Well, as long as I’m in this thread just talking to myself, I want to note that the voice acting in this game is best in class. All the squaddies have well delivered, distinct (if broad and slightly cartoon-y) personalities. It’s in the in-game barks, but also in the squad stories, which are little side stories each featuring about 3 members of the squad.
The writing isn’t phenomenal, but the VA delivery really is. I almost never find myself disagreeing with the pronunciation or intonation. (I generally put dialog on fast, so I can finish reading before the voice work finishes. When I do finish reading, the audio tends to match my mental image of how the line would be delivered almost exactly).
Now, the last game I played with significant VA work was Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which can generously be described as atrocious, but it isn’t just a question of a low bar. I think there’s really good work being done here.
Ah, ok, well, I’ve only played the first one and loved it, and I’ve debated a couple times picking this one up at 50% off and haven’t yet pulled the trigger. This one has been described as much like the first one with some minor improvements. Sounds like you’re liking it.
It’s much better than the first one but for the main character’s motivations. It improves basically everything, and the level design is heads and shoulders over the original imho.
You are harsh: shooting people to make exercices so people are hungry enough to be fed with poorly baked pans was a pretty cool motivation, in my opinion.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I was referring to. I do find the main story conceit (weird Barbarossa) more interesting than the original, but it’s missing some of the charm, world building and coherency of the first game.
But it makes up for it in other ways. I think I prefer it.
I’ll admit for me at least I played the first one pretty much entirely because the game design mechanics were brilliant. The anime was one the main reasons I ignored it, but when it went on deep sale I decided I wanted to see how they worked the movement/action piece of the game and I loved that. I wish someone would appropriate it for other settings.
Anyway, sounds like you’re saying they’ve done good things with this one, so I’m definitely going to pick it up, just not for the story.
I’m near the end of this, and: Wow. The big reveal in this (the Centurion’s classified secret) is…a choice. I’m assuming they’ll pivot somehow before the end, but there’s some seriously questionable decisions made in the writing process, and not in an animoo way.
So, you have a top secret battleship, with basically an atom bomb on it, which you plan to set off in the Imperial capital, killing “millions” of civilians. Also, the atom bomb isn’t an atom bomb, it’s actually powered by SACRIFICING A SMALL CHILD. It’s okay though, because this 8 year old signed a waiver.
Now, Japanese people obviously have a complex history with The Bomb (they’re also very clear that the bomb was made by their world’s USA proxy, which is funny) , and they’ve worked hard in this game to highlight lots of death and to make it pretty clear that War Is Hell, and I assume there’s going to be a miracle Hail Mary at the end that solves everything. I’m as much a utilitarian as the next guy, but, like, come on guys, generally don’t make your protagonist commit capital W- War Crimes.
I’ve more or less finished this game now (there’s some post-game content, which gates the “true ending”) so I figured I’d check in with some overall impressions. This is mostly the same as what I posted above. Overall, this being a true successor to VC1 holds true to the end. It’s good. They looked at a bunch of mechanical stuff and tweaked to improve or fix a lot of it.
The game feels a little small. Even though there are technically multiple antagonists, they more or less function as a unit, so you don’t get the normal pattern of escalating against bigger bads until you get to the big boss. Apparently this game had a limited budget (which also explains the more limited environment types). There’s enough gameplay content, but the story is kind of weak.
Grenadiers. I noted it upthread, but Grenadiers are better than everything they replaced. They “fit” in a way that seems very natural to core rock-paper-scissors class counters (They’re great anti-infantry, but Grenadiers are “blast damage”, so it does virtually no damage to Lancers, and because their interception fire is long-range tracking, it typically can’t hit scouts because they move too quickly). They also make the verticality of the level matter in a way it kind of didn’t before. If there’s another VC, I would be surprised if they made significant modifications to the class.
Uber-Scout Alicia. IF you played VC1, you know that there was a degenerate strategy to make your scouts invincible and do infinite damage with Orders, and then just run them straight ahead. Apparently, there’s some of this possible in the post-game content, but it isn’t a dominant strategy in most of the game. Orders are still game-breaking in the late game, but that’s just the way it goes.
Mid-mission gimmicks. Yes, there are still gimmicks mid-mission. They’re handled a little bit better, and it seems like it’s kind of just part of the genre. You can save mid-mission, and I’d recommend saving at the beginning of each turn, just to avoid irritation, but otherwise it’s not too bad. The plus side of this is that the game keeps giving you new mutators on missions (weather, etc) until the end.
Simplified tech tree. There’s no branching class evolutions in this one. That’s generally positive, as there was usually only 1 viable path. The only real loss is the shock-trooper Gunner class, which was a defense / interception fire focused class, but even then not very useful. I do miss the anti-tank snipers, though.
