Valkyrie Profile Review

When I first got Valkyrie Profile, I was very much excited about the game. The honest truth was that Star Ocean is probably my favorite rpg game and getting my hands on a game that was made from the creator of Star Ocean was a must to do for me. Despite the fact that Valkyrie Profile had a great battle system just like the great battle system in Star Ocean, everything else in the gameplay including the story was kind of a let down at first. Now I knew there were multiple endings in the game but I had no idea that the multiple endings would be the key factor in how enjoyable the game would be, especially the storyline. When I first finish the game, I got what is now known as a normal ending. There are three endings. Bad, normal, and very good endings. I held off writing a review for the game cause I felt the normal ending wasn't very satisfying. Boy, was I glad I made that decision. If I were to judge Valkyrie Profile on the normal ending then I would have given the game a much lower score. So now I'm going to base this review on the best ending of Valkyrie Profile and on the normal game setting of Valkyrie Profile.

On the surface, Valkyrie Profile doesn't present much of a good quality storyline. But if you dig deeper and that's much deeper, then you would have one of the best rpg love story around. To prove the point, I, "ahem, broke a tear on this love story". Hadn't felt this bad since the death of Aeris. Yes, I'm a sucker for sad love story. Yes, I'm a man. I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's get back to the starting point. The title of this game fit very well with this game. This is indeed a profile of the goddess, Valkyrie. Mostly about who she is and where she came from. Before playing the game, you can see or watch the story prologue. The story prologue is very important to the story best ending as they are both connected to one another. The prologue begins with two children. A boy name Lucian and a girl name Platina. After finding out that her parents were going to sell her off as a slave, Platina and Lucian decided to run away from home. Aftering running off, the two kids ended up in a deadly place called Weeping Lilys. It appears that if anyone who isn't strong enough inhale the lilys, they die. Platina being a little girl and isn't as strong as Lucian dies. The prologue then ends with Lucian crying over the death of Platina.
Now fast forward to the beginning of the game. The game begins with the Odin, leader of the gods, summoning one of the three goddesses of fate. Valkyrie, the lead (female) character just happens to be one of the three goddesses of fate. Valkyrie is the goddess of chosen souls for your information. Getting back to the point, Odin has summon Valkyrie because a war is going to break out in Asgard, home of the gods. Basically a war of the gods. Odin has summon Valkyrie for a purpose. That purpose is to gather the souls of dead heroes in Midgard, home of the humans. With this objective at hand, Valkyrie sets off to Midgard to look for fallen heroes. Now this is the basic of the game quest and the story. Valkyrie will use her power to find the next character that will fall in battle. You will then get a small background story sequence to that character. Afterwards, you move onto the next character to fall in battle. Now that doesn't look like much for a storyline, does it? Each of the small background story sequence of the characters that join your party does in a strange way fit together but they're more of a jigsaw puzzles and you have to figure out what order of the story sequence goes where. If you play the game the second time around, you'll probably have a better understanding of these small story sequence. Still the story is very lack luster. So where's the love story in this game. The key is getting the really good ending to the game. The game's real story is so hidden like a secret side quest that you really have to try hard to unlock it but it's well worth the effort. Okay, it doesn't take much of a dumb person to figure out that Valkyrie is the little Platina girl that died in the Prologue seeing as they looked exactly the same. The key is to try and trigger an event that will start to bring about Valkyrie past memories back to her. This of course involve, Lucian, one of the fallen souls that Valkyrie gathers who just happens to be Platina childhood boyfriend. Lucian starts off like a dull character but quickly becomes the male counterpart of Aeris. Which explain why I've quickly grown to love Lucian as one of my best male rpg character. Without going into too much details. Lucian while trying to bring Valkyrie memories back met up with Loki, Valkyrie Profile's Sephiroth. And we all know what happens when Sephiroth met Aeris. So I won't explain what happens next. Needless to say, Valkyrie soon got her memories back only to find out what happens to Lucian. "I shall not forgive.." is the best Valkyrie quote for this situation. Then we have the showdown between Cloud and Sephiroth. I mean Valkyrie and Loki. This is probably the best emotional end game fight sequence since FF7 disc 1 scene after the Aeris sequence. What is amazing is that they actually fit this entire storyline sequence into the ending of Valkyrie Profile. This is one of the best endings in terms of closure to a game's plotline and storyline. Without this really good ending, Valkyrie Profile story is very dull and somewhat confusing. The entire story lay heavily on the outcome of the good ending. And the good ending doesn't disappoint you. The downside is that you really can't get this good ending story closure without a strategy guide or a faqs. What is also great about this love story is that they don't try and force a couple down your throat like some rpg games. In fact this is really a tragic love story as the key love couple never got a chance to be together. This love story works for me. Maybe it's because I'm a sap for a good love story. Without the good ending and just the normal ending, the story would get a 7 but I'm adding an extra 2 points to the 7 for the really good ending.

