Retro spotlight: Valkyria Chronicles

A true classic of Sega's post-Dreamcast library.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The tactical role-playing game is an excellent genre, but it’s never been one to generate massive sales. It’s really some nerd shit — which is fine, says the guy writing a newsletter about retro video games — but yeah: lots of strategizing, lots of reading, not much in the way of flash or pushing the limitations of the hardware, and often brutal difficulties means tactical RPGs have always been a bit more niche, even if they have a built-in audience.

Nintendo didn’t even bother bringing Fire Emblem anywhere outside of Japan for a decade after the series’ inception, and exactly none of the series’ Super Famicom’s output has seen an international release or remaster even now. Sega’s Shining Force did get an international release, but, while popular enough to persist as a strategy RPG across three different platforms (the Genesis, Game Gear, and Saturn) and receive international releases at a time when that wasn’t the norm, it was never a system-selling, flagship franchise, and Sega eventually switched genres to something a bit more flashy and action-y. Sega also never bothered to bring Sakura Wars, a tactical “dramatic adventure” series to North America. Final Fantasy Tactics, which had the triple-threat advantage of (1) being a Final Fantasy game (2) on the Playstation that (3) also ruled, helped bring the genre to a larger audience, and allowed for a further proliferation of the genre and an increase in how many of these games ended up localized.

Tactics was the first major success for the genre, but even then, we’re talking about a game that sold 2.5 million copies worldwide. Final Fantasy VII sold more copies than that just in North America, and only counting its original Playstation sales: lifetime, through ports and the Playstation Network and so on, and without lumping Remake sales into it, FFVII has sold about 10 million more copies than Tactics has managed to. Fire Emblem went from nearly canceled due to a lack of sales to Awakening moving 2.33 million copies, to Fates besting Tactics’ longstanding record for sales by crossing the 3 million mark, and now Three Houses sits at the top of the pile with 3.4 million copies sold as of May, 2022, and thrived enough that even its musou spinoff — that’s like a niche within a niche — topped the charts in Japan and the United Kingdom during its release week.

The original Playstation 3 box art, released early enough in the system’s life that it still has the “Spider-Man font” on its side. Image credit: MobyGames

Which is all a long way of saying that it’s rare for games within the genre to thrive commercially in terms of raw sales figures, and that the ones that do tend to be doing something special while also having plenty of name recognition to build off of. It took Fire Emblem some time to become a true hit, but Intelligent Systems and Nintendo got there by focusing heavily on the characters and player choice, and combined that with a battle formula that’s been heavily tweaked and refined over the years to be one of the genre’s best. Tactics, as said, was both great and a Final Fantasy game released during the golden era of that franchise — it might have had a head start, but it was a deserving one.

Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles was designed to stand out from the crowd, and come away as a more successful addition to the tactics space than much of its competition. And it’s hard to say that they failed in their goal: Valkyria Chronicles had a slow start, both in Japan and abroad, but in the 14 years since its release, it’s sold over 1.92 million copies, and is available not just in its original Playstation 3 form, but in a remastered edition on Windows, the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch as well (plus availability on the backwards-compatible PS5 and Series S|X systems). A million-seller in this space is a real rarity — Square Enix’s Triangle Strategy is possibly the most recent newbie to manage the feat, with 800,000 in global sales reported just two weeks after its release in March — but Valkyria Chronicles managed it despite getting its start in a time before digital availability for games with physical releases was even a thing.

The how is pretty easy to figure out, if you’ve played: the game looked unique and beautiful, and plays exceptionally well, too. Rather than the standard tactical setup with a lot of overhead play, small sprites, and a grid to maneuver around, Valkyria Chronicles presents you with a map that features symbols to represent your characters and their class. You select the one you want to move, and the game zooms in for a third-person view, where you become free to run around the map for as long as the player’s Action Points (AP, represented by a depleting bar) are available. This gives you real freedom of movement, choices for where to leave your character at the end of their turn — hiding behind cover, simply behind a wall, or right out in the open in the hopes they’ll counter anyone who comes near them — and makes you very aware of accidentally leaving a unit in a place where they’ll be in danger on a much more granular level than if you were moving around a grid. Since you can use a character multiple times per turn, too, so long as you have the turn points to do so — not only do characters have their own action points, but you have a certain number of them on a given turn to be distributed how you wish, with tanks requiring two, special orders that temporarily boost stats costing one to three, and standard units utilizing just one — you can figure out how to take advantage of their strengths to maximize how productive a turn for your militia is.

Be warned, though, that there’s an extra layer of strategy in this: the maximum available AP for a given unit go down the more they’re used within a single turn, meaning there are potential diminishing returns for going to the same character again and again, since they can’t travel nearly as far on subsequent uses. Sometimes, it’s a matter of necessity, though, and you’ll learn to balance letting some units move two or three times during a turn, and making sure other units get their chance to move across the map, attack, whatever.

