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Valkyria Azure Revolution Demo Impressions

Nyoro SF

Member
I think what we're seeing is what most games look like before polish.
Placeholder footstep sounds.
Field textures are usually last on the list of improvements.
Animations unfinished.
Hit detection unfinished.

Looks more like a beta than a demo, if there ever was a time for such a distinction, now is the time.
 
How many times do I have to say it's not a Valkyria title. They are just using everything around a Valkyria title to sell a Shining game.

Anyway I hope the combat improves, looks rough as hell.
 
Comparison only holds true if it accompanies a HD remaster released on PS4.

...

......

wait

And just like Duscae, the demo has completely killed my interest in the game for now.

At least I'm not going to pay 60€ for VC HD :)
:(

How many times do I have to say it's not a Valkyria title. They are just using everything around a Valkyria title to sell a Shining game.

Anyway I hope the combat improves, looks rough as hell.

I'd rather have a Shining game. At least those have Tony Taka
 
They're still going to make mainline Valyria games right? At least the visuals and music are nice here, give that polish to a new Chronicles game on PS4 and we're golden.
 
They're still going to make mainline Valyria games right? At least the visuals and music are nice here, give that polish to a new Chronicles game on PS4 and we're golden.

Maybe. I don't know, Sega is weird about it. VC1 sold well again infact on Steam too.

Sega is really annoyed with how VC2 sold on PSP, even though I like that game I know why a lot of people don't. That said, they were hoping for VC1 sales that took until 6 months later for it to catch on, on the PS3 almost immediately on the PSP with VC2 in 2010. Can't say that plan payed off well.

One could hope for a new console entry, maybe the remastered version of 1 will decide that.
 

Pooya

Member
How many times do I have to say it's not a Valkyria title. They are just using everything around a Valkyria title to sell a Shining game.

Anyway I hope the combat improves, looks rough as hell.

If they didn't wanted the association they could have just called it something else!
 

biocat

Member
Why include this demo with VC HD?

It's like, "Hey, you liked that first game? Well, this new game isn't anything like it."
 

Maniel

Banned
Combat could use some work, but I liked the art and music. I think this game needs some more time in the oven.
 

Mesoian

Member
I found someone streaming gameplay.
http://www.twitch.tv/hamachin/v/42638738

So it's an entire game based around the co-op command from VC3.

Could be great...that close combat mode needs some work; it could really use a lot more feedback than popped number enemy moves with a slower animation.

Why include this demo with VC HD?

It's like, "Hey, you liked that first game? Well, this new game isn't anything like it."

...because they're planning on selling this game and people who bought VC are the most likely people to be repeat consumers? What is this question?
 

Nyoro SF

Member
I have to say this thread definitely shows who did and didn't play the handheld games.

Sword fighting in battle is heavily prevalent in VC2. Less in VC3 but still there. So wondering about sword fighting? There you go.
Like someone else noted, this whole game seems based off the Direct Command in VC3.
Skirts in battle... well, that was in all three games, so if that didn't bother you before, I don't know why it would bother you now. Or if it did bother you before, at least you know what to expect. Like this:

This is Valkyria in name only. They've discarded everything that made VC...VC.

I suppose Rosie and Alicia "aren't VC" lol

I can definitely see potential for a game based entirely around Direct Command. Sadly my preorder of the physical code is going to take a while to get here because I am *pretty* sure this code is not on PSN...
 
Why its a spinoff! This same song and dance every thread gets old. Its not Vc its a spinoff of the Valkyrie series. Let it go!
if they didnt want this reaction they could've i dont know, not made a spin off to a dormant but beloved series

And now we are nto only not getting more valkyria chronicles, it appears we are just getting a shit game with this spinoff
 
I was hoping at the absolute minimum it'd share some mechanics with Valkyria Chronicles, but it seems not. Honestly, I'm not impressed. Even visually it just looks like a typical anime RPG with a heavy paper filter rather than the picture book style of VC or Okami.
 
that twitch stream is real choppy for me, it's basically a slideshow with audio. is the combat like an arpg? is each attack a button press (Fable, Amalur) or is it auto attack but you manage specials (Xenoblade)?
 
I think I know why this looks so boring... unlike a conventional third person action game (shooter or melee centric), there's a lot less enemies and the enemies don't really do much of anything.

For example, in Mass Effect 3, Cerberus goons would advance on your position, fire at you, lob grenades, setup turrets, and a bunch of other stuff that would force you to react and advance in order to flank them and take them out. Here, it seems like you could avoid the melee phase by creeping up slowly and taking tons of potshots outside of the enemies' vision range, which is pretty boring. The maps also don't provide much in the way of cover or obstacles for interesting gameplay (which is something VC1 shares).
 