Characters are in an abundance here. I don't really recall exactly how many characters you can get but it's definetly over 20 characters. Before each character joins your party, you have a very good small story sequence which explain who and what these characters are. So the character developement is there. But what is disappointing is the lack of character support after they join your party. In fact pretty much all of the characters that join your party becomes nothing more than nameless sprites with the exception of Lucian. Still any game that can make me love and hate a character in the way of Aeris and Sephiroth is doing something right.

The graphics are very excellently done. What you basically have is a 2-D world. A side to side 2-D world much in the way of the 16 bit era to be exact. The sprites are hand drawn to perfection. The background colors are amazing and the background themselves are hand painted. There's some small pockets of FMV/CG here and there but these really don't have much an effect on the overrall graphics. Overrall, one of the best hand drawn graphics in rpgs.

First let's start with the music. The music is very nice, not overwhelming or anything but something that you really can't complain about. I wish there were more tunes though. Basically it's better than average for the music. What is most impressive is probably the voice overs of this game. There's alot of voice overs in this game. The majority of the voice overs are nicely done. Some of them aren't as good in terms of acting but overrall are nicely done. What is most impressive about the voices is during the battle sequences. This game without a doubt in my mind possess one of the best battle voice sequences in any rpg games. Each character has his or her own battle lines. From beginning of the fight lines to the ending of fight lines. There are even different special attack and magic fight lines. What I love about these liners are that they are unique and different. I really love the one liners that the character give off when they fail to kill an enemy with their special attack. It goes something like this, "What?? You're still alive?!" or "I cannnot believe this!". It's really a treat to hear this characters talk during fights. Good music and good voice overs. Can't ask for anything more.

