Valkyria Chronicles

[Don]

Saw this on Steam and picked it up. It's a strategy RPG along the lines of Shining Force/Fire Emblem and it's a pretty good game, but it has one of what I'd consider a cardinal sin in SRPGs: ranking based on how well you did. These ranks aren't obtained by actually being good at the game, because to achieve the ranking you have to pretty much already know where everything is going to appear and what additional objectives will show up, and you probably need to head shot everyone along the way too. All this means is you get to save & load a lot of time, and since the ranking seems to carry an XP bonus it actually matters whether you can do well. There also appears to be no way to tell what the exact criteria on the ranking is without consulting GameFAQs or whatever so you don't really know if you're on track to meet it. This is my gripe with the older Fire Emblem games (not sure about the new ones, haven't played them at all) where they've the level/time rankings that are pretty much mutually exclusive (you need to take extra time to level up but if you do your time rating suffers so you have to know exactly how many level and how fast you have to beat to hit A rank on both), and since you don't know the exact requirement for either without GameFAQs you end up having to guess, and at least in FE4 some of the time rankings are borderline impossible to do since you can't cover enough distance with your leader without the movement ring and there's no reason for you to assume that taking the shortest path every turn to every objective and never stopping is somehow not supposed to be fast enough. This is probably a pet peeve of mine but I just don't like being told there are objectives that aren't humanely possible to get without saving after every move plus already knowing where exactly every additional objective is going to pop up, especially when those objectives do matter to the game itself.

Honestly if they want to make all this a big deal they should make it way easier and not allow you to save during a battle. I remember XCom was quite hard if you didn't save every turn because it's very easy to walk into an ambush and die horribly. In fact I'd say playing on Superhuman with saving is significantly easier than the easiest difficulty where you didn't save during battles.

[Eric]

This is a surprisingly excellent port of the original from the PS3, most ports, especially from Japanese companies are shit, but this was is excellent and optimized for PC performance.

[Don]

It seems like trying to play this game like XCom will get you totally spanked in the rating. Sending one guy running through everything and headshotting everyone seems to be far more successful than moving as a squad.

[Don]

It seems like the review for this game is overwhelmingly positive and all talk about this being a strategy game. Are people just so incompetent to not be able to see the whole A-rank stuff is not remotely strategic and since you can't replay operation battles it kind of matters a lot whether you get it or not? Why should you have to consult a walkthrough to throw a grenade at a sniper that you cannot possibly see and know exactly where all the enemy is before you can see them to avoid their LOS? There's a lot of good things about this game but I find the ranking system so insulting that it more than wipes out everything good about the game put together.

[Shrinweck]

The game is fun and I think that's what they reviewed. If you're going to go for top ratings then yeah I agree it's going to be garbage because of how it grades you. Anyone playing this game for the first time who isn't omniscient is going to get a C or D the first time through nearly every mission. I suppose this was to promote re-playability, but if you're the type to replay a mission until you get top rated then all the little things are going to ruin the experience. On the plus side, the game is balanced so you can get through it without A-ranking everything. There are also the skirmishes if you did get stuck and thought it was because you didn't have enough experience/currency.

I think it's getting reviewed well because it was a fairly original take on a system that doesn't see much in the way of creativity. Also the focus on a character-driven story. The fact that it's a good port on top of it all, probably earns bonus points.

[Don]

The game's difficulty is pretty trivial because all you have to do is hole up in an area and then you can kill almost everything that isn't a tank by just the retaliation fire you do while the enemy stupidly run to their deaths. Of course doing that trashes your rating in a game where you're expect to just run someone through 10 enemies to kill the 2 guys guarding the flag way down. I'm not going to beat the game once and then do the New Game + or whatever they have to finish up the A rating stuff. I guess you can just say don't pay attention to the rating but why should someone good at a strategy game purposely ignore a rating when you know you're quite capable of doing well in any normal strategy game?

For an example of a game that has arbitary rating done reasonably right, look at Front Mission 3. You don't know the exact criteria needed for each milestone but it's pretty straightforward stuff. Don't take too much damage, don't take too long, and don't be overleveled for a fight and you'll get your Platinum medal. The only really tricky one is the level requirement but that basically just means you should always level up two type of weapons concurrently because using only one type of weapon makes the game pretty trivial and you will not be able to hit Platinum. Even the final boss you can't get Platinum if all you have is S rated weapon skills. The medals themselves also don't have any significant gameplay impact (I think you get to fight and obtain the uber mech if you've enough Platinum medals but the uber mech can be obtained by consulting a guide even if you don't meet the requirements to fight it) but I still went back and got Platinum medal for all the fights because it's actually quite challenging to do.

I understand the sentiment to support the oddball, nice looking game, but I really can't stand games that tells you that you suck at the game, especially when it's because you didn't know where that Sniper that you cannot possibly have seen is going to pop out and shoot you. This isn't even like the hardcore genre like Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden, because those games are probably actually hard. Getting the A rank isn't hard. It just requires you to load the game a lot of times while you're trying to hit all the improbable headshots.

[Julius Seeker]

I must point out, Skies of Arcadia dev team.

[Don]

Skies of Arcadia had a rather glaring flaw in the game too (random encounter was excessively high) but this is on another level. If the entire Skies of Arcadia played like the part where you get thrown back by the wind storm where it can take 30 minutes to move one screen worth of distance after the random encounters that'd still easily wipe out whatever good Skies of Arcadia had.