I finally started up Valkyria Chronicles, after sitting on it for years and years and telling myself I was going to play it someday, I finally did start playing it. That's a wow moment right there.
I really like it, it's a fun strategy game. It has extremely questionable AI where enemy units will occasionally get confused and run back and forth doing nothing, or enemy mortars will bomb their own units, and those units will make no effort to move from the location that is getting bombed by their own side and just accept death. The AI also does absurdly bullshit things occasionally, like headshotting one of my partially hidden units, with perfect accuracy, from across the map, with a tank shell for a one hit KO. Or doing the same with thing Lancers, units that use handheld explosive missiles, whereas my Lancers can barely hit the broad side of a barn. It's enough to make you really paranoid.
But otherwise, it's pretty decent. It's just hard enough that you have to take it seriously because you'll get punished for strategic errors, but not hard enough that I'll tear my hair out retrying the same mission over and over. Yet. There seems to be just enough variety in unit types to make it interesting, and each of those unit types feels necessary and useful; it's almost like a 3D Advanced Wars.
The story... well it's inspired by WW2. The tone and feeling of the story oscillates hard enough to give you whiplash. A lot of scenes are gratuitous, grotesquely, loathsomely wholesome. Like, holy shit, so wholesome it makes me sick with how saccharine it feels. Then in the next scene we're walking through anime Auschwitz as it exterminates anime Jews, here named Darcsens. Then we can read a newspaper blurb that states that baker schools are shutting down due to the war. Then in that same newspaper it states that the only things more numerous than war orphans are the number of orphans who'll grow up under-educated and impoverished. Jesus Christ game.
I feel like that some of the game design didn't go through rigorous enough oversight to make sure it actually worked or made sense. Like you unlock a little tank you can use at the end of one mission, and in the next mission I'm hoping to, you know, actually use the tank and get a feel for how it works... but the next mission is designed so your tanks are trapped behind an arbitrarily placed impassable wall, and then the next mission after that doesn't use your tanks at all. Like holy shit let me use the little tank I unlocked.
Right now, I might be at a very crucial level that determines whether I hate the game or not. I tried it once, and there's an enemy base to capture, that's the only objective, and I captured the base.... and then the mission doesn't end, I'm surprised by Ambush Spawns (a first so far in the game) and I don't have any more command points so I have to let them move, and they instantly oneshot my main character and game over me. I consider it a hallmark of bad game design to punish the player for information that they couldn't possibly know beforehand, and force them to memorize the level in order to win.
We'll see though how my opinion bears out.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 14549580 times)