![\"\"](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp_odin.jpg\")
Everything that you do in Valkyrie Profile follows\u00a0from this premise. (All Valkyrie Profile images via yannick.fleurit.free.fr<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Although some of the einherjar’s stories are interconnected, they have little to no story role\u00a0as soon as they become party members. The bulk of the game’s storytelling occurs in disjointed vignettes that establish\u00a0the tone of the setting but don’t give you much reason to get attached to specific characters – which is just as well since you have to let a good number of them go in order to fulfill Odin’s demand for recruits. You’re free to view these scenes in any order, though only a few are revealed during each of the game’s eight chapters. At the end of each chapter you’re shown how the quality of the einherjar you transferred affects\u00a0progress in the Valhalla war effort, as well as the bonus you receive from Odin. All of this combines to create a game with a very specific mood and a very circumspect\u00a0story. Lenneth is more or less defined by her job, and\u00a0the particulars of how she does it have a gameplay impact but are\u00a0mostly irrelevant\u00a0to how Ragnarok\u00a0unfolds.<\/p>\n …at least, that’s the case if you get the “B” ending. If you notice an odd feature of the status menu, if you piece together vague references in certain characters’ dialogue, if you do the exact right thing in\u00a0the exact right place at the exact right time – in other words, if you use a walkthrough – you can instead trigger the “A” ending, which reveals the true\u00a0nature of Lenneth and gives her a real character arc. Almost the whole of the game’s actual\u00a0plot, the stuff that would be doled out in cutscenes every 30 minutes\u00a0in Final Fantasy,\u00a0is\u00a0locked behind an incredibly arcane puzzle that demands counterintuitive\u00a0actions at extremely specific moments spread out\u00a0over the course of a 30-hour game – which boils down to tri-Ace doing for storytelling what it normally does for game mechanics.<\/p>\n Valkyrie Profile combat looks turn based until you press a button, and then things get craaaaaaazy.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n VP’s battle system bears more resemblance to Marvel vs. Capcom than to Final Fantasy.\u00a0Your party chains attacks together into combos, which need to be carefully timed just as in a fighting game – e.g.<\/em> a low attack will miss if the target has just been launched into the air. Juggling enemies yields experience bonuses; pounding an enemy that’s been knocked down reduces the cooldown on special attacks. Those special attacks can only be used after a combo long\u00a0enough to fully charge the special attack meter, but multiple specials can be chained together if used in the correct order.\u00a0You’re rewarded for experimenting with the composition of your party, the order in which their three attacks are used, and the order you send them into a combo. Unfortunately, once you’ve found a pattern\u00a0that lets you chain as many attacks as possible, you are rarely forced to switch it up; aside from a few enemies with small hitboxes, your technique will be universally applicable.\u00a0Strategy boils down to choosing\u00a0the order in which you’ll beat down on enemies –\u00a0especially important in some Hard mode battles where enemies can revive each other or absorb the strength of defeated comrades – and when to give up a character’s turn to use healing items or spells.<\/p>\n Despite the dynamic feel of\u00a0combat, it quickly\u00a0becomes\u00a0repetitive, so it’s good that\u00a0most non-boss enemy encounters can be avoided while exploring dungeons. Exploring in VP means\u00a02D platforming, rather than the usual maze running. Combat is initiated by touching an enemy, and it’s usually not very difficult to play keep-away if you don’t feel like fighting. Enemies don’t respawn until you leave a dungeon entirely – and since re-entering a dungeon advances the Ragnarok\u00a0clock, this ensures that the experience you need to prepare yourself and your\u00a0einherjar\u00a0for the endgame is a limited resource.\u00a0The other major mechanic in the exploration phase is Lenneth’s ability to shoot\u00a0crystals which can stun enemies or create platforms.\u00a0The dungeon design gets a lot of mileage\u00a0of this twist, but overall the platforming in VP is at best a novelty and at worst a frustrating mess – most\u00a0of the dungeons exclusive to Hard mode have some kind of gimmick that is far too demanding\u00a0for the sloppy jumping physics you have to work with, and failing often means being sent back to the beginning, or even being kicked back to the world map, pushing the clock forward and\u00a0most\u00a0likely causing you to reload your save.<\/p>\n Most of these don’t do what they sound like they should do. Some don’t do anything.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n tri-Ace loves giving you a huge list of skills to choose form when developing characters. In VP, many of those skills don’t have any effect in battle, but are instead used to assess the capability of einherjar sent to Valhalla. The distinction isn’t always clear, either – Find\u00a0Trap will not show you traps in dungeons, of which\u00a0there are plenty, but an einherjar sent to Valhalla with Find\u00a0Trap will occasionally get an award for detecting a trap. Hooray! But that’s nothing compared to the opacity of the Transmutation system that converts one item into another – or maybe a\u00a0third or fourth type, if you have the right\u00a0item equipped… one of which you create by transmuting something else… again, the sheer possibility space means you’ll be using a walkthrough. And if you use transmutation to its fullest potential, you end up with equipment that frankly breaks the game, even on Hard difficulty.