution – my thoughts after the game were split in two parts. One, I wondered somewhat why I bothered when I couldn't even feel like all that much was done. Two, I was laughing because one character inadvertently said a line that was a different in-joke from college. However, to be fair, the line was so ridiculous that I imagine people outside my immediate circle of friends would laugh at it. I'm not asking for much – I just want a game to have an ending a little more complete than that.
I do enjoy quite a bit of Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria. It finally answers so many questions I had about the first game, and I admittedly am looking forward, in five years, to the release of Valkyrie Profile: Hrist. Other fans of the series will likely feel the same way. However, with the battle system tweaks and the weaker voice acting, I can't help but think that more than one fan of the original will be left cold by this one. On top of that, too much of the game depends on having played the first, meaning that so much of the game's content will just be lost on a newcomer (and I can’t imagine that being all that much fun). Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria was tweaked where it shouldn't have been, and was left alone where it needed tweaks. It's still a fun time, but it's unquestionably a step down from its classic predecessor.