The setting is what really makes this decision work: Valkyria Chronicles might not play as well as it does were it all knights and magic and cavalry, a la Fire Emblem, but since it’s a World War II-esque setting, with firearms that allow for ranged attacks of varying distances and some huge, powerful foes like tanks to worry about, the third-person view works extremely well. You also have far more control over whether critical hits are possible, since you can aim your reticule in a way you can’t with a sword attack: level up your soldiers in between battles, improve their gear, and you’ll find yourself able to attack with accuracy from further and further away, while still doing significant damage. All of which will become necessary for survival as your enemies also get stronger and better-armed as the game progresses, and the goal of your squad in each level continues to shift and evolve.

Speaking of leveling up, the way Valkyria Chronicles handles it is well done, and different from what you might be used to. Rather than upgrade individual characters, you instead train as a class, and level up that way, too. There are characters within their classes that are better, naturally, for reasons we’ll get to, but as far as leveling goes, every scout levels up at once, every trooper together, the engineers and snipers and anti-tank lancers, too. This allows you to utilize however much of the game’s large cast as you want to, and makes it so you don’t need to worry about grinding for levels or replaying the optional skirmishes just to get some extra experience in order to use environmentally-appropriate characters you had been ignoring to that point in the game. And allows you to go heavy on a particular class for a mission that might require more lancers because there are more tanks or large turrets to explode, or one where you need more shocktroopers because of an offensive push or defensive setup, or more snipers because you need to pick off targets at a distance while advancing the rest of your squad. All without having to grind for XP to bring characters you weren’t using yet up to speed.

Not to keep going to this well, but if it were a game like Fire Emblem, then this “everyone levels up together!” bit would be kind of a downer, as it would make death a bit more meaningless from a gameplay point of view given the sheer size of your squad — 20 active units from a larger pool, for missions that tend to top out at 10 units — but Valkyria Chronicles has its own systems that reward keeping everyone alive and healthy. You have more squad points per turn through the deployment of story characters like Largo, Alicia, and Rosie — keeping them alive means you get more moves and freedom of action per turn. If they run out of hit points, rather than risk death, they actually just retreat if you run out of turns to recover their unconscious body (you get three) or an enemy touches them, since they’re all story-based and need to keep on living for that reason. To balance this out in the gameplay systems, you can’t bring them back to the battle if this occurs, and you lose the bonus squad point, too. Whereas regular characters die forever if you let three turns go by before fetching them a medic or if your enemy reaches them first, and can be put back in battle without any negative consequences attached one turn later if the medic does get there in time, aside from the squad point you spend to recall them from your base.

Units have personal likes and dislikes, be they other specific soldiers (or even classes of soldiers) as well as environmental pros and cons. So losing some of your depth to permadeath here means losing out on combinations that might work well, or situations where you’re forced to use someone with a “Desert Allergy” in a desert level, someone who has stat boosts in a city but stat reductions in the forest in the latter, being forced to line a misogynist up with a bunch of women or a racist next to those they’re racist against. Valkyria Chronicles does not shy away from the idea that its protagonists can be on the morally good side of a war while being immoral themselves, and in fact made those personality traits part of the gameplay strategy.

Rosie, who is early on consumed by her racism, confronts the Darcsen Isara in a way that makes Welkin and Alicia clearly uncomfortable. Image credit: Operation Rainfall

They’re also at the center of the story, which again, takes place in an alternative universe World War II-esque, European-esque setting. You play as Welkin Gunther, son of a war hero, and command his militia, Squad 7, during the new war against the empire, the Europan Imperial Alliance, which is pushing into Gallia. Seemingly for control of their significant ragnite resources (just imagine giant glowing lithium batteries that also unlocked latent supersoldier powers in a very tiny percentage of the population and you’ll be caught up) but in actuality for a much larger and even more selfish goal that will be revealed. The higher-ups in Gallia, both military and political, are shown to be cowards and dopes, your opponents are basically evil imperialists willing to kill anyone in their way. Only the militia, made up of regular folks who have been conscripted into war in a small country sandwiched between two superpowers, where a normal part of the high school curriculum involves learning combat strategies, weapons use, and tank piloting in case those powers ever get in an annexing mood, seem to have their heads on straight. And even that’s just comparatively speaking.

