Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria Review

Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria

~the end of an era, to challenge the gods themselves--the best RPG of the PS2's final years

Platform: Playstation 2
Genre: RPG, action-based battles
Developer: tri-Ace
Publisher: Square Enix
Japanese Release Date: 06/22/06
US Release Date: 09/26/06
EU Release Date: 09/14/07 (upcoming)

Previous games by tri-Ace: Radiata Stories (PS2), Star Ocean: Till the End of time (PS2), Valkyrie Profile (PSX, port on PSP subtitled "Lenneth"), Star Ocean: The Second Story (PSX), Star Ocean (SNES, JP only); also, before the team broke off from Namco, Tales of Phantasia (SNES, JP only)

Developer Credits: (from GameFAQs page, credit EmperorBrandon, Kouli, MasterDabura, skytraveler, irishrpgfan, The_Mana_Legend, Ubersuntzu, and Setis)
+ Show Spoiler +

Music Composer Motoi Sakuraba [aside from all the above tri-Ace games except Radiata Stories: Tales of Symphonia among other Tales games, Camelot Software Planning's games, Baten Kaitos, etc.]
Game Designer Masaki Norimoto
Planning Takashi Sato
Planning Masahiro Nishida
Lead Programmer Shigeru Ueki
Battle Programmer Yuichiro Kitao
Lead R&D Programmer Yoshiharu Gotanda
Sound Yusaburo Shimojo
Art Director Eiko Sawamura
FMV Director Kenichi Kanckura
Director Takayuki Suguro

Voice (JP): Ahly/Leone Tanaka Atsuko
Voice (JP): Alicia/Valkyrie Yajima Akiko
Voice (JP): Aluze Touchi Hiroki
Voice (JP): Silmeria Kawasumi Ayako
Voice (JP): Dylan/Brahms Nomura Kenji
Voice (JP): Frei Kawamura Maria
Voice (JP): Rufus Nakamura Yuichi
Voice (JP): Lezard Koyasu Takehito
Voice (JP): Lenneth Touma Yumi
Voice (JP): Odin Ikeda Shuichi
Voice (JP): Barbarosa Nakata Jyoji
Voice (JP): Ull Aoyama Touko
Voice (JP): Heimdal Matsumoto Dai
Voice (JP): Roussalier Horikoshi Mami
Voice (JP): Dalas Kamiya Hiroshi
Voice (JP): Walther Nishimura Tomomichi
Voice (JP): Gabriel Celesta Kusunoki Taiten
Voice (JP): Iseria Queen Honda Takako
Voice (EN): Alicia Michelle Ruff
Voice (EN): Arngrim Dameon Clarke
Voice (EN): Lezard Liam O'Brian
Voice (EN): Adonis Travis Willingham
Voice (EN): Roland, Xehnon Johnny Yong Bosch
Voice (EN): Silmeria Jennifer Sekiguchi
Voice (EN): Rufus Talis Axelrod
Voice (EN): Dylan/Brahms Patrick Seitz
Voice (EN): Hrist/Leone Tara Platt
Voice (EN): Lenneth Megan Hollingshead
Voice (EN): Barbarossa Stephen Martello
Voice (EN): Walther Michael McConnohie
Voice (EN): Dallas Yuri Lowenthal
Voice (EN): Freya Kirsten Potter
Voice (EN): Odin Arthur Russell
Voice Director (EN) Jonathan Klein
Voice (EN): Sha-Kon/Phyress Hunter Mackenzie Austin
Voice (EN): Celes/Tyrith Gina Grad
Voice (EN): Fraudir/Circe Erika Lenhart
Voice (EN): Richelle/Sylphide Kristy Pape
Voice (EN): Mithra/Khanon Charles Rubendall
Voice (EN): Rousallier Victoria Harwood
Voice (EN): Zunde/Aaron Kyle Herbert
Voice (EN): Dirna Hamilton Carrie Savage

What is this game?

Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria is a highly strategic, challenging, and deep console RPG, showcasing the technical limits of the PS2 as well as the talented developers' own growing maturity. Loosely based upon the untamed world of Norse Mythology, Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria--from here on out, referred to as VP2--is the prequel to the original Valkyrie Profile, a classic which still sells well over a hundred dollars on eBay. Like all other games by the same developer, VP2 is a traditional console RPG with a largely linear progression aside from the several optional dungeons scattered throughout, filled with towns to explore, townspeople to talk to, the occasional witty comment, shops, dungeons, threats of world destruction, and the like. Also like other games by tri-Ace, it features an action-based battle system, this time an improvement of the original VP's four-character timed button presses that takes the series into the 3D fighting arena, requiring sharp tactical play.

