Been a while. But I'll finally write my review.
Keep in mind this is for the PS4 version.
Pretext: I am not a professional reviewer, it's been weeks since I finished, and there might be errors.
GRAPHICS:
On this front I liked the presentation of the squad uniforms and the outfits of the enemy generals. The modeling of the enemies looked cool, too, including the mechanized bosses. The bad is really bad though. The ground, grass and stone textures look incredibly awful, directly from the low end of PS3 games. Textures for clothes outside the Anti-Valkyria Squad's lack almost any sort of detail.
Perhaps the biggest offender are just how weak the spell effects are. The effects are very weakly rendered, with many just a different color to represent elements; there are very few elemental renderings that look any good at all.
The faces and design of the men in the game look great, but the eyes of the women are too large, so they look alien-like. Normally this isn't a problem in Japanese games but the realistic head sizes and the realistic clothing proportions make the problem worse. NPCs have extremely little detail on their faces or none at all.
And on a final note, the amount of asset reuse in this game is nuts.
Sub-category of Animations: The battle animations are great for the most part. The ones that are weighty look weighty and the lighter attackers have appropriate light feel to their animations. The story animations though, are almost nonexistent. There's huge stretches of cutscenes where people are standing around talking to each other with almost zero dynamism in animation; incredibly boring. The brief moments where animations are used look really bad (in a hilarious way sometimes), like Amleth grinding his teeth.
Due to the obvious budget cuts there's dozens of times where NPCs address people with their backs to the camera, so that they don't have to render the eyes and lips of NPCs as they address our main characters. It looks just as cheap as it sounds. Despite this there are times where you will see eyeless, mouthless NPCs addressing some characters. This lack of animation even extends to the main street hub where shopkeepers stand around listlessly making the place look like a strange post-apocalyptic mannequin theater.
CUTSCENES:
These get a separate category since the game is 70% cutscenes / 30% game. These cutscenes aren't animated, they're real-time rendered by the game.
Hate to say it, but the cutscenes are for the most part poorly done. Many of them last any longer than they have a right to and to put it bluntly, aren't interesting whatsoever. I have no issue with the voice acting, but they should've done way more condensing of scenes, better pacing, and more animation. There's nothing particularly wrong with the story (I'll talk about that later), it's about middle of the road, but the cutscenes make it tearfully boring and the lack of animations makes almost everything they say carry no weight. Like they were content to just set characters down and then do nothing with them.
There are side story cutscenes called ”Community Events" that unlock if you use certain characters. These are actually lots of fun (some are really weird, good luck localizers). They did this strange vertical cut effect to show character models during these, but it looks really bad. They should have just done portraits again with stylized UI instead of the strange paper tear effects that look cheap and weird like someone stepped out of a parallel dimension to chat.
GAMEPLAY:
Unfortunately very flawed. Let me start by saying this; the AI, Artificial Intelligence, of your units, is complete and utter garbage and not fixed from the 2.0 demo. Your teammates will stand around like idiots when an enemy collapses and reveals their weak point, they'll get stuck on things constantly, walk in the wrong direction, attempt to engage enemies that are eons away even with the team prompts like Buddy or Force to stick together. You'll issue a direct order using the command wheel and they'll ignore it for 7+ seconds. I could go on, but it's unsalvageable and you'll basically have to play the game like a single-unit action game and just hope your teammates aren't dumb enough to get hit.
Enemy AI isn't much better. They're good at attacking together at first, but once you separate them and learn some easy neutralization strategies they become totally helpless. Probably the only thing that's truly consistent is hyper armor during rage.
The entire success rate of your squad is based on the ATB cooldown meter. Because of that, you want to prioritize it as much as possible. Combine this with the neutralization strategy towards enemy forces and there's no reason to use any defensive fighters or slow heavy hitters. To make the problem worse, the slower heavy hitting characters have bad hitboxes. Godot, Tilda, and Daryl all have problems where the pushback of their weapons actively work against them and cause their forced combos to whiff.
They repeated the mistake from past Valkyria games where some characters have potentials so bad it's tough to justify using them or potentials so good that you almost have to use them to defeat the huge HP sponge bosses. This mistake is iterated so badly that there's a story event in the game where Amleth and Ophelia unlock their own strong potentials, making these two already top tier characters two of the unquestioned best.
Certain types of magic attacks are locked to certain characters and their weapons, so many fighters are locked out of the best attack magic forcing you even further into the Amleth/Ophelia/Sara/Random team formation. This is actually a really big problem! Most of the attacks exclusive to shield users are just absolutely awful.
