Valkyria Chronicles 4 rekindles the unique blend of turn-based and real-time tactics of its predecessors, maintaining the painterly anime aesthetic that set the once-dormant tactical RPG series apart from the genre’s standard fare. Amidst this, Valkyria Chronicles 4 avoids most of the trappings a retread —  comfortable acting as a functional sequel to the original Valkyria Chronicles (2 and 3 were well-received but relegated to the PSP, the latter not even seeing a Western release) while simultaneously serving as an entrypoint into the series.

The series has always centered its stories around the Second Europa war — a sort of steampunk anime version of axis and allies. It’s a refreshing departure from the various riffs on high-fantasy that we normally see in Japanese strategy RPGs, although there’s plenty of room made for the fantastical. For better or worse, the narrative structure shift too away from what you’d expect from a hero’s journey narrative structure, but it does take a few opportunities to subvert expectations.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 even opens in similar fashion to the original: a plucky, ragtag group of greatest-generation style soldiers are thrust into a war they didn’t ask for. Circumstance eventually asks them to become heroes, and (of course) inspire the irresponsible adults that got them into the mess in the first place.

Claude Wallace, portrait of an anime good guy and tank commander, leads Squad E of the Federation’s army into the belly of the Empire on a pivotal mission that will fundamentally change the tides of the war. Like the rest of the series, Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn’t ignore the extremely low-hanging war story tropes (i.e. innocent people die). But through a calm and muted visual aesthetic, a rather romantic portrayal of wartime soldiers, and a hopeful soundtrack, Valkyria Chronicles 4 decides to remain optimistic that there’s something better on the other side, so long as the right side wins.

The prevalence of optimism doesn’t save Valkyria Chronicles 4 from an occasional bout of heavy-handedness and dark turns of questionable affect. The game certainly has something to say about war as a commodity, culture, and export, but it saves much of its message for extremely-anime villains to deliver via long-winded poetic waxing in favor of subtlety. Nonetheless, the plot successfully intertwines several threads of tension and rivalry into a series of climatic moments that pay off because of the small moments heavily peppered throughout the the story.

Despite how well most of the plotlines pay off, Valkyria Chronicles 4 leans too heavily on it’s Book Mode gimmick — a visual novel style delivery mechanism housed within Claude’s journal. It quickly becomes an inefficient and disjointed framing device. The episodes within each chapter are chopped into short scenes of varying degree of effectiveness. Overall, Book Mode does disservice to a plot by creating a disjointedness that doesn’t need to the be there. The disjointedness hinders the game’s ability to communicate a sense of movement, place, or scale as you move deeper into Imperial territory. That’s unfortunate, because Valkyria Chronicles 4 strikes the right balance between small slice-of-life moments and dramatic in-engine cutscenes to create a narrative that pays its dues by the end of the game.

In battle, Valkyria Chronicles 4 sticks with what works. The innovative BLiTZ battle system is back, and hasn’t deviated much from its original incarnation. In essence, it’s a cloth map that allows you to select any soldier, zoom into a third-person, behind-the-back perspective, and move around the battlefield in real time. Each unit’s movement is limited by an Action Points (AP) meter that drains as you move around, and you get to aim and fire once per turn.

Historically, tactics games have stuck with the one-turn-per-one-unit structure. Valkyria favors a pool system that limits turns with Command Points (CP) that can be rationed across your squad as you see fit. Units who are selected multiple times per turn will not replenish all of their AP until the turn ends, creating a risk/reward gambit that limits the feeling that each unit’s turn is all-or-nothing. This makes each turn in Valkyria Chronicles 4 feel less like a puzzle to be solved and more of a calculated decision-making process where there’s never one best answer.

Part of what ties this together is interception fire. Units moving within range and line of sight of enemies will find themselves taking return fire until they end their turn or move out of range, creating a delicate balancing act between offensive and defensive unit positioning. Move too deep into enemy territory without securing tactical vantage points — like high ground or base camps — you risk getting cut off by interception fire or leaving your squad vulnerable to advancing units.

And through most of the game, enemy units will not stop advancing until you capture and secure their camps. However, they’re not smart enough to outmaneuver you. Enemy squads seek to overwhelm with numbers rather than outwit with tactics, often running directly into interception fire and choke points with disregard for their own safety. It’s disappointing that Valkyria Chronicles 4 makes no real attempt to make the enemy forces feel as if they’re actually under the command of a competent general. Luckily, this deficiency is effectively offset by smart encounter design and mission objectives that offer a lot more variety than the usual “capture the enemy’s base camp” or “kill the leader.”