There is a very non-subtle bit of antisemitism going on in the game’s story — well, the in-universe equivalent — with the stand-in for Jewish people, the Darcsen, hated by the masses and blamed for what was basically the near-downfall of civilization due to their greed and lust for power, while the supposed lost race of Valkyrur are revered for saving Europa from them. While these Valkyrur remain beloved in their absence, there are concentration camps full of Darcsen, who are treated as a disposable source of labor during the war, and it’s not like the Gallians fighting back against the empire — even the ones on your own squad! — that opened up those camps is all that broken up about them, either, at least not until they get a firsthand view. Luckily, I can say without spoiling the how that the history of the Darcsen that people know isn’t their true history, so you don’t need to start tugging at your collar wondering if Sega decided to develop an “actually the Jews are at fault for World War II” game. Sometimes (that’s an actual, non-universal sometimes — plenty of stories and storytellers do not deserve any kind of benefit of the doubt and actually are whatever -ist you’re accusing them of) you have to let stories be told to get at what they’re going for, and Valkyria Chronicles is one such case.

Now, this is not the same thing as saying that Valkyria Chronicles handles racism deftly and successfully — there are still some problems in the presentation and narrative here, and the use of it is lacking some refinement when you really think about it, but from a broad strokes perspective, things work enough, and the game certainly isn’t condoning any of the negative behavior it shows.

Anyway, you can beat Valkyria Chronicles on the standard difficulty without worrying too much about any of these personality bits and how well certain characters are going to work together, but you won’t necessarily get the highest grades and bonuses that allow for more XP and gold rewards, which you use to make your squad and their gear even stronger. And you’ll want all of that extra help for your more difficult second run, where your stats carry over from your first, or for the DLC mode (packaged with the Remastered edition from the start) where you can’t use the game’s most powerful tank that is in the majority of the game’s missions. You probably also need it for the back end of your initial playthrough, even on the standard difficulty, as the game goes from letting you feel like you’re in a pretty good groove to trying to kill you if you don’t do things near-perfectly in a hurry. Luckily, you can retry after failing a mission, or save whenever you want to on your own turn and reload as necessary, so you’re not forced to replay missions in full again and again. It’s the kind of relaxed attitude about difficulty that didn’t exist at Fire Emblem at the time, but does now — an easing in to the permadeath mechanic, that makes it essentially optional, even if it’s the default.

Much has been made about similarities to Sega’s Sakura War series, and that’s largely in part due to the settings — a more technologically advanced alternate history setting that hides a secret past, steeped in anime conventions with a heavy focus on narrative. It’s also because director Shuntaro Tanaka and producer Ryutaro Nonaka are both Sakura Wars veterans, as well. However, whereas Sakura Wars had more emphasis on choice and the visual novel-y, adventure-y aspects of it, as well as a focus on romance, Valkyria Chronicles is much more combat-focused. The narrative parts are strong, yes, and the game has more viewable cutscenes than battles in it by a longshot, but you’re still on a pretty linear path here, with a predetermined story/relationship at the center. The narrative bits are setting and narrative-progressing, but they don’t power the gameplay, like in Sakura Wars, nor are they a central piece of what you’ll be doing: you are simply watching and absorbing during the narrative, cinematic bits, not making decisions or figuring out puzzles or whether or not someone is going to slap you for flirting with them or not.

Enough cannot be said about the game’s art style. It’s truly lovely, and inspired, too. It all looks like colored in pencil sketches in motion, and there’s something of a visual onomatopoeia at play at times, with the rumbling engines of tanks displayed in text as “Rumble Rumble” even though you can hear the sound effect itself. The idea behind this is that the lead character, Welkin Gunther, is actively shown drawing extremely detailed sketches of plants, animals, etc. in the opening. You are then led to believe that you are playing through his own illustrations of the events of the war that he partook in — it’s not explicitly stated, but you can figure out that this is what you’re seeing just by putting 2 + 2 together. A brilliant way to weave narrative, character, and visual design together, and fantastically executed in a way that’s memorable and really pops off the screen.

It’s not just the visuals that deserve praise, though. The soundtrack was composed by veteran Hitoshi Sakimoto, who has worked on dozens and dozens of games over the decades, but is best-known (or loved, perhaps) for Final Fantastic Tactics. He was the perfect choice for the Valkyria Chronicles soundtrack not just because of his familiarity with composing for the genre, but for anyone that wants their themes to sound exhilarating and epic, but in the classical, non-bacon sense. If you’ve played Tactics, or Radiant Silvergun, or any of Sakimoto’s Vanillaware contributions, then you know what you’re in for here, sound-wise. You’ll hear many of the same songs again and again, but they’re an excellent fit for the game’s intended vibes, and do not wear on you, but instead work in Valkyria Chronicles’ favor.

Valkyria Chronicles remains a legitimate classic of the genre all this time later, and it’s something of a shame that the series, for a time, kind of lost steam internationally. The first sequel released exclusively for the Playstation Portable, which certainly worked in Japan but not as much abroad, and the third entry was a Japan-exclusive. Valkyria Chronicles 4 brought the series back to consoles, international release, and seven-figure sales, though, and the original now exists on all the modern hardware that can handle it outside of macOS, so Sega’s support for the series remains. If you haven’t played it before, go out and find Valkyria Chronicles on your platform of choice, and change that.

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