Gaming Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

[Dagger]

I haven't played the original Valkyrie Profile (and probably never will, unless I get a PSP). Luckily, this is a prequel. Actually, I don't play many games in general, but you know that sensation you get when you're a few hours into one and all of a sudden the battle system makes sense--and it's entertaining & just right and you can't get enough of it?

That's how I feel about VP2 right now.

I don't know whether the story will be any good. The characters are mostly blah (albeit very pretty), and the cut scenes are terribly directed (unfortunate, as it's nothing if not a good-looking game). Right now I'm eager to go on because dashing around the battlefield is so much fun.

Aside from that, it's great that attack spells are powerful enough to be more than worth their cost. For once I like having sorcerers in my party. (It helps that magic, like physical attacks, draws from group AP rather than something like MP.) I do have some gripes, but since they might get ironed out over the course of the game, I don't want to air them just yet. I'm itching to play more.

~Dagger~

[Semjaza]

I'm not big on the original. It's by no means bad, I just think it's extremely overrated. It was pretty and had some neat ideas, but I don't know. The battle system, in particular, just did not work for me at all. You basically just pressed one of the face buttons and a specific point and characters attacked. I felt completely uninvolved.

I owned it on the original PlayStation. Supposedly the PSP port has a lot of problems. From what I've seen of the sequel, though, they seem to be quite different.

As for the sequel, I was thinking about picking itup, but just haven't gotten around to it. I'll have to check it out when I finish some of the other RPGs that just seem to be piling up. Sometimes I wish these things actually were shorter... lol. I'd be interested in seeing what your impressions of it are later on.

[Dagger]

I must be getting toward the end now (I sure hope I am!), but my impressions are still mixed. Almost violently so, haha. Now that the story is lurching its way toward awesomeness, the gameplay has started to suffer.

The einherjar are optional characters that you acquire by finding old weapons lying around in dungeons. When you get them to a certain level, you can release them, and in return they give you items to level up your characters' strength, magic, experience, whatever. After they're freed, they go stand around in towns etc. and may give you further rewards if you talk to them.

Leveling them up is very much worthwhile. It's also boring. And if you're going to level them up (I found myself usually juggling two or three at a time), that makes it tough to keep your regular characters caught up, with just a four person party. There's a way to allocate some experience to your reserve characters, but that doesn't become an option until at least halfway through. So if you want to take advantage of the einherjar's gifts and actually move through the game at the same time, you can only focus on two or three (out of six total) of the regular characters at once.

This wasn't problematic for me until the story started moving, and my regular characters started dropping like flies. First I lost two that I hadn't used at all since recruiting them. Fine, I thought. Then I lost a character that I had gone out of my way to make super powerful, which was a bit more bothersome. Then that character came back--for just one boss fight--and now seems likely to stay unavailable for the rest of the game.

So I'm stuck with two einherjar who are rather pathetic compared to the characters I used the past einherjars' gifts on... and I can't even form a full party, because out of the original six playable characters, four are gone, one is temporarily out of commission, and one is still with me. It's downright obnoxious. I'd mind much less if the steady flow of einherjar hadn't suddenly run dry. I just hope I start finding more again soon.

The battle system uses the one button per character thing, but I've also seen people say that it's pretty different from the original.

~Dagger~

[2010DigitalBoy]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]Oi. I rented this game about 6 months ago and i absolutely loved it for the time i had it. I always played it while listening to Avenged Sevenfold... it's the only game I managed to really get into in a long time, which makes me wonder why i don't own it yet (oh yeah; I'm cheap). I think I was on like the third or fourth area of the map - I'm not sure cuz there were a ton of levels in that game. I think I'd have to start a new game if I bought it.

I simply adore the unique battle system. It took a while to get used to, but once I got it, I enjoyed running into battles and killing everything in seconds, hehe. This game is hard as crap, though. I always spent a good while grinding before entering any next dungeon...[/COLOR]

[Dagger]

The price has dropped by now. If you enjoyed it that much, you should get it. :)

I like a lot of the small details of the battle system... for instance, attacking from behind makes a difference in how much damage you deal out, but not so much so that you're forced to manuver around in back every time. I [i]love[/i] the fact that killing the enemy leader ends battles instantly. I still find it delightful that you can make sorcerers so awesome in this game--it's fun to pick off enemies with a single spell.

~Dagger~