TTD: VP Love
Dec. 11th, 2014 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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personalapocalypseToday, lassarina asked me to talk about Valkyrie Profile and why I love it so much. Considering that it was one of my all-time favorites for years after I first played it in 2002, it's a fair question.
I was interested in the game before I ever played it. Well before, in fact - I was wanting to play this game ever since I saw the first few character designs, probably on The GIA, and decided, "Okay, this looks promising." It was hard to find at first, and immediately became extremely valuable; I was lucky to get it back when I did, because I got it for fifteen dollars when it was going for eighty or more on eBay. (The re-release would not come for years after this point, and this was before I'd even heard of an LP.)
I am probably the worst person at avoiding spoilers in the universe, so I did go into it spoiled, but it didn't matter. I enjoyed it almost immediately and replayed it a bunch of times, kept saves at places to see character intros again and went through to see all of the endings. I was immediately hooked.
The battle system was part of it - it's a fun system, fairly simple but still tough to get exactly right. (Each player in your party is assigned a button on the game pad, you have specific attacks based on your weapon that you can reorder and use, and the challenge comes in when you have to use the different attacks in such a way to knock down or juggle the enemy so that you can get bonus experience or turns in battle. There's a lot of timing involved. I had a lot of fun with it. Outside of battle, the game is basically an adventure game, in the style of Zelda II - mostly side-scrolling, jumping and attacking enemies with magic crystals and your sword to enter battle (you got to act first if you could hit the enemies before they hit you.) It was lots of fun, although sometimes the jumping puzzles were annoying; then again, I've always been the worst at jumping puzzles, so that might just be me.
The game's plot is mostly hidden amongst the character introductions and interactions. I've always been more interested in characters than plot, so that worked for me. You find out about the world from their struggles, and it gives it a feeling of depth that a codex entry wouldn't have provided. It's easier to care about something when you see someone else who cares dealing with it, you know? And this is one of the few games where I can honestly say I'm interested in every character they introduced. They almost all have some sort of tragic backstory - considering that the game is about a Valkyrie harvesting souls, that's not surprising. But the way that the game manages to fit so much information about them in a fairly small space... I was impressed and inspired by that for a very long time.
But yes, the main plot is hidden away. There are three endings; one of them is simple, one of them involves a lot of screwing up on the player's part, and the other is nearly impossible to get on the first playthrough unless you have a walkthrough. It would've involved a lot of trial and error; once you know what to look for, it's not difficult, but finding it is tricky. I can see why that might put someone off who didn't enjoy hunting for it, but I liked the search.
The graphics were very nice. The game followed tri-Ace's habit at the time of pre-rendered backgrounds with sprite characters. Both were well-done, and honestly I would've preferred that the few CG animations that had gotten thrown in hadn't been there, because they just felt tacked on. And as for the music... I got VP before I played Star Ocean 2, and so this was the game that introduced me to Motoi Sakuraba, who is still one of my favorite video game composers of all time. The voice acting was hit-or-miss, as so many of their games were at the time... there were some really good performances, and some mediocre ones. (The real standout amongst the VA performances was probably Maddie Blaustein; she did three different voices, and all were distinct and well-done. The fact that she voiced one of my favorite villains ever probably means I'm biased, though.)
There were a few things I would've changed, if I'd been on the team. The translation was mediocre at best, if not as badly censored as some of tri-Ace's other offerings. I'm sure a few things were lost between the two versions. And there was really just no reason to have the different difficulty levels, except to restrict the dungeons that you could enter. Easy Mode was the most pointless thing ever. You don't get all of the characters, you only had access to a quarter of the dungeons, and you could only get two out of three endings. The enemies themselves weren't appreciably easier, if I remember correctly; you didn't have to play the harder puzzles in Easy Mode, but there's nothing in the game forcing you to play them in the harder difficulty levels, either. Play Normal once or twice to see the dungeons that aren't available in Hard Mode, some of which are especially pretty or interesting storyline-wise. Then play Hard Mode. Still, if you get the chance, at least give it a shot.
As for the sequel... well. It came out years after the first game, long enough that everyone was surprised there was going to be a second game in the series at all. Gameplay- and graphics-wise, it was recognizably the same game in a 3d engine, upgrading the game's core mechanics without altering them beyond recognition. I approved of that. The graphics and music were still good, although the soundtrack felt more generic. The voice-acting was much improved, as was the overall quality of the translation. (As for my favorite character, Liam O'Brien had a tough act to follow, but I think he managed it.)
I suppose that where Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria falls down is the way the plot was handled. Not the plot itself - that was interesting and had a lot of potential. But the game had good dramatic buildup for the first few chapters that sort of fell apart around the middle. It was still enjoyable, but I wish that they'd taken out a few of the things that made it drag on for so long at certain points, then jump ahead in others. Also, it lacked the character-building scenes that I really loved about the first game; there was still the recruitment of souls, but it felt like an afterthought, and the "main" characters were favored over them. You didn't get scenes; you just got a codex entry for each one, and a few conversations between them when you recruited them. There were still some neat stories to be told in those entries, but it lacked the punch that those scenes in the first game could deliver.
Still, if you've played the first game, it's worth playing to finish the story that the first game started to tell. (I'm still trying to decide if it's worth playing without having played the first Valkyrie Profile. On the one hand, the gameplay is fun! On the other hand, its plot owes so much to the first game that I can't imagine playing it on its own and still being able to make sense of it.)