<\/p>\n So\u00a0Valkyrie Profile sets itself apart from other\u00a0JRPGs in nearly every aspect of its design and execution. Not all of those differences are for the better, but when it fails, it fails with character. Six\u00a0years later, tri-Ace released Valkyrie Profile 2, which took the essential mechanics of the original and transplanted them into a much more conventional, and much more polished, JRPG. The narrative conceit of Ragnarok’s impending arrival, and the game structures built around that premise,\u00a0are\u00a0entirely absent: VP2 follows a party of eccentrics on a linear quest to find a MacGuffin, traveling from town to dungeon to town, resting at inns, buying items from shops with money, and advancing the story through a steady trickle of\u00a0cutscenes, like every other JRPG. Transmutation is gone, and there is only one\u00a0end to the story. Einherjar can be collected in dungeons (with only a brief line of dialogue to establish\u00a0them as characters) and\u00a0released after leveling up, but the reward is merely\u00a0a stat-boosting item. Many character skills are available, but all have\u00a0a clearly defined purpose,\u00a0though many are highly\u00a0situational.<\/p>\n The sequel\u00a0is a prettier game, and it’s not always just\u00a0about polygon count –\u00a0like\u00a0the visually pleasing rune mechanic that unlocks new skills.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n None of this is to say VP2 is simplistic or unoriginal. Skill acquisition by equipping items is a common trope, but here a combination of items in adjacent slots on a grid is required to unlock each skill. While this could have been an overwhelming combinatorics problem, giving each item one of four colors and limiting each skill to a color-matched set gives the player a friendly visual handle on the possibility space, and the equipment grid is a very pleasant\u00a0piece of user interface design. Monster parts can be\u00a0sold\u00a0to stores to craft powerful items and equipment, but how those parts are obtained is married beautifully to the unique Valkyrie Profile style of combat\u00a0(more on that later).<\/p>\n One of\u00a0VP2’s most\u00a0unique additions is the\u00a0ability to collect and manipulate Sealstones, which create dungeon-wide effects on the party and enemies. This single mechanic enables not only some\u00a0very clever puzzle designs in dungeons\u00a0but also another layer of player customization that gently\u00a0ramps up \u00a0in complexity over the course of the game as more sealstones come into your possession and more of them can be equipped at once. (Among\u00a0the few bits of unfortunately opaque design in VP2 is that those slots are gained by completing optional dungeons which only appear if you talk to certain random\u00a0NPCs, and sometimes talk to them more than once; NPC interactions\u00a0are otherwise totally disposable, so it’s easy to miss these very important rewards.)<\/p>\n The Sealstone system will throw a new set of variables at you in each new dungeon, and then let you customize those effects to your taste.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n The pieces of Valkyrie Profile that survive in VP2\u00a0are\u00a0the platforming dungeon sequences\u00a0and the basic fighting-game-y combat mechanics, but each of those elements is\u00a0refined and elevated here. The feel of VP2’s dungeon exploration is terrific, and even though the platforming\u00a0is much improved, the\u00a0finicky twitch-based jumping puzzles are gone, just to be safe.\u00a0Replacing Lenneth’s crystals are new protagonist Alicia’s photons; these\u00a0let\u00a0Alicia jump on\u00a0floating enemies by freezing them,\u00a0in the finest\u00a0tradition of Samus Aran. Even better, a second photon fired at a frozen enemy swaps\u00a0its position with\u00a0Alicia’s, opening up a whole new set of possibilities for platforming puzzles, not to mention lightning-fast movement across areas you don’t feel like fighting in. Getting all the treasures in each dungeon usually requires some very creative use of photons, though\u00a0the item you get is usually less satisfying than the feeling of accomplishment. Yggdrasil, the third-to-last dungeon of the game, is a brilliant challenge that melds\u00a0platforming, photons, and sealstones together in a completely new and intuitive\u00a0way.<\/p>\n Alicia can not only freeze enemies to create platforms\u00a0but also switch\u00a0positions with a second hit.