In VP2, you control a dainty but resolute princess of Dipan in Alicia, a girl whose body, due to a grave mishap of an ancient rite of rebirth, also houses the soul of the Valkyrie Silmeria, youngest of the three goddess sisters who must gather the souls of the brave and virtuous to prepare an army for the inevitable Ragnarok, the end of the world and battle between the gods and giants. However, Silmeria isn't all too pleased with her duties under Odin, and she guides and has been training Alicia since childbirth along a path to defy the gods themselves. King Barbarossa of Dipan, as well, also seeks to oppose Odin, the All-Father who in this retelling of Norse Mythology may be tyrannical as well as wise. The play is set for a conflict that will literally decide the fate of Midgard.

Intro movie (although the rest of the game isn't really like this)--guess what the voices are

Einherjar System

Like in VP, throughout the course of the game you collect the souls of dead warriors, called Einherjar, who become your party members to use as you please, materialized into flesh and blood before every battle to aid you. However, whereas VP focused on the tragic deaths of these people, VP2 focuses on bringing them back to life and the second lives you grant them. This is how VP2 balances having a cast of 52 playable characters--40 of them are Einherjar who have no bearing on the main plot of the game, whereas the rest (although some only are playable in the post-game dungeon or near the end of the game) are living people who the plot revolves around.

In battle, Einherjar are used indistinguishably from plot characters, except that plot characters are more likely to have unique attacks within their attack sets--in any case, plot characters are not necessarily any stronger (actually, often weaker) than the best Einherjar. The game allows you to use any combination of your characters to form a four-person team: even Alicia can be left out of the party.

Dungeon Exploration

In VP2, "Profile" refers not only to the view with which we examine the protagonist's character, but also the mode of dungeon and town exploration. That's right: VP2's dungeons are still explored as a 2D puzzle platformer, even though the graphics in this installment are 3D. You can exit rooms sometimes into the screen, out of the screen, or to the left or right, and dungeons may be very convoluted--thankfully to some, the game provides a map of areas you've already been in before. Enemies can be seen on the screen in dungeons in a typical fashion where different enemies have different patterns of chasing after you. Touching them or hitting them results in initiating combat in a separate screen from the dungeon; if you bump into one you're likely to get ambushed for your first turn of battle, but you'll start the battle normally if you initiate combat yourself. There are two things you can do other than run around and swing the sword: jump and shoot photons.

Photons provide the puzzle element to the platforming. Alicia can shoot these projectiles that when striking a certain object like a pillar or an enemy, freezes them for several seconds. Photons bounce three times off of walls before fizzling out. However, if a photon hits an already frozen object or enemy, that object and Alicia will swap places on the map. To progress through dungeons or get to treasure chests or unlockable Einheriar, you'll be required to take full advantage of this swapping. By the end of the game, you'll be photon-swapping enemies from one area to another side of the screen, jumping, shooting in mid-air, swapping with frozen enemies, swapping again with enemies that are falling where you used to be, and so on…perhaps all within a single "puzzle." Of course, due to the organic nature of the system, each puzzle--more like, how do you get to the other side of the room or that high ledge--can be solved in a variety of ways, some much easier to execute than others.

Also of note is the Sealstone system, which quickly becomes intuitive as you play but is difficult to explain. Sealstones are found in dungeons, and they have various effects like boosting your attack power by 25%, turning your attacks into ice element, making your indirect attacks stronger at the expense of your movement speed, etc. Some of them have positive effects, while others have negative effects, and yet others have neutral or mixed effects. You can pick them up at your will, although there are certain restrictions. While you are carrying them, the effects are active on your characters; however, if you place them on a pedestal, they'll instead go into effect on all enemies in the area. As such, sealstones become integral to planning boss strategies--in a rudimentary example, maybe you want to turn your characters into fire attribute while turning the boss into ice, thus making you both deal more damage to each other.

Battle System

The battle system, the heart of the game, is too detailed to describe here. Perhaps the most important attribute is this: button-mashing or fighting without abandon will get you totally destroyed, whereas with skill and planning you can finish many battles without taking a single hit. This discrepancy in results between good and bad play is what distinguishes it from much weaker games, where it's painfully obvious what you need to do at all times. However, some highlights are still in order.

Rufus's Three-way Attack (erm, I don't use Rufus, but I think that's what the attack is) consumed 6 AP

The first thing you notice is that enemies don't move unless you do. That is, you can plan everything out before you decide to execute it, as time stops while you're not moving or doing an action. You can move all characters together in a group or split them up--in either case, they only move as you control them, unlike in other action RPGs. Also, you can see enemies' attack ranges in front of them; if you step into them and it's been long enough since an enemy's last attack, it'll attack you. Different attacks have different attack ranges as well as patterns (a fan, circle, line, etc.). Also, some enemy combinations may have leaders, and killing the leader wins you the fight instantly, which you may be rewarded for if you do so quickly.