One of the problems with the core VC gameplay is, I think, that the enemies just aren’t hard enough. In general, if you can’t kill at least 1 enemy per action, you’re doing it wrong. Combined with the depleting AP on multiple activations means that it’s a terrible idea to waste time setting up multiple units to fire together. Together, this means that there are several mechanics (retaliation fire / team-fire) that kind of don’t matter. VC4 actually addresses this a bit with a couple of boss encounters. There are bosses who take 10+ attacks to kill, which forces you to use the team-fire mechanics (which are otherwise useless) if you want to kill them quickly. It’s nice, but it’s still set-piece design, and doesn’t address the overall systemic issue.
My biggest complaint is that I wish the units were more differentiated. Potentials mostly just make characters unusable when they’re bad (randomly refuse to act or run out of ammo) or slightly overpowered when good (take 2 actions), but because they don’t trigger predictably, you can’t really build your strategy around them (I’ve been told this this may be different in Expert mode / postgame content). As limited as the different class evolutions were in previous games, at least there was potential for specialization. Now, there’s pretty much no reason to use different units in different situations.
I do hope this did well enough to continue the franchise, and I’d like to see them branch out a bit. I’m a little tired of Gallia, and get the impression that they’re running out of stories to tell in EWII. They dropped some more hints about the broader Europan universe in this game (the United States of Vinland and un-named crypto-Japan), so I could see them making a Valkyria Kenzan. Also, this game didn’t have a playable Valkyria (outside of DLC), so if they aren’t tied to that, it opens up possibilities for more settings. Similarly, somebody on the writing staff clearly loved Klaus Walz, so I could see a EWI / Boer War style prequel if they wanted to.
Until then though, I guess I’ll be waiting for Sakura Wars 2020 for my waifu-combat fix.
So for the few who played this, if you liked VC1 a lot (and I did, the mechanics were great especially since I ignored the degenerate scouts strategy), is this a good Switch pick?
Yes, it’s basically an improved VC1, with fewer exploits, better level design and some new classes that allow for more emergent tactics, but overall the same.
The story is not as well paced, but it’s still plenty serviceable.
VC1 with better level design and fewer exploits sounds superb. I was meaning to pick this up at some point and it slipped my mind. Did you ever play it on Switch? I think I remember reading about some performance issues, otherwise Switch would be my preferred platform for it.
You can try the demo. I’m not sure it had terrible performance issues, maybe a bit of slowdown here and there. It was pretty reasonable vs the PS4 version, all things considered.
I played the Switch demo and ended up going PC, mainly due to the low res and 30 fps (PC was really crisp and 60).
I played on the Switch, and don’t recall any noticeable issues with performance. There’s very little action that’s super twitchy or frame rate dependent, so there’s no real gameplay impact. I think it is a little less impressive looking, but I was playing handheld anyways mostly, so the big screen impact wasnt really a factor.
Looking at my last post above, it feels a little more critical than my overall feelings about it. It was probably my GoTY the year it came out, I effectively 100%-ed it.
Yeah, it looks like the reported issues I remember reading about were lower framerates and other things that make it look pretty rather than performance. Which is a fair tradeoff to play it handheld. Still, I’ll return to my original position of getting it on whichever platform (PC or Switch) it goes on sale next. Hopefully, someone bumps this thread if it goes on sale before the Steam winter sale.
This is on sale on Switch right now (in the US at least), but weirdly not on Steam. The only difference is that the Steam version has all the DLC, but looking through them the only one that might interest me is the expert skirmishes. The others seem to just be introducing characters from the first game into this one—which would feel weird to me—or finding a pretense to get the characters in their bathing suits—no kink shaming, but not really what I’m looking for in a strategy game.
Are any of those DLC missions especially good, or is my assumption that they are mostly about getting new (old) characters and new outfits correct?
I don’t have it in front of me to check, but I think the Squad 7 (VC1 characters) one has a couple of decent missions in it, and the expert skirmishes are probably worth playing as well.
The Edy one is just fanservice, and only has a single trivial mission. I don’t think I played the playable Valkyria DLC.
Turns out the complete edition is on sale for Switch too, so I just got that. I figured the expert skirmishes pack and then if only one of the others were any good would cover the extra cost.
The Edy thing is so weird. I barely remember her from the first game, despite playing through it nearly twice. I hear she’s big in Japan.
Yeah, she was the most popular character in Japan since the first game. She’s a try hard at being an idol, but she’s kind of terrible at it, and also kind of bitchy. She had a one sided rivalry with the lead VC 1 character Rosie. I guess that’s a character trope that appeals to some.
IIRC she got some kind of character specific DLC in VC1 and I think she’s been unlockable in some way in all 4 games.