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n The improvement\u00a0to dungeon exploration would have been enough, but VP2 also pushes the original game’s\u00a0combat forward by literally adding a new dimension. Battles take place in an arena\u00a0which the party must traverse to reach enemy targets. Enemies can attack if the party steps into their target range, a visible\u00a0cone or circle on the map. Enemies only move when the party moves, but the party can also dash to pass through a danger zone unscathed, at the cost of Action Points, which are regenerated by moving normally. This, in itself, is tremendous fun, and you’re incentivized to do it a lot\u00a0since there is a big\u00a0XP reward for heading straight for the lone enemy leader, whose defeat means immediate victory. I love the leader\u00a0idea and the snappy pace of combat it allows. The faster the leader goes down, the\u00a0more bonus magic crystals you get – magic crystals still being the reward for juggling enemies with a mid-air combo – and in VP2 these serve\u00a0not only as a multiplier to the XP reward in battle but also, in a nice touch, as the currency used to permanently add sealstones to your collection. Although I didn’t often make use of it, there’s also the ability to split your party into two groups so the beefier characters can draw fire away from their fragile partners.\u00a0So tactical\u00a0movement is a crucial aspect of the new battle system, and this goes a long way toward relieving the grind of combat.<\/p>\n There are flaws with this system, for sure; characters will sometimes unexpectedly get stuck on geometry during a dash, leaving them right in the line of fire. The fact that enemies have multiple attacks with different ranges, and their\u00a0chosen\u00a0attack often changes following a player action, means a safe spot regularly becomes an unsafe spot without an opportunity to react. This is forgivable since otherwise you could probably finish\u00a099% of battles without the enemy taking a turn, and also\u00a0because you can manipulate this phenomenon\u00a0to your advantage by using a menu action to force the enemy to switch to a\u00a0more easily avoidable attack.<\/p>\n VP2 battles incorporate\u00a0a mild level\u00a0of tactics; stay out of the red zones and enemies can’t attack.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n The battle menu is an interesting idea but definitely the one that I’m most ambivalent about. Casting\u00a0non-attack spells, changing equipment, and using items all make use of the battle menu, and\u00a0once any character does any of those, the menu is unusable until a cooldown period elapses. Moving, attacking, or being attacked will advance time until the menu is available again. Initially this requires judicious decisions about healing, especially in boss fights, since\u00a0you’ll probably only get to use one item or spell between the boss’ big party-wide beatdowns, but that soon becomes a moot point as you accumulate enough money to have 99 heal-everybody-to-almost-full items on you at all times. Ultimately the menu limit ends up only being relevant in desperate scenarios when your party is down to one survivor and you need to slowly reverse momentum with\u00a0a series of revivals and healing. In that case,\u00a0having to avoid contact with the enemy for such a long time\u00a0can be very challenging, but not exactly fun.<\/p>\n Once your party is in position and you press the first attack button, the camera switches to a side-on view and the familiar mode of combo-based combat from VP takes over. The major difference is that each attack now consumes AP, which complicates fights against enemies that can survive a single turn of all-out assault. Whereas in VP you could attack the same number of times each turn and there was rarely a reason to do less, VP2 frequently requires you to choose between attacking now with a limited AP pool or trying to move around the battlefield, putting the party at risk, to put more AP into a single combo. Or, since being attacked restores a large chunk of AP, you could just stand in front of the target and trade blows\u00a0–\u00a0but unless you’re doing a lot of grinding, enemies in VP2 hit rather hard.<\/p>\n Enemies in VP2 are made up of several body parts – this attack made contact with the monster’s\u00a0legs.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n The other new mechanic when attacking is enemy body parts. Where you position yourself on the field in relation to the enemy, and where your attacks land, determines whether you hit their sensitive tail or their armored plating. Enough sustained damage to a single body part will break that body part off, which may yield a crafting item (told you we’d get there!) and may also activate Break Mode, a short period during which you can just button mash the enemy into paste without worrying about AP usage. Visual flourishes and some nice sound design make it viscerally\u00a0satisfying when skeletons\u00a0explode with\u00a0goodies like an undead pi\u00f1ata.<\/p>\n Special attacks are back, and the rules for using them are the same except there is no per-character cooldown between rounds; if you’ve got the AP to get the meter to 100, you can use your specials. Blessed be tri-Ace for adding the ability to skip past the special attack cutscene that you see every single time you use it; by the end of my recent\u00a0VP playthrough I was building my strategy\u00a0around how to minimize the number of times per minute I had to\u00a0watch them. One step backward in VP2 is that mages always have the same special regardless of the spell they have equipped, whereas in VP there was a corresponding special for each regular spell; this means if you run into\u00a0a type of enemy with an elemental resistance to your mage’s special, you can’t just change spells, you have to change characters, which is something the game makes you do frustratingly often as it is.