Finalow

Member
of course music is great, Mitsuda is on it.

we already knew that the combat was going to be different and more action-ish, so there you go. it does look rough but then again it's just an early demo.
 
The girls had skirt armor in VC1. But character designs are indeed shabby and boring in this title.


On the demo footage itself, they are emphasizing 'combat setup' not in only in the sense of your loadouts, but also in how you manage the field before or without engaging in close combat. That's more strategic than I expected.

Close combat looks like crap though. I think they could make it better if they added targeting individual parts of enemies rather than just straight up mashing. Alternative equipment (guns, grenades, smoke screens) don't seem to have much application in close quarters (except maybe to escape?). That kind of defeats the purpose of the fencer types in the VC games, where their movement was shit and their range limited compared to other classes, but they dealt crazy damage.

I think it would also help to have the ability to separate team members to position some into more strategic locations (sniper in the far, far back for instance). But I don't know how that would work with the range -> close combat type system they have going right now.
Wait. This is apples and oranges.

First, on VC1 only three female soldiers in your army wore skirt armor (and the rest of the couple dozen girls wore pants) and it was still part of a relatively believably military uniform designed for battle. Everything besides the cutesy skirt was designed for battle complete with uniformed combat boots. No stupid heels here! It was still fantasy but very much grounded-ish in reality.

Azure features a girl running around in a frilly, long, cumbersome, and sticks-out-in-a-battlefield white dress running around in high heeled boots.

If you can't see for yourself how different these two versions' interpretation for what a woman should wear in a battlefield are then I can't help you.

It's night and day as far as anime inspired games go.
 
Still salty about the game... for completely unfair reasons.

When it was first announced, I read it as Valkyre Azure Revolution and Valkyre Profile remaster Announced, not Chronicles. So I though we were getting a brand spanking new VP game T_T.

Not fair to the game, but I need somebody or something to be angry at so...
 
PkQn76w.png
 
Can't wait for this. Just speed up the combat alil bit sega is all i ask. Melee looks to slow. Otherwise hopefully this comes west.
Edit: and i see gaf will not be a good source for info on this game lol so much salt its not Vc good lord.
 
Wait. This is apples and oranges.

First, on VC1 only three female soldiers in your army wore skirt armor (and the rest of the couple dozen girls wore pants) and it was still part of a relatively believably military uniform designed for battle. Everything besides the cutesy skirt was designed for battle complete with uniformed combat boots. No stupid heels here! It was still fantasy but very much grounded-ish in reality.

Azure features a girl running around in a frilly, long, cumbersome, and sticks-out-in-a-battlefield white dress running around in high heeled boots.

If you can't see for yourself how different these two versions' interpretation for what a woman should wear in a battlefield are then I can't help you.

It's night and day as far as anime inspired games go.
Yeah a more accurate comparison would be this to VC2 dye to the academy uniforms. And even then it's not like Azure.
 
Hmm, reviewing the footage, here's the main improvement that I think that VAR is going to need without having to go the Devil May Cryonetta Rising Automata (heh) route.

Enemies need to actually fight back in melee, instead of clunkily shooting their rifles and occasionally rifle-butting like it's Type-0.

I'm thinking, stuff like parries, ripostes, bladelock, flanking, kicks, throws, halfswording, etc like with in Dishonored. That's what VAR is going to need to have good combat, instead of this TES Oblivion: Tales of Type-0 crap I see.

Though, animating that would probably be a bitch since Amleth uses a BFS instead of a more gentlemanly (
"M'Valkyria" *tips fedora*
) shortsword like Corvo does.
 

sense

Member
would they listen to a feedback that says go back to the original battle system?!!

what would have been one of my most anticipated game has turned into a maybe for me :(
 
This is like a very weird mix of TPS, VC tactic elements and classic ARPG combat.

Yet the combination dosn't seem to work at all, actually quite the contrary, dosn't look fun or engaging at all. Movement and animations looks off, and the TPS elements are hilariously clunky and bad.
 

Nyoro SF

Member
Stuff starting to appear on YouTube now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUw_TsvCDXw

(Impressions in English)

Note: Boss battle begins at 7:40 until end, so minor spoiler warning ... err... maybe...

Just finished watching.
Some notes from him:

There's no point in a cover system if you can just heal with items immediately.
Level balancing is broken.
Gunplay feels mostly pointless and grenades are far too strong in both utility and strength.
Can't cancel attacks into dodge moves; having played action games that do it both ways, I prefer dodge canceling out of attacks being possible, but only doable late in animations to prevent the battle system becoming mashy.
Not enough borrowed elements from Valkyria Chronicles battle system to deserve its Valkyria name.

