Now I know I said that the next overview was gonna be Fire Emblem Fates, but this was a little something I did before that Twitter poll in April got the final verdict.

If you ever got familiar with some of Sega’s franchises, other than just Sonic and Yakuza, you would also be familiar with their under-appreciated titles, mainly within their RPG catalog. Valkyria Chronicles was a franchise I never thought I’d come to enjoy at first. What started in development as a simple dramatic war story idea, became something in of itself; with fun tactical gameplay while also having real time actionbattles, and the freedom to plan out your army team and strategies accordingly. I played the first game for the PS3 back in 2013, and fell in love with not just its visual and gameplay presentation, but the story, setting, and its characters really kept me invested as well. I might actually put together a review video at some point detailing everything about my experience, but moving on to the subject of this overview.

I had my copy of one of the second game sitting in my library for a while, and figured if I was ever gonna do videos or streams (so much for the latter after the glitchy Xenoblade X stream incident lol) related to the series, I might as well get the time to see how the sequels play out. So while I waited for the Twitter poll to close, I grabbed my PSP and started my first play through. After three in a half months of playingthrough the story, I can say that it does make some slight improvements gameplay-wise, but the direction felt off in some cases. Here are my thoughts on why that is.

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Starting with its visuals and gameplay, its pretty much plays the same as it does with first game, only with a significant down-grade. Taken how this was made for the PSP, the presentation had to cut down a budget due to limitations. In the first game, when characters are speaking via cutscenes, they’re usually presented with a headshot of their 3D models and are fully animated. In 2 however, they decided to go for portraits and still images that move around, making it something akin to a visual novel. Many of these cutscenes aren’t fully voice acted, except for important moments within the story, and major ones would even include fully fledge 2D animation. This can make the experience somewhat jarring if you’re more familiar with the 3D style, than this one.

Gameplay’s just the same with its use of the AP meter (points that allow you to move your units btw), and strategic gameplay, but the maps you play on also got doubled down. Instead of one singular open area, the maps would instead support different sections you can traverse to via your camps. When you capture one of the enemy’s camps, you would gain more control and access to certain areas that you can use to your advantage. The amount of units you can send out on missions, are limited to six(the first game would let you control 12, including your tanks), so you’d have to be smart on which members you want to take out or put in for certain situations.

All the classes your units can play as from the previous VC game do make a return, with some various tweaks here and there. Big major examples would include the engineer and sniper classes. In the first game, engineers are responsible for making sure your tank and teammates stay alive in battle, they also had the ability to disarm mines and fix barriers. In this game, they pretty much nerfed the latter by giving it to a new class, the armored tech, who are also pretty much your melee fighters. Snipers in the first game were also a class that you can choose to have at the start, now they’re just an upgrade class that you give to your scouts. Speaking of which, many of the upgrade classes that you can get, do have their nice perks; such as the commandos who support the use of flamethrowers, the mortarers who shoot powerful grenades, the medics who are able to fully revive fallen units, and the anthem corps who are pretty much your bards. While I did enjoy the freedom to customizing my teammates however I please, part of me did wish for some of those classes to be there from the start.

Weapon and tank customization are also still a thing, with many of the upgrades requiring you to go back to certain levels for materials, which leads to another point I’mma bring up. This game definitely encourages you to grind your levels a lot. During the courses to get through the story mode; you are greeted by a selection of missions for the month you’re currently on, and you have to pass a certain amount of marked missions in order to get to the next month and progress the plot. There are also missions you can buy via the store and DLC (which are no longer available at the time of this post, thanks Sony…), that you can play optionally. Then there are character missions that show up, depending on which unit you play the most, you’ll get to see a cutscene to learn more about them, and after a certain amount, you then eventually do a special mission to unlock their hidden potentials, some of them would even replace one of their bad perks. This was a somewhat nice feature, as it does help you to get closer to finding your favorite units, which was something the first game did somewhat lack (minus-ing the Edy Detachment DLC).

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The story itself seems to take a bit of a strange turn in direction. At one point, its suppose to be war story, while at the same time focuses on school themes. During the first half, when you attend the academy, you are greeted with a tournament arcof some sorts, where you’d have to prove you’re the best class out of everyone. After that, it immediately shifts back to the serious war story, as you later find out the school was an experiment ground for creating artificial valkyria. Part of me really wants to believe, because the Persona series was hitting big on PSP at the time, Sega wanted to take a slice of the cake with their own turn of the “kids in high school” genre (which is kinda ironic since they own Atlus now lol), only for it turn out not as strong as they hoped for.

The characters are also not nearly as memorable or original as the first game’s, with many of them being defined by cliche anime stereotypes. You got your hot headed shonen protagonist, your cool and stoic bookworm, your cute and clumsy main girl, etc. Not to say you can’t make characters around those stereotypes, but had they been given more depth, it would have benefited the narrative a bit more. There are some recognizable VAs which sorta ease them to an extent, as many of them did a great performance, while there were some moments where some deliveries felt a little off, it didn’t take away the impact of the important parts of the story. (Plus the main boy is voiced by Jason Spisak, who I kinda have a childhood soft spot for. Which is a little bonus point for me. lol)

So overall, while this game lacks a lot of the charm from the first, it sorta makes up for it with the amount of missions you can take on, as well as the replay value. I can definitely say it’s a bit harder than the first, due to the gameplay limitations. In fact, it probably made me experience a lot more mission failures than the first, with certain enemies being able to one shot your tank, gratefully dodging your gunfire, and finding smart ways to steal your base camp without you knowing. Thankfully its a little forgiving by not including permadeath, otherwise it’d just be just cruel to get through. Despite all that, it eventually sold 94,000 copies during its release, it even got high praise from reviewers that it eventually made it to be the second highest rated PSP title after Persona 3 Portable.

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With that taken care of, before I go into Fire Emblem Fates, I have been recommended to play through some other FE games beforehand. Starting with Awakening first, followed by Echoes, and then all of the 3 Fates games last. Might do overviews on both Awakening and Echoes when I feel it’s necessary.