<\/p>\n Party management in the original VP may be\u00a0odd, but in many ways it’s much friendlier\u00a0to the player than a more conventional JRPG. Completing dungeons and solving puzzles rewards you with Event XP, which can then be freely applied to whichever characters you wish at your leisure. You can level up your mainstay characters faster, or – my preference – get the characters you haven’t been\u00a0using up to snuff before sending them to Valhalla. It’s very nice to have that buffer rather than constantly juggling your party formation to keep everyone equally leveled. By contrast, VP2 is a downright bastard about surprising you with\u00a0characters leaving your party at the whim of the story\u00a0– sometimes right before tough\u00a0boss fights – and instead of a bank of Event XP you get a handful of\u00a0items that award a certain amount of\u00a0XP to one character, that amount being insignificant\u00a0by the endgame.<\/p>\n Sure, the localization is better in the sequel, but the original has so much more personality. Polish isn’t everything! …no you’re<\/strong>\u00a0being nostalgic. Shut up.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Still, this\u00a0is the only aspect of\u00a0VP’s design which I would call mechanically superior to its sequel.\u00a0VP2 throws as much\u00a0stuff<\/em> at the player but that stuff is more coherent, more polished, more balanced. There’s no doubt in my mind that in terms of mechanics the sequel\u00a0is the better game.<\/p>\n But though\u00a0I might sometimes wish otherwise, mechanics aren’t everything, and VP2’s failure to connect on a narrative or emotional level\u00a0taints the whole experience. It got rid of a lot of problems the first game had, but it may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The countdown to Ragnarok is a compelling idea to build your game around; there is no compelling idea at the center of VP2. The dialogue in VP is stilted and the voice acting is notoriously uneven, rather\u00a0behind the curve as far as turn-of-the-millenium Japanese localizations go, but VP2’s storytelling, with the benefit of improved translation and okay\u00a0performances, is just incredibly boring.\u00a0In terms of story, the\u00a0relationship between VP and VP2 is roughly analogous to that between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross – the sequel takes\u00a0a fairly minor unresolved plot thread and builds an entire new game out of it,\u00a0more or less abandoning the theme and tone of the original, and also wreaking such havoc with convoluted\u00a0time travel metaphysics shenanigans that you’re left not knowing whether anything that happened in either game ends up mattering. But Chrono Cross has its own identity independent of Chrono Trigger, and a charming one at that, while VP2\u00a0never aspires\u00a0to be more than an appendix to its predecessor.<\/p>\n Even though this avalanche of confusing data is mechanically irrelevant, it’s all in service of the game’s core concept – that your reason for existing\u00a0is to recruit einherjar\u00a0to prepare for\u00a0Ragnarok. Valkyrie Profile thrives on messy details like this while its sequel is very tidy and totally bland.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Valkyrie Profile’s story didn’t need a sequel (or prequel), but\u00a0unfortunately tri-Ace seems unable to hold onto\u00a0nice things; its flagship RPG franchise Star Ocean ended up being sunk by sequels that needlessly undermined the story its fans were invested in\u00a0with retcons that made the whole setting absolutely\u00a0pointless – sound familiar? Given that\u00a0Valkyrie Profile 2 isn’t really about being a Valkyrie and doing Valkyrie things anymore, conceivably it could have been given a completely new setting, story and title and been just as fun without the baggage of being a sequel to a beloved game… but new IP is\u00a0risky. tri-Ace’s most recent console release, excluding their contract work on the sequels to Final Fantasy 13, is Resonance of Fate, which mostly flew under the radar – despite having a terrific battle system, according to\u00a0Bob Mackey\u00a0on\u00a0this episode of Retronauts<\/a> on RPG battle systems (which you should really listen to even though it lionizes Active Time Battle more than I would<\/a>). Maybe I wouldn’t have played Valkyrie Profile 2 if it didn’t have the name, and that thought makes me sad.\u00a0Because it’s a great game… it’s just a lousy Valkyrie Profile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" tri-Ace’s Valkyrie Profile is\u00a0weird even by JRPG standards. It throws out nearly every genre convention in order to tell the Norse story\u00a0of Ragnarok in RPG form, much though it may\u00a0deviate from the source material. The valkyrie Lenneth\u00a0must prepare Valhalla\u00a0for cataclysmic war\u00a0by recruiting the worthiest dying mortals to\u00a0serve as divine soldiers… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-combat-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp_battle.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp_skills.jpg\")
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![\"The](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp2_sealstones.png\")
![\"Alicia](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp2_photons.png\")
![\"VP2](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp2_battlefield.png\")
![\"Enemies](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp2_battleaction.png\")
![\"Sure,](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/vp_vp2_specials.png\")
![\"Even](\"https:\/\/doctorshrugs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vp_einherjar.jpg\")