Note that he wisely ignores stuff like animation jank, unfinished textures, footstep placeholders since the game clearly isn't finished on that front, he goes after the core items which are more important to the overall game. Making a high quality texture and fixing animation cancels is fairly straightforward, making a competent battle system much less so, so improvement needs to be focused on that part of the feedback first.

That being said... where does the feedback go anyway? Is this a hands-free demo and Sega actually doesn't take any direct feedback, just metrics? x_x
 

ref

Member
Not sure why they decided to go this route combat wise when Valkyria Chronicles was praised for it's combat.

It was SO good. Why oh why. Still possible to do new things but keep the tactical turn based gameplay intact.

It looks alright, but not feeling the gameplay at all.
 
Just finished watching.
Some notes from him:

There's no point in a cover system if you can just heal with items immediately.
Level balancing is broken.
Gunplay feels mostly pointless and grenades are far too strong in both utility and strength.
Can't cancel attacks into dodge moves; having played action games that do it both ways, I prefer dodge canceling out of attacks being possible, but only doable late in animations to prevent the battle system becoming mashy.
Not enough borrowed elements from Valkyria Chronicles battle system to deserve its Valkyria name.
This is such a big deal for modern action games. Can not even begin to tell you how annoying it is to completely commit to stonger, longer attacks with no way out and getting completely blind-sighted by an enemy that initially delayed their attack.

Overall, those are some valuable thoughts. In regards to his complaint about the clunky lock-on system, I think Sega should also look into ditching ranged weapon lock-on in general and just make it free-aim like any modern TPS.
 
Well aware this is a spin-off title, just not feeling how the gameplay is turning out, seems awfully clunky and kind of slow. Seems like the game needs some serious fixing, I just hope the feedback gets back to developers...is there anyone doing what KHHSubs is doing for the Yakuza 6 demo and sending translated fan feedback to SEGA?
 
Whelp. It was too much to hope it would be good. The gameplay looked really bad :(

At least I get the original game on the PS4 as a result of this I guess.
 

shandy706

Member
Slightly OT, but..

Is there any way to make Valkyria Chronicles not Aliased to hell and back?

I turned it to 4k and I swear it didn't look any different on my 1080p set. I'm guessing higher resolutions don't change anything.

I need to google this I suppose.
 

dramatis

Member
Wait. This is apples and oranges.

First, on VC1 only three female soldiers in your army wore skirt armor (and the rest of the couple dozen girls wore pants) and it was still part of a relatively believably military uniform designed for battle. Everything besides the cutesy skirt was designed for battle complete with uniformed combat boots. No stupid heels here! It was still fantasy but very much grounded-ish in reality.

Azure features a girl running around in a frilly, long, cumbersome, and sticks-out-in-a-battlefield white dress running around in high heeled boots.

If you can't see for yourself how different these two versions' interpretation for what a woman should wear in a battlefield are then I can't help you.

It's night and day as far as anime inspired games go.
It's not apples and oranges. No matter how you would like to spin how superior VC1 designs were, skirt armor is skirt armor. And the main female characters had it because they're the main female characters, so they had to have some sort of feminine distinction apparently. Thus, skirt armor. It wouldn't be an issue if the males also had the same skirt armor feature, but they didn't, which meant the skirt armor was specifically designed for the females.

Don't act righteous by defending one game's very anime designs while excusing the poor design elements of another game. Azure's designs are crappy. But they're not an excuse for VC1's design shortcomings.
 
Well that looks average. I had low expectations to begin with but it just looks even more mediocre than I thought it would. What a lame looking battle system. Plus the music is straight up boring and forgettable too. Modern day Mitsuda for you.
 

Nyoro SF

Member
I think some people would be pretty shocked to see how horrible their favorite games looked before they were polished, lol... not saying there's going to be magic fixes to all the problems, but stuff like this just pulls back the curtain on how ugly this stuff looks before it's done.

Well aware this is a spin-off title, just not feeling how the gameplay is turning out, seems awfully clunky and kind of slow. Seems like the game needs some serious fixing, I just hope the feedback gets back to developers...is there anyone doing what KHHSubs is doing for the Yakuza 6 demo and sending translated fan feedback to SEGA?

I hate to break your optimism, but Sega Japan does not care one bit about Western feedback to their games.

The Valkyria games and the Valkyria franchise has always been promoted and sold solely to the Japanese with the Western branch to pick up the pieces after. Might as well shout into the wind (which, I suppose is what we're doing right now).

Probably doesn't help that our feedback is centered around skirts. lol
 
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