Re-release this: The Legend of Valkyrie
There is exactly one English release of Namco's The Legend of Valkyrie, and even that came out five Playstations ago.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Valkyrie is a series that, outside of Japan, just isn’t that well-known. That’s not to say it’s unknown, but the older the games in the series get, and the older the people who remember playing its most famous iteration 20-plus years ago when it finally reached North American shores get, the less known it is. It doesn’t help that, even if you do learn it exists, there aren’t very many avenues for playing it available to you. Hence, the “Re-release this” banner for this write-up.
Games in the Valkyrie series were exclusive to Japan for some time, with the first, Valkyrie no Bōken, coming out on Nintendo’s Famicom in 1986. It was inspired in part by Nintendo’s own The Legend of Zelda, in the sense that Namco wanted to focus on developing console-exclusive games, rather than just arcade ports, and to focus on the same kinds of fantasy adventuring that Zelda had helped prove could be popular. In a fun twist, it was the return to the arcades that created the superior Valkyrie title under discussion today: known in Japan as Valkyrie no Densetsu back in 1989, it would eventually make its way to North America in 1997’s Namco Museum Vol. 5, renamed as The Legend of Valkyrie, where it served as the highlight of that collection.
There has never been another North American, localized release of The Legend of Valkyrie: just the one in 1997, as part of a collection of Namco’s past. Namco Museum is still a series that’s alive and releasing on every console in existence, and yet, they never bothered to put Legend of Valkyrie on another of them. It has, in one form, been put out in North America again, through the Turbografx-16 Mini, but that features the Japanese PC-Engine release. It’s certainly playable, as there are only a few moments where you need to be able to read the dialogue that’s on-screen, but the arcade version put on Namco Museum Vol. 5 is the superior edition, even leaving aside that the Turbografx-16 Mini release is in Japanese.
With that being said, the Japanese-only release on the TG-16 Mini is still absolutely worth your time in the absence of any alternative: the graphics and sound are both downgraded, but even with that, some of the tweaks made to the gameplay make plenty of sense and are welcome, and it certainly doesn’t look bad. Just not as good, with the effects that were incredibly impressive for a 1989 arcade title removed since the PC-Engine wasn’t capable of handling them. The co-op mode, too, has been removed, which is a shame. Of course, to play it at all, you have to buy a TG-16 Mini, and while it is certainly worth your $100 for the 50ish games on there, it would also be lovely to just be able to play The Legend of Valkyrie/Valkyrie no Densetsu for $10 or $15 or whatever without having to download Namco Museum Vol. 5 somewhere, to then play it on an emulator or a modded Playstation Classic or what have you. And downloading it is what you’d have to do, unless you feel like shelling out at least twice the cost of a TG-16 Mini on an authentic copy of Namco Museum Vol. 5 on eBay. Which costs as much as it does in part because it’s the only anything with a localized Legend of Valkyrie on it.
Let’s talk about the game itself. Legend of Valkyrie is a top-down action platformer with attacks that are more reminiscent of shooters than anything, since you fire off a variety of beams from your sword in eight directions. Valkyrie, the main character, descends from heaven to save the Golden Seed, and then place it in the Northern Spring, a magical place that grants wishes, and where the Golden Seed will be able to spread life-giving magic throughout Marvel Land. You will learn the story in bits and pieces as you play, told via artwork and text in between stages, and it’s all rather charming like the rest of the game.
The platforming is legit, and not just a forgettable add-on in an action-focused game: if you fall into the abyss, into water, whatever, you suffer half-a-heart of damage, and have to restart the entire platforming sequence. So, don’t fall, is about the only advice there is to be given there. The game will tease you on occasion with what are clearly some easier paths and platforming challenges to complete, but the reward on the other side is also usually lesser, and missing out on some items and spells and riches found at the end of some of the more difficult portions of the game can catch up to you the deeper you get into Valkyrie’s eight stages.
You can find or purchase sword upgrades that give you a homing beam, or a spread attack, or a piercing one, and so on. These have a set amount of uses, though, the game does not share with you how many there are or how many are left at a given time. Just stock up when you can, and the next upgrade will automatically go into use when you deplete the one you’re utilizing. Your basic attack is short-range and low-power, but it can still get the job done in a pinch: my most recent completion of the game saw me defeating the game’s final boss, Kamooz, with that default weapon, slamming on the attack button as quickly as the game allowed to make it work.
There are other upgrades to concern yourself with that are more permanent, like ones that extend your health or magic bars, even if you suffer a game over… so long as you still have credits remaining. Luckily, credits are always available in the Namco Museum version of the game, since it doesn’t require quarters: you just have to press Select or the equivalent on whatever controller you’re using to “insert” another quarter. You can also press start before the transition to the game over screen after dying to continue from where you died, but the cost is your score, which will reset to zero. This is good, though, since if all you care about is clearing the game, then press start every time you die, who cares. If you want to attempt to set high scores or do a one-credit clear, though, then obviously, then clearing your score in exchange for a direct continue isn’t going to cut it.