The entire party shares one AP bar that has 100 max. Actions such as casting spells from the menu or attacking deplete it, while running around or getting hit by an enemy (both of which take time) raise it. You can also execute a dash that uses 15 AP; this can be used to jump over enemy attack ranges to get near them without getting hit first yourself. Using items also uses 15 AP--also, note that after using an item or a spell, there's a recovery time before you're able to access your menu again, a time that mussed be passed by walking, attacking, getting attacked, etc., so you must ration item usage well.

Each character is assigned to a different face button on the PS2 controller. Once you're close enough, you initiate an attack chain by hitting a character's button. Each character can select up to three attacks (limited by weapon, some stronger weapons may only allow one or two attacks) before battle to use. Once you select an attack, the character goes to attack, and you can start hitting other characters' buttons at any time during the chain, having them go to attack as well. You can have each character attack as many times as they have attacks equipped, although soon the game will allow you to overattack with characters.

The attacks actually work similar to those in fighting games--they have different startup and recovery times, damage multipliers, AP costs, and directions they swipe in. Some moves even launch or ground bounce the enemy; if you hit an enemy lying on the ground you get some AP back, and if you hit an enemy in the air you get extra experience. Also, there's a second meter, a Heat gauge that goes up as you hit the enemy but returns to zero once a chain is finished; however, if you end a chain with 100 Heat, then you'll be able to chain on some Soul Crushes at the end. Of course, some weapons don't allow Soul Crushes, so that's another consideration when picking weapons. Each character starts with 3 different attacks and eventually learns 10 total by leveling up. Seeing as there's about 130 different attacks scattered among 52 characters, there's a lot more differences between characters than simply stats, equipment selection, and spell selection.

Another interesting aspect is that each enemy has multiple hittable body parts, each with a separate HP bar and defense values, along with the total HP of the enemy. An enemy may have 5000 HP, but one of its claws may have 1500, its head 2500, and its body 3000, among others. Damage you deal does damage into the total HP as well as the body parts HP--if you kill the claw by moving around the enemy and using attacks that hit in that certain area rather than sweep too low or high, then the claw dies. And then its dual claw attack will only hit once. Or if you kill a lizard mans feet, you'll debilitate its movement. Of course, if you can manage to kill a "vital" part like a body or head, that's an instant KO even without doing the enemy's full HP in damage. Also, different body parts drop different items when they're destroyed, and these accessories can be equipped or combined in predetermined recipes in stores to yield strong equipment.

A very easy first boss with an overpowered party, Japanese version
By the way, you can change the camera view not to be retarded like that.

Miscellany and Summary

Skills are learned in VP2 from combinations of equipment. Instead of a equipment housing a skill, most pieces of equipment have a rune associated with them. Each character can equip nine things on a grid, and connecting runes yield learnable skills. For example, equipment with the blue runes Head, Arm, Activation, and Resistance let you learn Free Item, a skill that costs 3 CP and lets you use items without the 15 AP cost. However, each character has a limited amount of CP with which to equip skills (and there are many skills to learn), which when learned are selectable by that character only.

If the game was too easy for you the first time, because you spent a lot of time getting useful skills, equipment, and such, each successive time you play through the game until it caps at the 51st time, the enemies get boosts to stats: 1.2x HP, 1.5x Atk, 1.2x Hit, 1.2x Rdm, Avd, Rst after the first time, up to 15.9x HP, 26x Atk, 6.1x Hit, 1.3x Rdm, Avd, Rst for those of you who are really really dedicated and also Japanese. Boss strategies that work the first time may not work the second, as the game becomes less forgiving. You'll have to rely more on sneaky tactics like getting hit intentionally by weaker enemies to recover AP instead of getting clobbered by the strongest enemy around as well as extreme powergaming in min/maxing (more like just maxing). There's also an extensive postgame dungeon that gets harder each time you beat it as well, up to 10 times.

The music in this game has more orchestral, subdued tracks than the original VP, which was filled with a lot of nice metal-like tracks. Sakuraba back in the 80's released a progressive rock album (no vocals), so that's his background, I suppose. I think the music here is not quite as good as usual for him, which still translates into pretty damn good as far as game music goes. For example here is the regular battle music (sh! I'll take it down if I'm asked to) for reference.

All in all, the game is fairly solidly crafted, with a great battle system, graphics, music, etc. The puzzles, fighting, and planning all require some reasonable thought, and there are many ways to design your team--all of which may change from one fight to the next as you decide you need different strengths. Tri-Ace has delivered real depth of gameplay, something fresh in a world of A button mashing, a commonplace scenario even in turn-based RPGs. The only real disappointment is the plot, which really turns out to be mediocre or slightly better--it's worse than the original VP here. And that's not much of a disappointment at all to detract from a stellar game.

This concludes my second review in what's shaping to be probably a weekly column. Time for a poll, for kicks:

Poll: Did you read the whole thing?
(Vote): Yes.
(Vote): Mostly.
(Vote): A little.
(Vote): No.

Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria Review

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming