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E3 Impression

Valkyria Chronicles

07.25.2008

Chris Privitere
E3 CORRESPONDANT AND RPGCAST PRODUCER

Straaight from the Wild West

At E3 this year, I had the opportunity to sit down and play a mission of Sega's Valkyria Chronicles for the PlayStation 3. Let's just get it out of the way: it was fantastic.

I have to say they've done a really good job of melding genres together. This has resulted in a tactical RPG that feels accessible to a diehard Final Fantasy Tactics fan, but adds innovations to the genre like first-person aiming and third person 3-D character movement.

The first thing I did when I sat down at Sega's booth was stare at the beautiful brushstroke graphics. After that, I took command of my forces. This was a well balanced group equipped with World War 2 era technology. It included scouts, snipers, lancers, and even a tank (the vehicle kind, not the MMO kind). I had a number of what are essentially action points allotted to me each turn that limited the amount of units I could move and use during the round. I could take a scout and repeatedly move them across the map while ignoring the other units. Or I could try to balance my points out and slowly sweep my entire force across the map. Once I picked a unit to move, I had a set amount of movement I could take, as well an attack I could make at any time during the unit's turn. And during that attack is when the action elements kicked in, and I got to jump into first person to line up my shots and decide where I wanted to wound the enemy.

My favorite strategy, however, was taking my tank out into the middle of the battlefield and just leaving it there, so that the enemy forces would run into its range. See, when an enemy unit entered one of my unit's range, my unit would start to fire at them at an interval while they remained in range, and this persisted throughout their entire turn. Of course, the enemy would do the same to my units if I went into their range. So for my tank, this meant all the enemy units would run up and try to attack it, and then get mowed down while the computer was moving the rest of the units during its turn.

I'm glad this wasn't in the demo

All in all, this added a nice tactical importance to where I left my characters when my turn was done. Stranding them alone near an enemy was likely only going to result in them needing to be carted off by a medic the next turn. But when thought out, it could permit one of my units to take out a number of enemy units in a single round.

Which brings up character death. If one of my units died, I only had three turns to run near their position with one of my other units, at which time a quick anime cutscene of a medic running up occurred, and my dead unit lived to fight another day. One caveat though, if the enemy ran by my unit, they would capture the unit, and I could kiss it goodbye.

The wonderful thing about Valkyria Chronicles is how it delivered the immense joy of masterminding a tactical sweep across a map, taking out enemies one by one and advancing my position, and then capped it off with the satisfaction of lining up a headshot. Oh, and it also let me run over enemy units with a tank. Which I did repeatedly. I will be greatly anticipating Valkyria Chronicles when it releases this November and it was easily one of the top three titles at the show.


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Console:
· Playstation 3

Release:
· Nov. 2008

Publisher:
· Sega

Developer:
· Sega


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