It will become a whole lot harder to play with score in mind starting in stage six, since that’s the first one in which there are no longer checkpoints, meaning you need to clear a stage on one credit. Luckily, every time you do die, you get some bonus gold for your next playthrough, so if you need to die a few times in order to buy the kinds of upgrades that will keep you alive, well, that is a strategy that will work. And it’ll teach you enemy patterns and give you space to explore alternate paths, too, so even if it can feel a little tedious to fail again and again, it might be just what you need to finally succeed.
As for magic, the spells can be tough to master, but that’s fine, since using them correctly makes Valkyrie basically unstoppable. She can summon tiny versions of herself that will attack at the same time as her, and since you can summon quite a few of them at once and at little cost to your magic bar each time, you can have a little army going to take down even bosses in no time flat. Of course, avoiding damage long enough to summon all of them is the trick, as is walking around without having them drop off of cliffs or into water or lava. Valkyrie can also become a tornado that whirls around impervious to damage, or become a huge version of herself whose jumps cause little earthquakes that damage foes… it’s a fun mix of powers that aren’t required to complete the game, but do make for a more interesting combat experience. And it’s good that they aren’t required, since you can easily miss them thanks to the game’s multiple paths.
The video below shows off the first stage of Legend of Valkyrie (as well as how it appears on the Playstation edition of the game, with the screen modified to show scores and status on the right), so you can get a sense of the basic gameplay and systems — there are NPCs to interact with who will often give you rewards for helping or talking to them, there is a shop, and, at 3:56, you can see some of the impressive graphical effects I alluded to earlier that are in the arcade version:
Check out that scaling effect with the ground well below the platforms Valkyrie is traversing: can you believe that’s featured in a game from 1989? That effect isn’t just used to add some depth to background graphics, though, as the entire screen zooms out for a massive scorpion boss later on, and the quality of what you’re seeing holds up, while also giving this giant foe the sense of scale the effect intended. It’s also used in the other direction, and in the foreground, to increase the size of foes you’re familiar with later on in the game, so that you know that you’re facing a more dangerous and difficult to defeat version of a monster you’re used to. Yes, they’re a bit more pixelated han their standard look, but the effect worked as intended all the same. It’s really impressive stuff, and not just for 1989: these would all be neat effects to deploy in a retro-style game in 2021, too.
The game features loads of color and brightness, even when you’re in the depths of a cavern, and it helps it all stay as cheery as the music makes it sound like it is. The soundtrack is great, short as it might be: not every stage has a unique theme, but the one that’s replayed in multiple levels and is found in a modified form in others is such an ear worm that you won’t care. It’s the one in the above video, but here’s an isolated version of it, sans sound effects (be warned, this video is extremely loud for some reason):
What makes the absence of The Legend of Valkyrie in North America even more aggravating is that they didn’t stop making games in this series. They just, for the most part, kept them in Japan. Whirlo is a spin-off for the Super Famicom and SNES, featuring Valkyrie’s co-op partner, Sandra, the green creature you seen in the artwork in this piece. That only made it as far as PAL territories, though, and is a side-scrolling platformer made for consoles, with barely any Valkyrie in it. Otherwise, every continuation of the series has been a Japanese-exclusive. There was a graphic-adventure game released for Windows in 1996, as well as a side-scrolling action RPG, The Glory of Walküre, released for mobile phones in 2007. Its sequel, The Glory of Walküre 2, is designed much more like The Legend of Valkyrie, but it, too, is a mobile phone exclusive, and never left Japan.
Valkyrie has gotten some love from Namco in non-series releases, as she’s part of the Namco x Capcom crossover series developed by Nintendo’s own (and Namco’s former) Monolith Soft, which has expanded to become Project X Zone, the latest of which featured characters and settings from Namco, Capcom, Sega, and Nintendo. Sadly, Project X Zone is some nerd shit contained within some nerd shit, so, as much as I enjoy it for all its weirdness, it’s not exactly doing the kinds of numbers or getting the kind of attention that would compel Namco to start releasing old Valkyrie titles in English once again, or to re-release The Legend of Valkyrie, or even to make a new Valkyrie title.
So, instead, we’re left with me writing about it here, hoping it will at least get a few folks who don’t know what it’s about to find a way to play it that hopefully does not involve a $300 eBay transaction. It’s worth the effort to play it, whether that effort is directed at purchasing a Turbografx-16 Mini or modding a Playstation Classic, but wouldn’t it be nice if the only effort you needed to expend was adding The Legend of Valkyrie to your cart on your Playstation 4 or your Nintendo Switch, and then agreeing to purchase it? Then you, too, could have the main theme from the game stuck in your head all the time until you finally relent and play it again.
[Update, 4/14/22: The Legend of Valkyrie (finally!) released on the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch systems through Hamster’s Arcade Archives series of classics, for $7.99. It is not a localized release, as far as the game’s dialogue goes, but it is still The Legend of Valkyrie, and legally available for the first time in its arcade form since the era of the original Playstation.]
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