Enemies and sandbags are placed slapdash all over the field with extremely little thought, and the simplicity of placing explosive barrels next to everything is insulting to a player's intelligence. The constant ”cutscene reinforcement call-in" is cheap and basically removes what little area strategy the game has... which is terrible considering that as a party ARPG it's simple enough already.
A lot of the leveling in this game feels totally unnecessary or badly balanced. This game has no active character leveling, so you get no satisfaction from beating up enemies that are tougher than you while underleveled; all levels are awarded after the mission is over. To add insult to injury, when reaching the last 10% of the game, VAR pushes the level of enemy bosses incredibly far outside of your reach, forcing you to grind an annoying amount of free missions in order to deal any decent amount of damage, which might be the most mind numbing thing I've done this year.
In order to level up your magic or physical attack power, you have to sacrifice magic itself using these huge character skill trees. The problem is that magic doesn't award enough leveling points, meaning that you are forced to tunnel your leveling towards few, specific characters, otherwise your rewards go to waste and gives you less magic to play around with. One of the last missions of the game forces you to use almost all the characters from your squad, meaning your horribly underleveled and underequipped characters now have to fight a boss and mooks that are 20 levels above them.
From a basic ARPG standpoint it's functional, but it kind of stops there. I don't expect highly intellectual combat from a party ARPG of all things, but there's very little depth to the combat at all. The best tactic is just to catch enemies by surprise, overpower them quickly and get your morale bar maximized as quickly as possible. Your mission rank judges you on time and enemies killed (so they finally adjusted the ranking system for the series) but this forces the balance towards characters with the fastest damage output instead of just speed.
Being forced to play free missions just so that you can do normal damage during main missions is dumb game design. Initially this wasn't the case, but it became this way around 75% in. Free missions should be like they were in previous games where they existed for users who wanted to grind out and feel like gods in the battlefield. Here they're required if you don't want to suffer doing 100 damage per hit to 20000HP bosses.
Bosses: The number of reused bosses is crazy. You will fight the giant scorpion way too many times. You will fight the Valkyria way too many times. You will fight Maxim too many times (thank god he's weak to paralysis). To top off the horrible balancing of it all, bosses are huge HP sponges for no reason (and nearly all of them are immune to status effects or recover too fast from them to be worth it). Thanks to this, these fights last F O R E V E R. My battle against the mechanical snake boss took almost 30 minutes, as one example; and this was with a fully decked out Sara launching nukes and Amleth shredding out huge amounts of raged damage. The bosses have very little strategic approach, and you will spend more time reviving your dumb allies ignoring the ”Defend" command than doing anything of strategic value.
The game has a tiny number of battle maps and they are reused heavily. The maps have extremely little strategic design, with most being corridors with soldiers haphazardly plastered over the area. There are brief cool moments with enemies lying in wait using elevation to their advantage or hiding for ambushes, but extremely rare. Story missions lose their punch when they use the same map and setup over and over. The reused maps rival VC2 in terms of repeated use.
STORY:
The story premise is actually an interesting one. And the themes they discuss are interesting as well. However everything is so cheaply presented it lacks any punch. There's one scene in the game where a villain comments that Amleth lacks conviction, then proceeds to make his entire getaway off-screen while Amleth stands 5 feet (1.5m) from him. That sort of thing. Stuff like a captain deliberately issuing impossible orders causing someone to die, or war propaganda population manipulation, or a female spy tricking men into dropping all their intel, only for the information to be a trap... interesting ideas, right? But because of the cheap presentation, it really dilutes what should be interesting scenes. Add that with conversations that last way too long for the situations they're in and the complete package is lacking.
One major problem I want to mention is permadeath. Because they really wanted to have permadeath in this game, the Anti-Valkyria Unit can't have any participation in the story. They're barely there outside of community events, so the story largely focuses on the 5 Sinners and Ophelia (and her royal guard). This is a big waste considering that the AVU has fun characters in it that are more interesting than the Sinners, heh. Permadeath worked fine in VC1 because they had a good strong focus on the main characters who all contributed something to the main story or to important characters (plus it helps that they were largely on the battlefield together for scenes). But in this game it's not interesting because the 5 Sinners hardly do anything of interest at all due to their roles unless you count sitting around a table talking ”interesting".
The game tries to make a big deal out of Maxim and him surrendering his country to the Empire, but this character overstays his welcome by about 8 chapters; his country and his story don't align with the main storyline of the Sinners and their revenge at all, so the rivalry setup doesn't work as motivation.
Because the scope of notable characters is so low, the twist of the story halfway in is stupidly easy to guess too, which is pretty disappointing.
Also, the ending is rather bleh, a culmination of the cheap presentation the game has to offer and obviously cut off early with very little grace.
