Story & Playability

Five years ago I purchased (for a rather large sum I might add) a Playstation game entitled Valkyrie Profile. I consider it to this day one of the most underplayed and wonderful games ever created. After that I begged and pleaded with the gods to make another game, thankfully they did. Valkyrie Profile 2 was created years later and this is the review.

I would first say that playing the first Valkyrie Profile is a must. You can get by playing this game without any previous knowledge of the characters and the story, but you lose a lot of the impact and attachement to the characters. The story takes place long before the events of the original Valkyrie Profile as you take control of Alicia/Silmeria. Alicia is the exiled princess of the kingdom of Dipan. As luck would have it, she shares her body with a valkyrie's soul, Silmeria. Silmeria has decided to revolt against the gods as she sees that the lord of the gods, Odin, is going down the wrong path. So the game intially plays out as you try to assist the humans prepare for battle with the gods and keeping the Valkyrie still loyal to Odin, Hrist, off your tail.

The story unfolds slowly at first, and hits a huge brick wall during chapter 3. Chapter 3 you spend almost the entire time searching for the dragon orb, and this takes a long time, in excess of 10 or more hours due to the difficulty (more on that later). Once you cross the boundary of Chapter 3, the story really starts to kick into high gear and with all of the backstabbing and plot twists, it proves to exceed its predecessor.

Rating: 8

Graphics

Square-enix; need I say any more. This game looks absolutely fantastic. For the past 4 months all I have played is my Xbox 360 on an HDTV with gorgeous graphics and flawless frame rate. Needless to say next to that being next generation, this holds up tremendously well. Character designs are a strong point as they created many new characters for this game and resurrected old favorites in 3D glory. Every character, even minor ones, have been painstakingly created to fit the style of the game and create and individual personality for each of them. Background animations are very nice although prerendered. Since the game takes place in a 2D world when outside of battle, a lot of detail was able to be put into background animations that simply shift as your character navigates the two-dimensional world.

If you are judging the graphics againist next generation, then you may find it hard to adjust. But if you look it at with the fact that this is a PS2 game, then you will find yourself as amazed as I was.

Rating: 10

Sound

Typical RPG fare. Motoi Sakuraba comes back yet again to compose the soundtrack for VP2, and it shows. While it does fit the game style, nothing too particularly stands out. You have average boss music, average battle music and average... well everything. Some of the old tunes that Sakuraba has done before appeared once again, and were as usual, fantastic, but how can I give extra credit for songs that aren't new?

The voice acting side of the house though is a complete oposite. Granted there is no language selection, which is always a negative for me, but the English dubbing was actually quite well done. I know that dubbing is always going to be an arguing point for everybody who is a "I must play the game in it's native language" camp, but the voice acting was solid. The majority of the actual parts played are in the hands of Alicia, Rufus and everyone's favorite magician Lezard Veleth. They act out brunt of the emotional parts and are the ones to make the story progress.

Rating: 6

Fun

YOUR MILAGE WILL VARY!

Positives

Those familiar with the VP battle system will quickly adjust to the changes and newbies will find themselves begging for this type of system to be used elsewhere. Each character is assigned to a button on the controller. When you press a button, that cooresponding character will act. If you act in a good order, you can chain together massive combos and juggle the enemy so that they have no chance to act. If you inflict enough damage in succession, you can unlease Soul Crush attacks which just furthers the fun. But unlike the first game, you don't just stand stationary. This time you are able to move about a battlefield, using dashing techniques to gain the upper hand on your adversary. The battle system is the best thing you'll pull from this game.

Outside of the battle system, everything takes place in a 2D world. You use an overall map to travel to various points on the world map, but within cities and dungeons, you run on a 2D plain running and jumping to reach ledges and treasure. Also while in this plane you actually see your enemies, meaning NO RANDOM BATTLES! You see every enemy and can choose to fight them or freeze them in your path and use them as a stepping stone to treasure. This ends up being fun and adds a degree of strategy outside of battle so that you can effectively get from point A to point B and get all the good treasure in between.

Negatives

Three major things do this game tremendous harm. The aforementioned chapter 3 kills the pacing of the game. It takes forever just to accomplish one tiny part of the overall story. The second is the fact that you are forced... again I say FORCED to power level. You will be in one area doing just fine, only to get to the next area and find yourself far weaker than anything you fight. You'll go from a boss that you deal in excess of 1000 damage per hit to, only to run into the next one and deal in the 30's. That will happen often. This means you have to backtrack to the last place you could convincingly defeat monsters, and do it for hours on end just to move on. Take away the power level fact and this game is only 20-30 hours, but it ends up being around 40+ with all of the mindless leveling up. The last is the fact that without a guide (which I certainly didn't have) you have no idea if the character you are leveling up right now, will be around at the end of the chapter. I ended one chapter with 4 characters at level 45, only to lose 2 of them and now my team is 45,45,11,8. Which just means more power leveling. Then I lost the other level 45, which is just agrivating when you expend so much time only to lose that character.

Summary

There are some things that really hurt the overall experience, but when all is said and done I would put it at one of the best RPG's of the year, if not the best. I expected a lot when following behind one of the classics, and I wasn't dissapointed. It had a fantastic story with lots of twists. Amazing battle system and plenty of extra replayability with the Seraphic Gate dungeon. If you've played the first one, this is a must play. If you haven't, you may want to give it a pass unless you either plop down the $100 bucks for the PS1, or go out and buy it for the PSP.

Rating: 7

Final Verdict

7.6667 (good)

Reviewed by shoujoboy, Oct 16, 2006

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