Valkyria Chronicles (currently available on PC/XBOX Game Pass) is a turn-based anime-style story-driven strategy game (say that five times fast) that published in 2008 by SEGA for the PS3. It ported to PS4, Switch, and PC. What it does differently from other games of the genre, like Jagged Alliance, is that moving your units reverts to a real-time component. You take control of your unit for that turn to move them into position while possibly taking reaction fire from any opponents close enough to you and that can see you. When you raise your weapon to aim, you get a breathing break. As soon as you take your shot, the enemy can return fire and everyone else can continue their reaction fire.

Moving closer to your enemies improves your chances to hit your opponents, but the act of movement can get you killed. This becomes extra painful when you have a heavily wounded soldier facing off against an opponent and the act of taking control of your soldier may get them killed if you are not fast enough at raising your weapon. But then again there is nothing like parking your tank with a machine gun in front of multiple enemies and waiting for them to take their turns…

From Consoles to Computers

Valkyria Chronicles is first and foremost a console game. While this allows for some unusual, dynamic combat, it adds limitations and patterns that do not play well with regular PCs. It wasn’t published for PC at launch and suffers from a regular case of “being a ported game”. This includes a complete lack of options in the settings menu. While you get basic things like resolution switching, world detail level, and controls, you should not expect much more. No Anti-Aliasing settings, no particle settings, no bloom. On the positive side, this also means that the game runs well on an integrated Intel graphics chip. Hooray!

One of the selling points of the game is the story, driven by beautiful cut scenes and story clips drawn in a graphic-novel style. These clips are impressive; that I believe nobody will dare to dispute. They use a rendering system that makes all the visuals pop with unique beauty. It renders them in *glorious* 720p resolution, which raises issues for anyone who wants to play Valkyria Chronicles on a screen with a significantly higher resolution. At 1080p, the videos still look and feel decent, but having originally started the game on a 4K screen with all the bells and whistles enabled (the one slider bar pushed to the max), I felt like I was trying to watch something drawn in the ’90s and I do not mean that in a good way. Given how visual-heavy the game is, it is a real pity I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone play it on a higher resolution screen.

Getting to Grips with the Controls

The control scheme is unusual. Using the mouse is almost completely out of the question. Which is weird when you think part of the game is like a third-person shooter, with a free aiming system for your troops. Speaking of aiming, you use tank controls, i.e. the NumPad keys to do so. On a controller, you can use a joystick. To shoot the weapon, you press the spacebar or, if you prefer a controller, the A button. While it makes sense in terms of what the action accomplishes – a confirmation of an order – it does not feel appropriate for the situation. Shooting the enemy with a submachine gun feels so much better when you can pull the trigger. It may have been better with a PS3 controller, but without one to compare this to, I will remain critical.

Navigating the menus in and out of combat is yet another ordeal since they consider the mouse taboo. Arrows for submenus, F1/F2 for switching between menus, buttons over triggers, and the triggers themselves for the controller. More precisely, the triggers are not used for shooting; the game uses them for navigating menus. Questionable design decisions, that is for sure. While you can change the controls in the launcher, remapping most keys is not exactly what I want to do when trying out a new game. I recommend using a controller, which is peculiar considering this is a strategy game. Once you get used to the weird controls, the game becomes a much more pleasant experience, but getting used to them is a pain.

Having Fun Storming The Battlefield

Tactical combat takes place in turns. Each player has a limited amount of Command Points that replenish each turn. I can use a Command Point to either take control of one of your units (infantry units take one, while tanks require two). When you take control of a unit, you enter a third-person view of that unit. You can move them a certain distance, you can take a shooting action and/or take a special action, such as defusing a land mine. This creates an interesting conundrum: do you move few units multiple times, sacrificing manpower for extra mobility, or do you move with everyone, sacrificing mobility for higher survival rates or more careful entrances into dangerous situations? Both are valid tactics, and the game is more than happy to let you decide for yourself in most cases.