MUSIC:
One of the few bright spots in this game, Mitsuda delivers excellent tracks.
The entire soundtrack is stellar and standout, with great themes throughout.
You will be better served buying the soundtrack than the game.
RANDOM JUNK THAT PERHAPS ONLY I CARE ABOUT:
-Where are the tanks man? Is it really a Valkyria game without a single vehicle? If it's a fantasy game, can't I at least ride one of the beasts, or a super magic tank?
-The game's main starting point is the teacher and her student. To progress the game you have to select the teacher (Richter). However if you want to view extra cutscenes or view your progress you have to select the student. But there's no notifications whatsoever that you have extra cutscenes unlocked, so if you want to make sure you're following cutscenes in context, you have to select the student every time and watch the animations of the book opening and closing over and over again. Also the chapter selection has no wraparound scrolling.
-Why on earth is there no notification on the menu when a new Community event unlocks? You have to go into the Community menu each time to check.
-Why doesn't the clothing store have an ”equip" option like every RPG in the past 6 years? I really don't enjoy backing in and out of menus to assign clothing.
-The chest opening animation is too slow, the rewards are very sad, and you can't skip the animation. Also you are forbidden from opening it if enemies have noticed you; what the hell kind of logic is that?
-On that note, why on earth is Save/Load/Return to Richter on a separate menu from the command menu that has everything else? Redundancy much?
-Why does the framerate randomly drop into the 10s for no reason? Happened like once every 8 missions or so in areas without that many enemies. Wasn't a consistent enough problem to be completely annoyed by it, but it was really strange when it happened.
-Why can I not pick Amleth's starting point on the main street? It's shaped like an H, but you can only start in the lower left corner. It makes certain shops really annoying to repeatedly access.
-Why on earth does the character select (Personnel Files) not have wraparound scrolling?
-Why is there a UI delay every time you change characters in the Battle Palette menu? This makes switching around magic for characters a big chore the farther you are from Amleth on the menu. Protip for UI designers; assigning character items at all points during your game should be snappier than a snapping turtle!
-Why not just directly tell me how much RP a magic piece will get me? Instead I have to play stupid adding games when unlocking the character skill tree. Having no overflow choices is really restrictive and is poor design given how character trees are unlocked.
-Not remembering my position in the magic menu after I use magic to unlock character trees!
-Around halfway through the game, the mission briefing music changes to the boss battle music, and it is LOUD! The audio is out of balance somehow, and I had to lower the volume on my monitor around halfway every time it came on. I can't tell if this was a personal problem on my end or the game's problem...
-Is it really necessary to make the Battle Palette only available and configurable from the factory/briefing menu? I get the limitation in Valkyria Chronicles because the whole game's customization is menu-based, but really, there's no reason for it to be like that in this game.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Like I said when this game was revealed, this game should be judged on what it is claimed to be and not what it isn't. Anyone that says ”this is no Chronicles game" or issues demerits based on comparisons to Chronicles should be entirely dismissed. And so I waited until the final product came out and could give a real ultimatum without being tied up into what the game is and isn't. And the final ultimatum is that the game is a cheap piece of junk not worth your time and not because it was or wasn't a Chronicles game.
Sega has a lot of guts to charge 1300 yen for a season pass of DLC right after selling this unfinished product for full price. Sega is also very fortunate that this game managed to sell 70k+ in Japan and not do a lot worse. They could learn a lot of lessons from smaller companies that have to work hard to earn their fans and their reputation instead of trying to make off like dishonest bandits once things started to go sour pre-release.
I feel as if many of the problems was lack of a coherent vision for what they wanted to make. Initially they stated that they wanted to make a magic fantasy game with slight warfare elements (with the line about people transforming into tanks). However they kept normalizing more and more of the game and moved farther away from fantasy and magic. In the end the presence of magic is hardly touched upon plot-wise, so it felt like I was playing a very weak war ARPG with magic and fantasy just kind of tacked on. Example: the enemy empire basically never uses magic against you, just guns, basic weaponry and mechanical bipedal units. It's only way later in the game when units with special rifles that shoot magic come out, but it's something that's hardly noticeable amidst the massive amounts of foot soldiers using normal weaponry.
The second major issue was Sega's reaction to the fan reaction. Sticking to your guns and actually building a separate world that you promised and a battle system that you gushed over would've definitely resulted in a more polished product. I understand everyone was at their throats and their vision wasn't the greatest, but I still think we could've gotten a way better game than what we got.
Now all we have left is this poorly executed unfinished unfun game which your North American team now has to sell to us. Looks like the Valkyria series can't catch a break.
3/10.