The Imperial army’s endless supply of reinforcements ensures that you’re always the underdog from a numbers perspective. Many battles, especially in the the back half of the game, feel like intense slogs where the odds are against you and slim margins of victory are the norm. Difficulty is variable, but not unreasonable (although abusing Claude’s ability to use stat-buffing “Orders” can still leave you with units that are way too powerful for their own good).

Valkyria Chronicles 4 tends to strike the right balance on the default difficulty level — it’s never hesitant to punish the overzealous and the unwise, but it fosters bounceback opportunities in the midst of battle, allowing you the leeway to make a mistake from time to time. Enemy bosses sometimes feel unbeatable, but Claude usually chimes in early enough to give you enough hints to figure out where the weak points are. The satisfaction of pressing through a critical mistake (in lieu of reloading an old save) and securing victory during the fated hour delivers a satisfying release to the ever-building tension, and Valkyria Chronicles 4 serves these opportunities frequently.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 adds the Grenadier to the unit list — joining the rifle-toting Scout, machine gun-wielding Shocktrooper, anti-tank Lancer, and sniper. The addition of only one new unit type was disappointing at first, but the tactical influence of the slow-moving Grenadier shifts the paradigm enough. The Grenadier’s mortar fire can knock out targets overtop of obstacles (as long as line of sight is maintained by another one of your units) and bombard the enemy during their turn. After a few (of many) upgrades, they can also be specialized as either anti-personnel or anti-tank.  

Squad-based tactics games in particular are effective at creating a sense of comradery between the player and their troops — especially when there is a threat of permanent death. (Valkyria handles permadeath by giving Claude’s non-essential squadmates a chance to die permanently if they are gunned down and not rescued within a certain amount of turns.) This comradery usually manifests because of the mechanical relationship between the player and characters. The stories that become important aren’t necessarily of an expositional nature — they are the stories that derive from emergent moments within the course of gameplay. The more you sortie certain soldiers, the more connected you tend to feel. The game seems to understands this, and gives you the ability to promote one of your high-ranking, normal squad members to a Squad Leader, which gives them access to a command that allows a Leader to team up with other soldiers during the movement phase.

In my playthrough, I frequently deployed a sniper named Aladdin because, well, his name is Aladdin and he looked cool. To specialize Aladdin, I equipped him with gear that favored range over damage, effectively creating a specialist that could pick off enemies from a considerable distance — if he could land a headshot. In one mid-game mission, I prioritized getting Aladdin to the high ground, which was of a significant tactical importance. However, I failed to guard his flanks with a Shocktrooper, so Aladdin was quickly gunned down by a powerful enemy general on the next turn.

Now, the most tactically efficient solution would be to deploy another sniper (the game gives you plenty of reserves), regroup at the base, and find a way to deal with the enemy general. But, Aladdin was my dude, and I wasn’t about to let him die face down in the snow. At that moment, priorities changed, and getting Aladdin back safely was the only mission.

These moments emerge quite naturally in Valkyria Chronicles 4. Unfortunately, the game occasionally overextends itself by inserting too much banter and exposition between missions, relying too heavily on dialogue boxes and less on game mechanics to build relationships. On their own, most of the character moments are effective at building rapport between the squad members, but the sheer number of these minor interactions during Book Mode contribute to an expositional bloat found all throughout the game. Even the “Squad Stories” — side missions meant to give a little extra flavor and context to the soldiers — feel a bit forced. They do offer an ample dose of side content that fleshes out some of the minor characters and improves their stats, but they just don’t feel essential.

Oddly enough, I found that information and traits housed within the character status screens generated more curiosity about than the outright exposition. “Potentials” differentiate squad members by unlocking stat buffs (and debuffs) when certain battlefield criteria is met. Many of these Potentials like “A Father’s Grief” — where one soldier loses action points when approaching a fallen ally because it reminds him of his late son — create the kind of context that turns soldiers into individuals, an area where Valkyria Chronicles 4 excels.

Keeping in line with Valkyria’s optimism, the cast of characters show the level of heart and innocence one would expect from a posse of young anime heroes (except for maybe Raz, Claude’s right hand man who should probably be in jail for being a creeper). Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn’t do anything explicit to blend its mechanics and narrative, but as you begin to develop a connectedness to your squad, the game finds a groove somewhere around Chapter 6 that carries it to its conclusion.