You can save command Points to use on future turns and the number of CPs you get each turn depends on map settings and the number of special troops you have. In your case, “special troops” are the main characters and the main side characters. Bringing them along gives you more options in terms of how many actions you can do, but limits you in terms of who else do you wish to bring along. It also makes killing the enemy’s special units a valid tactic to reduce the number of attacks he can make towards you in future turns, and that can make a difference between getting a cannon shell in the face instead of getting two.

The upshot of having to aim manually at your opponent when you take a shot eliminates quite a few problems that many other turn-based tactics games have. When you miss your target, you might hit something else. With a single burst, you can kill multiple enemy troops. If you do not see the target, you will not hit them, there is no shooting around corners or through walls. Barrel awareness matters, especially on varying terrain. It brings a level of realism that you would not expect from a game that includes flying pigs.

Additional tactical depth comes from camps and orders. Camps are special structures on the map that you capture and allow for retreating, deploying, and redeploying your troops. Orders give special effects, such as increased damage, to soldiers, damage to enemies, and help allies. Using camps also costs a single Command Point while order costs differ according to what order you wish to use. They add a dimension to the combat while remaining in the background – they require more menu-hopping. However, they have significant weight to them, a well-timed order or getting an extra Sniper in the field at a crucial point can easily make or break your advance.

The size of rewards depends on how many opponents you kill and how quickly you finish the mission. Each mission also has a strict time limit, but you can earn bonus experience and money for being extra quick. Most of the time, the time limit does not really come into play, aggression is nowhere as urgent as in XCOM2. However, it is very difficult to get high grades as a casual player. It is interesting to read up on how “expert” players solve the missions in just 2-4 turns through the use of specific orders or clever tactics when you’ve just finished a long and bloody ordeal where some of your dearest troops were in mortal peril.

The main gripe I have with the battle system, which works well, is the main screen. You get an overview of the battlefield to decide who gets deployed where, who gets to take actions, and what orders to make. There is no depth dimension to the battlefield which often results in Snipers being spawned in valleys while your Shock troopers end up in a sniper’s nest. Ground obstacles are difficult to spot. It means that you need to balance between having a plan before a battle and your ability to adapt to the battlefield itself. You start with very little information and try to make the best of it, but height lines on a map would have helped heaps to avoid silly mistakes.

Taking A Break From Battles

When you are not dealing with battlefield tactics, you get a lot of options for what to do. By that, I mean a lot. Headquarters offers weapons research to improve your armament costs money, build extra tools to have on your tanks, training your troops to improve their combat efficiency, go to a graveyard to learn new battle orders for experience, even choose which troops you wish to have in your roster as each soldier has their own good and bad qualities. This can range from bonuses from being around male members of your squad, having an allergy to their gun, even loving or hating being near certain other soldiers.

Over time, new soldiers become available, which is great since over time others may pass on. You can also go visit a princess to get some rewards, change your troops’ weaponry, and unlock extra missions by supporting a friendly neighborhood journalist. Most of what you do in the HQ has significant consequences on how your tactical encounters turn out. As resources are relatively limited – relatively since you can do optional missions for extra stuff – you have to consider your choices carefully.

Aside from the Headquarters, you can also replay older missions as Skirmishes with extra experience, read up on the story or the people, and check for other less strategic content. The sheer amount of content here is incredible.

A Captivating Story

This is a story-driven game, so no matter how good or bad the strategy and tactical parts are, a weak story can destroy the game. You rarely get to decide upon the order in which you wish to execute missions, and you get no dialogue options. I would estimate a third of the whole game time has to do with watching the story unfold as opposed to actively taking part in it. That is a lot of stories to push into a relatively small game. That produces a new challenge of balance: if the battles felt very similar, you fall into battle patterns and get bored. If they are too different, they don’t feel like the same game. With a very long story, clever tricks should be employed and Valkyria Chronicles has a lot of tricks up its enormous anime-styled sleeves.

Boss fights where simple violence does not help. Missions where you are forced out of your sweet little tank. The research trees for your equipment are as detailed as they are long. The difficulty of enemy troops slowly increases as the game goes on. Every time I think I’ve gotten a handle on the game, it throws something new at me. There is almost no moment of rest. I would say the balance of gameplay and story hits the nail right on the head, though some people may complain that there is too much story and not enough fighting.