That's it for now, since I don't have a DS and still haven't been able to play Covenant of the Plume.
lassarina asked me to talk about Valkyrie Profile and why I love it so much. Considering that it was one of my all-time favorites for years after I first played it in 2002, it's a fair question. I was interested in the game before I ever played it. Well before, in fact - I was wanting to play this game ever since I saw the first few character designs, probably on The GIA, and decided, "Okay, this looks promising." It was hard to find at first, and immediately became extremely valuable; I was lucky to get it back when I did, because I got it for fifteen dollars when it was going for eighty or more on eBay. (The re-release would not come for years after this point, and this was before I'd even heard of an LP.)
I am probably the worst person at avoiding spoilers in the universe, so I did go into it spoiled, but it didn't matter. I enjoyed it almost immediately and replayed it a bunch of times, kept saves at places to see character intros again and went through to see all of the endings. I was immediately hooked.
The battle system was part of it - it's a fun system, fairly simple but still tough to get exactly right. (Each player in your party is assigned a button on the game pad, you have specific attacks based on your weapon that you can reorder and use, and the challenge comes in when you have to use the different attacks in such a way to knock down or juggle the enemy so that you can get bonus experience or turns in battle. There's a lot of timing involved. I had a lot of fun with it. Outside of battle, the game is basically an adventure game, in the style of Zelda II - mostly side-scrolling, jumping and attacking enemies with magic crystals and your sword to enter battle (you got to act first if you could hit the enemies before they hit you.) It was lots of fun, although sometimes the jumping puzzles were annoying; then again, I've always been the worst at jumping puzzles, so that might just be me.
The game's plot is mostly hidden amongst the character introductions and interactions. I've always been more interested in characters than plot, so that worked for me. You find out about the world from their struggles, and it gives it a feeling of depth that a codex entry wouldn't have provided. It's easier to care about something when you see someone else who cares dealing with it, you know? And this is one of the few games where I can honestly say I'm interested in every character they introduced. They almost all have some sort of tragic backstory - considering that the game is about a Valkyrie harvesting souls, that's not surprising. But the way that the game manages to fit so much information about them in a fairly small space... I was impressed and inspired by that for a very long time.
But yes, the main plot is hidden away. There are three endings; one of them is simple, one of them involves a lot of screwing up on the player's part, and the other is nearly impossible to get on the first playthrough unless you have a walkthrough. It would've involved a lot of trial and error; once you know what to look for, it's not difficult, but finding it is tricky. I can see why that might put someone off who didn't enjoy hunting for it, but I liked the search.
The graphics were very nice. The game followed tri-Ace's habit at the time of pre-rendered backgrounds with sprite characters. Both were well-done, and honestly I would've preferred that the few CG animations that had gotten thrown in hadn't been there, because they just felt tacked on. And as for the music... I got VP before I played Star Ocean 2, and so this was the game that introduced me to Motoi Sakuraba, who is still one of my favorite video game composers of all time. The voice acting was hit-or-miss, as so many of their games were at the time... there were some really good performances, and some mediocre ones. (The real standout amongst the VA performances was probably Maddie Blaustein; she did three different voices, and all were distinct and well-done. The fact that she voiced one of my favorite villains ever probably means I'm biased, though.)
There were a few things I would've changed, if I'd been on the team. The translation was mediocre at best, if not as badly censored as some of tri-Ace's other offerings. I'm sure a few things were lost between the two versions. And there was really just no reason to have the different difficulty levels, except to restrict the dungeons that you could enter. Easy Mode was the most pointless thing ever. You don't get all of the characters, you only had access to a quarter of the dungeons, and you could only get two out of three endings. The enemies themselves weren't appreciably easier, if I remember correctly; you didn't have to play the harder puzzles in Easy Mode, but there's nothing in the game forcing you to play them in the harder difficulty levels, either. Play Normal once or twice to see the dungeons that aren't available in Hard Mode, some of which are especially pretty or interesting storyline-wise. Then play Hard Mode. Still, if you get the chance, at least give it a shot.
As for the sequel... well. It came out years after the first game, long enough that everyone was surprised there was going to be a second game in the series at all. Gameplay- and graphics-wise, it was recognizably the same game in a 3d engine, upgrading the game's core mechanics without altering them beyond recognition. I approved of that. The graphics and music were still good, although the soundtrack felt more generic. The voice-acting was much improved, as was the overall quality of the translation. (As for my favorite character, Liam O'Brien had a tough act to follow, but I think he managed it.)
I suppose that where Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria falls down is the way the plot was handled. Not the plot itself - that was interesting and had a lot of potential. But the game had good dramatic buildup for the first few chapters that sort of fell apart around the middle. It was still enjoyable, but I wish that they'd taken out a few of the things that made it drag on for so long at certain points, then jump ahead in others. Also, it lacked the character-building scenes that I really loved about the first game; there was still the recruitment of souls, but it felt like an afterthought, and the "main" characters were favored over them. You didn't get scenes; you just got a codex entry for each one, and a few conversations between them when you recruited them. There were still some neat stories to be told in those entries, but it lacked the punch that those scenes in the first game could deliver.
Still, if you've played the first game, it's worth playing to finish the story that the first game started to tell. (I'm still trying to decide if it's worth playing without having played the first Valkyrie Profile. On the one hand, the gameplay is fun! On the other hand, its plot owes so much to the first game that I can't imagine playing it on its own and still being able to make sense of it.)
That's it for now, since I don't have a DS and still haven't been able to play Covenant of the Plume.
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Date: 2014-12-31 08:50 pm (UTC)This is really interesting, thank you! I own both VP games but haven't actually played them, and I knew you really liked them so I was interested to know what fascinated you about them.
I tend to be a character person more than a plot person too, so I'm hopeful that I'll enjoy them as much as you did.