Now the gameplay is pretty much base on skills and the battle system. But before I get to those, I'll start with the basic concept of the gameplay. The objective here is to train you fighters so you can level them up and send them to Asgard to help with the war above. Now the game is broken up into chapters and periods. There are 24 periods and 8 chapters in total. Everytime you go to a town or dungeon, you use up a number of periods. Once you used up 24 periods, it's the end of the chapter and you get what is known as a Sacred Phrase where the goddess Freya gives you a report of on how things are going with the war and what Odin needs you to send up next in terms of fighters. So basically before the start of a chapter, Freya will give you a report of what fighters you should send up next. Once that's done, you will hit the start button to find out who's the next fallen hero to join your cause. Once you have gotten the location of where the next fallen hero will be, you will fly there and get a little background story sequence of who that fighter was. Once the story sequence concludes, you hit the start button again to find out where your next dungeon is. You then will have to travel to that dungeon and explore it and defeat the dungeon boss. Note that these dungeons really have nothing to do with the story and are nothing more of a place to level your fighters up to a certain level to transfer them to Asgard. It is possible that you can skip these story sequences and dungeons whenever you want to. Which is why the main overrall of the gameplay is really a let down. If gamers are going to explore dungeons then they should of least make the dungeons part of the storyline and not just some random place for you to level your fighters up. So the basic gameplay is very simple and straightforward. Just keep hitting the start button to find out where you go next. Once you get near the end of the chapter, send the fighters that have met the requirements that the goddess Freya has asked for. And now move onto the next chapter. This pretty much explain the basic of the gameplay to give you an idea of what it's about.
Now the game rely heavily on skill points much in the way of Star Ocean. Each characters comes with a bunch of skill traits. After each level up, each character will get a certain total number of skill points. These can then be distributed to the skills that you what these characters to learn. Each skill of course will help add to the fighters stats parameters. Now in addition to the skills you have what is known as an experience orb. After you clear a certain dungeon events, you get what is known as event experience. These event experience are kept in your experience orb. You can then use the experience orb to distribute these extra experience points to any of your fighters. This is a good way to get a back up fighter level on par with those that are on your party since back up fighters don't gain any experience at all. Finally the really cool cutting edge battle system.
Battle System: Unlike the traditional turn base battle system where each time a character attack turns comes up, Valkyrie Profile uses a designated button system in a turn base real time fight sequence. There are 4 members in each party. Each member is assign a button by you. Square, Triangle, Circle, and Cross are the buttons that you can assign your fighters to. So basically if Fighter A is assign the Cross button then all you have to do is press the Cross button to get him or her to attack. You have 4 fighters all assign to one of the buttons on your controller. The key to this battle system is real time combo attack. You have to try get your fighter to attack simultaneously. So just press all 4 buttons as quickly as you can to whatever order to try and get off a 4 hit combo link. Now sometimes a fighter is allowed to attack more than once base on the weapons that he/she is using. A single weapon can allow you to attack between 1-3 times. So if your really good, you can do a 12 hit combo link. Now the key to combo links is to try and activate your special attacks. On the lower left side of your battle screen is a hit gauge. The hit gauge will only fill up if you can do a consecutive hit combos. Once you have filled up the hit gauge, you can then use your fighters special attack. Each special attack does a major number of hits combo as well. Meaning that it's very likely that one special attack alone can fill up the hit gauge again to allow you to do another special attack. This in turn will allow you to do a special attack combo to go with your normal attack combo. When done correctly, these combos are really cool to watch. These combos are necessary cause the game uses a high hp counts for monsters and characters. That should explain the basic of the battle system. Almost forgot. The game uses CT also known as charge time. This applies only to special attack and magic. After using a special attack or magic, you have to wait till your special attack or magic finishes recharging so you can use it again. This can be a pain in the butt sometimes, especially when you have to rely on your magic users to back you up. Still the battle system is just plain fun. It's a real treat to try and get off a combo attack.
Overrall the gameplay isn't as good as I would like it to be. Great battle system but you need sometime else to get you going besides a great battle system. Exploring dungeon for no purpose other than to just level up your fighters is kinda boring. If you're going to explore dungeons, at least make it so we have to retrieve something as a way to help further advance the rpg story. Here you can just skip a dungeon without any effect to the overrall story. No mini games or any other added distraction to help take you away from the mindless dungeon exploring too. All 7 points are from the battle system. Take away the battle system and the gameplay is just plain boring as hell. While most rpgs battle are a pain in the butt, Valkyrie Profile battles are the only thing that's fun.

The extras and replay go hand to hand in this game. There aren't that many secret stuff to find. Ones that aren't worth a mention anyways unless you count getting the good ending. But the replay value is incredible in this game. First, as I stated above, there are three different endings. Bad, normal, and really good endings. Second the game comes in three gameplay mode. Easy, normal, and hard. When you play the hard mode, you get a few new characters in your party that you can't get in normal mode plus some extra storylines that wasn't available in normal mode. You also can unlock a secret hidden dungeon called the Seraphic Gate. You can get the Seraphic Gate in normal mode too but you won't be able to get very far into it as you need certain key items that are only available in the hard mode. It's a good idea to play the normal mode first to get the feel of the game before tackling the hard mode. Overrall you have different game modes with different multiple endings with an extra dungeon. All you need are some mini games to make this game complete.

Finally, this is a fun game to play with a good story if you can unlock the good ending. I really enjoy this game alot more the second time around then the first time. I really love the battle system and the story of Valkyrie Profile. What more can you ask for in an rpg game? I just wish the overrall gameplay can be better. While it's not better than Star Ocean, it's definetly an rpg game you have to pick up.

Valkyrie Profile "I Shall Not Forgive..."

Valkyrie Profile
"I Shall Not Forgive..."