So is Valkyria Chronicles good?

[Mister K]

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: For 12-13 USD on Steam? Most definitely yes.

Full answer: First of all, it is not a JRPG. It is (Japan made) tactical third person shooter with a tiniest bit of rpg element-leveling up your squad.

OK, now for other stuff.

Gameplay: quite enjoyable. You and enemy take turns and move your units and give buffs to them. You have a limited ammount of points. By spending point, you choose a unit to move around the battlefield in 3rd person perspective. While unit is moving, enemy units can fire at him/her/it (it is true for both your and enemy units), so be careful where you move. Then, unit performs an action of your choice, be it shooting, capturing the flag, healing, or fixing a tank (if it's an engineer). When you press "action" button, the game pauses and you can choose your target. Perform action and pick other unit to play as. Not all that hard. What actually matters is positioning your units on the battlefield.

Visuals: Imagine anime, but painted with watercolor and rendered 3D. Looks gorgeous. Also, character designs are interesting and rather memorable.

Story, characters and such: Well, they do follow certain usual for Japan story and character tropes, but they aren't really that obvious (especially characters) and are rather nice. Also, about characters: Your squad consists of 20 characters. While 5-6 of them are important to the story (which means you can't replace them, but why would you?), other spots can and must be filled by other characters of your choice. While some of them are, well, boring, other at the very least decent and at most quite nice. Also, they all have their own "perks" and backstories (which you can read in the glossary), so you have an option to create a well-rounded squad, that consists of characters you like.

Gripes: Minor. Major one is that sometimes you really need to play skirmishes (i.e. non-story battles) to get enough experience to be sure in the outcome of the story missions, which can get tedious. Minor one: For points you earn during successful battles, you can buy additional story bits, which are really well done and they expend on backstories of major characters or give you a chance to find out something about story events. HOWEVER, the most expensive one is a goddamn "anime-on-the-beach-filler-episode". Damnit.

Overall, I found the experience enjoyable.

 

[Fox12]

Hmm, I might get it for my wife then. If the dialogue is very much "highschool anime" -esque stuff, then I might have to eat my own entrails as a form of self defense. My wife however will probably find it absolutely delicious. xD But she's crazy like that.

The stories not bad, it's just basic, and seems to exist as a vahicle for the game play. It even had some legitimately heartfelt moments at the end. There isn't any fan service, but it can get cheesy at moments. In that sense it's not anything you haven't seen before, and you could probably see the plot twists coming a mile away. However, the game does get pretty dramatic towards the finale and I felt the hype. If you've ever played a fire emblem then you should know exactly what to expect from the plot.

The art style is a gorgeous water color design. It's fantastic and unique, reminiscent of Wind Waker or Okami.

The strongest draw is the gameplay, hands down. It's a unique blend of turn based and real time strategy that actually works really well. If you're a fan of strategy games then this is basically a requirement. I highly reccomend it for the battle system alone.

 

[Fasckira]

I played it religiously till I got to the desert level with the fuck-off huge tank, rage-quitting after several attempts.

Aside from that, its really enjoyable.

 

[Auron225]

A bigger question to determine your possible enjoyment isn't "Do you like JRPG's?" but rather "Do you like RTS games?"

It's pretty much the only RTS game I've played but I enjoyed it well enough. It does take some getting used to. I found myself needing a fair bit of trail and error with most levels I played;

"oh, I can't put my sniper there cause she'll get killed immediately",
"damn, I shouldn't have had those guys bunker down there cause now reinforcements have them surrounded all of a sudden"

Sometimes things like that happen and it's such a disaster that you need to repeat the operation from scratch, which can be disheartening considering they can easily take like an hour. Having said that, it could also be due to the fact that it was my first RTS...

As for JRPG/anime-ness, it's moderate. A bit non-nonsensical in that the main character just happens to have his own super-special-awesome tank lying around, and other reasons I won't go into now, but you'll find few glaring anime stereotypes. All in all, yeah - if what you've seen has got your attention then I'd say give it a shot!

 

[Angelowl]

Easily one of the best game on the console and certainly the most overlooked one. Art style is great, story is fairly decent for being an anime war story. The gameplay is pretty good despite having the usual japanese game cliches, such as endlessly spawning enemies, absurdly overpowered enemies at times and RNG of DOOM. I never finished it but I like it none the less and would like the third game.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Well firstly dont expect an RPG its a strategy game mostly turn based but mixes in real time as well to great effect.

I dont tend to like Strategy games but there is always a few that hook me and this was one of them. Fantastic Presentation, great art, great story that tackles potentially heavy subjects with a deft touch I particularly liked the humanising and exploration of weapons of mass destruction in war, how they are used and at what cost.

So for me I would say its definitely worth a go I loved every second of it and it has become my second favourite game of all time. I do wish they had got rid of the flying pig however even if it is a potential mocking of the futility of war and the possible reliability of those who record the tale of the conflicts.

I also like how it shows the good and the bad sides of war how it pushes situations to extremes and the racism issue was also handled surprisingly well. Just dont watch the anime of it because its horrible.

I have never played the second I did not like the apparent shift of tone and the fact it is PSP only I really wanted to play the third, may have to just import it and get a fan patch.

 

[Robert Marrs]

I bought it when it first got released for pc but it has fallen victim to the all mighty backlog.

 

[jedisensei]

You're not playing this for it's story, so if that's the only obstacle, you'd do yourself a disservice by passing on the game.

The cutscenes are damnably unskippable though, so you will need to stomache "androgynous teenage gobshites witter on about shit [you] don't care about" (thanks, Yahzee), or at least be able to zone-out long enough to make it to the next battle... I didn't find the story to be that bad, however, but then I'm also interested in alt-history, and games like Operation: Darkness...