Thinking about the story, it is unquestionably riddled with clichés, borrowing heavily from World War 2 culture. It is a mix of a fantasy World War 2 and the stories of Asterix and Obelix wrapped in a cozy warm anime sweater. You are from a small country rich in a vital mineral (not Unobtainium!) between two massive states, one representing Germanic culture, the other Soviet. Your troops are mostly female with impeccable skin, you are a plucky hero that gets promoted to a position of power for no real reason other than your lineage, your second in command is a sweet little baker girl who has a crush on you, your regiment is like a large family and the world is full of racism against brunettes. It should not work. It has no right to work. Since we are on clichés, you may know what I’ll say next: it works.

Now, I am no fan of anime, but somehow when someone sets fire to a barn full of slave workers, it made me angry. When the protagonist compared his second in command to a dove on a beach, I found it amusing. Emotions run wild and that is a good thing. The writing of the story is excellent, the 3D artistry sublime, the voice acting perfect. The human gestures are marvelous and detailed and life-like. If it did not have the cartoony look on top, it would be easy to forget that you’re not watching a live-action movie. I ended up enjoying the story a lot more than I initially expected to.

A Loyal Crew

Anime-styled tactics games often have a cast size that can only be described as ludicrous and Valkyria Chronicles is no different. Yes, you have the protagonists and antagonists whose stories unfold throughout the game. You have the main side characters whose backstories are often told through journalist reports, side missions and optional story chapters. And then you have the main part of your little regiment – the grunts.

Their backstories are often limited to two short paragraphs, but every and each one of them has one. I recommend reading up on your troops because it can give you a little insight into why their vocalized attitude is the way it is and add a little more depth to the role-play aspect of the game. It is also where I found out that some of my best troops were 12 or 13 years old! When I recruited them I did not understand their age and I did not consider the possibility, but I had used child soldiers to fight my battles.

Fortunately, I was not the only one at fault since my regiment, being part of the militia, was constantly sent into the most dangerous situations to spare army casualties. I took a dim view of the army sending in child soldiers to either do their dirty work or work as cannon fodder and continued playing.

Besides having backstories, each soldier has their own perks and problems, collectively called Potentials. These are additional effects that may or may not trigger in certain situations. Some soldiers will be less efficient when they have moved great distances, some are extra efficient at night, etc. There are a lot of different Potentials and you can unlock even more by training the specific unit classes. Because of these Potentials, you plan not only to take on an enemy tank with any Lancer, you try to do it with a specific Lancer that gets a bonus to killing tanks or a bonus to armor penetration. When you are battling in urban areas, you try to bring along soldiers that like the city life, as opposed to soldiers that crave for open spaces or dirt. While the Potentials do not make or break your game, they can be significant enough to make you think twice about your decisions. And that is exactly what you want in a game about tactics and strategy.

Conclusion

When I first heard of this game, it did not catch my interest. Cartoonish-looking games rarely do. What caught my interest was the battle system where you have to aim at your opponent, despite it being turn-based. Now that I have had my fair share of time with it, I can see I was premature in my judgment. The game definitely has its flaws, some because of its age, but others because of questionable design decisions. Something about the game absolutely works and hence offers a lot of entertainment. It is not a game for everyone, but if the interesting battle mechanics sparked your interest even a little, I would recommend giving Valkyria Chronicles your time.

TL;DR: Valkyria Chronicles is an unusual turn-based strategy game that brings a little innovation to battle mechanics and a lot of loveable stories to the strategy game. It is visually stunning despite its age and offers entertainment for dozens of hours.

You Might Like This Game If:

• You enjoy XCOM, Jagged Alliance, Laser Squad, etc.
• You want to re-experience the thrill of playing Hidden and Dangerous alone again.
• You like grid-less tactics.
• You are a fan of anime-styled story-based games.

You Might NOT Like This Game If:

• You violently dislike console games.
• You definitely want to play games at 4K or better resolution.
• You dislike anime.
• You dislike flying pigs.

Kaur played for many hours on a Dell laptop with Intel i7-7700HQ, and 16GB RAM using an Xbox One Controller. The game was played via Xbox Game Pass.