…but then there’s the PSP, a system blanketed with aged ports or soul-less and clichéd efforts masquerading as original material. Yes, the recent Final Fantasy remakes and the god-like Valkyrie Profile are major titles for Sony’s handheld, but their source material is over ten (or twenty!) years old at this point. Blade Dancer and Astonishia Story were moderately enjoyable titles, but each were buried deep under a persistent feeling of sameness. Brave Story took some steps in the right direction, but the slot for the PSP’s first distinguished RPG remains open. Can Valhalla Knights claim this title?
Aligning Our Clichés
The story, of which there is very, very little, is arranged in a way not unlike a Mad Libs activity. Valhalla Knights pulls a handful of cliché’s from the RPG grab bag and shakes them out for your narrative consuming pleasure. A tyrant identified only as “Dark Lord” has brought ruin to your alleged town. I say alleged because, of course, your main character is suffering from the spontaneous case of amnesia. Thankfully his quest to reclaim his identity simultaneously corresponds with purging the evil from The Cursed Land. While the aid of your invisible friend Noir and other bands of merry mischief makers, surely you’re bound to save the day. The narrative is quite thin and the text feels tired with its absence of personality and nuance, but at least it’s coherent.
But hell, I’ll take a solid dose of gameplay to compliment even the most narcolepsy inducing story any day. In this respect, Valhalla Knights starts off pretty well. You’re given a sufficient amount of control over the initial stats of your character and you’re even allowed to select a job class. After a confusing and, fortunately, brief intro you can head right over to the guild where,for a price, you can start creating other members of your party. All your usuals are here; phys attack specialist warriors, magic flailing mages, healing priests, and the sneaky thieves. These jobs are compounded through different races such as humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings, each of which with their own corresponding advantages and disadvantages. Factor in a six member active party and some advanced classes, such as Ninjas (!), later in the game, and you have the potential for seemingly endless combination of personnel.
But a party is only as good as their battle system, right? The non random encounters are activated by a Lunar-esque system of running into an on-screen enemy icon. Foes will chase you to some degree, but most of the time whether or not you want to engage in battle will be up to you. From there lies a smooth transition into the battle screen, at which point the battle starts in real time. The combat system has its roots in more action inspired RPGs and is actually quite lively. To make physical contact with the enemy you will actually have to walk up to it and get yourself in swinging range. Collision detection here is awkward and almost arbitrary; sometimes I would swing point blank and connect with nothing and other times I would completely miss, yet still do some damage. If hammering the enemy to death isn’t your thing, feel free to lock onto your target, get further away, and pelt it with magic attacks. Essentially, that’s it. The various classes and jobs make certain characters more adept at certain enemies, but it strategy is rarely a necessary tool in your box. Level up and bash everything in your way is a solid game plan for most encounters.
Dungeon Seizure
The game is structured in a poorly disguised mission format. Usually this involves a quest for a particular necessary item or random enemy purge. The narrative is of almost no consequence and it’s clear the game was built around a mission structure. If you’re looking for something extra, you can supplement your assigned, game progressing dungeon crawling with inconsequential, level building dungeon crawling via some minor quests. The veil isn’t exactly thin, however, as you’ll soon realize there’s little to no variation between the content of the quests. Battle your way through a dungeon to get something, back, battle your way through a dungeon to get something, battl-alright, you get the point. I lost count of the times I literally did the exact same thing over and over again only to once again, receive the exact same task. Oh sure it may be called something different, but the game never escapes its most basic formula, which tends to get boring pretty fast.
Dungeon design is sufficient, if not particularly uninspired. Each challenge provides a decent amount of terrain to cover while layering a seemingly infinite number of magically sealed doors and extended hallways into the mix. At least it’s consistent with the feel of the rest of the game; always the necessary amount without anything striking or particularly interesting. Zero interactivity and frequent trial and error path guessing were staples of the RPG’s of yesteryear and Valhalla Knights has no problem embracing these traits today. It’s cold pizza without the microwave.
Thou Hasth to Make Mud Pretty
Valhalla Knights’ overuse of textures is also an unnecessary burden on your castle exploring life. Literally, everything looks the same. Occasionally some barrels or minor structures are thrown in to help distinguish the environments, but on the whole it’s corridor after corridor of bland stone walls. Or forests. Or caves. The point is the game takes a theme and runs it into the ground. After a couple minutes boredom overcomes appeal and you’re left in a maze of sameness. I know UMD space is limited, but this graphical Groundhog Day feels hastily constructed. Anyway, your exploration efforts are augmented by a reveal-as-you-go map, the usefulness of which lessens significantly with a myriad of dead ends and back tracking (seriously, I’ve never seen so many sealed doors).
The rest of the visual package isn’t quite razorblades in your eyes. Character design is solid and it’s easy to recognize the different members of your party. Furthermore, the characters seem to move with an actual sense of weight (though has a weird tendency to keep walking after you’ve tried to make them stop), adding a few degrees of realism to the mix. Sunlight blasts through windows with brilliance and the environments, though repetitive, look quite organic. Unfortunately your lens for all of this is through the game’s camera system, which consistently hovers somewhere in between joke and annoyance. The developers have chosen to abandon the traditional L + R rotating format in favor of having L cut to a first person view and R lock onto the back of your character. In theory this is fine, the first person view is actually pretty slick, but the lock on mode has trouble navigating past walls and other essential “is there an enemy over there” places. Sound is a clean mix of midi-ish titles, which are about as interesting as the narrative (read: good luck voluntarily committing these to memory).
…But You’re Still Hungry
One would think the addition of a cooperative mode to Valhalla Knights would serve as a break in the monotony. Sadly, this is not the case. Yes, the game features ad-hoc connectivity for you and a friend with a copy of the game, but it doesn’t exactly bring a whole lot of meat to the table. You’re given variations of the same boring missions as the single player adventure, only now you have the added “bonus” of dragging a friend along with you. This does little to extend the titles value, offering nothing but more of the same. Replayabilty is based solely on tolerance; if hacking piles of slime for minimal reward in an unchanging context is your thing, Valhalla Knights might be for you. Everyone else is likely to get bored after the second dungeon.
