Valhalla Knights 2 for PSP Reviews by Gamers

Last year, Xseed Games and K2 introduced Valhalla Knights, an RPG with an amnesiac hero wandering a strange land trying to regain his memory. The game was long on customization and action but very short on storytelling, making the entire adventure a hit or miss for some roleplaying game fans. A year has passed, and Xseed and Marvelous Entertainment have recently released Valhalla Knights 2, a sequel that attempts to recapture the fast-paced action of six-on-six battles. However, while the action is quick and hectic, the game still suffers from a shallow story that never feels like it goes anywhere, which drags down on the fun and the excitement.



Unrelated to the original story, Valhalla Knights 2 starts off with a story of the Goddess of Judgment, who descended from the skies and unleashed a flood of monsters on the world. Buildings were destroyed and cities were lost in her wake; the people in the land were powerless to stop her. In fact, many felt that the gods had completely forsaken them until the Witch of the Crystal appeared and took on the Goddess in battle. While she was completely overmatched, the Witch managed to injure the Goddess enough to banish her and her power before the world was destroyed. Time passes, and the player discovers that the worshippers of the Goddess are being hunted as heretics committing crimes against the world. Unfortunately, the judgment of these hunters is sometimes clouded by their vengeance, and they attack and burn the orphanage that you live in, threatening you and a fellow orphan. The only thing that saves you is a group of Latroci, government sanctioned adventurers. Deciding to become a Latroci yourself, you move to Weiselheim and train to become a hero with the goal of tracking down and eventually defeating the Goddess once and for all.





While it's nice that the game didn't go the hackneyed route of amnesia for the main character (like the original game did), it does suffer from the exact same problems from the first title, which is that the story progresses at a snail's pace. You'll head out on your first mission to become recognized as a Royal Latroci, which involves heading out and fulfilling a quest with a magical stone, one which appears to be connected to the story of the Witch of the Crystal. However, once you've joined the ranks of the Latroci and start taking missions from the town guild, everything slowly starts to grind to a halt -- you're tasked not with important missions to the kingdom but with menial tasks. These are worse than the standard fetch quests that you'll find scattered in every RPG because instead of slaying monsters, you'll be tasked with elements like finding paint or tracking down a lost letter in town. What's more, some missions are mindless extermination battles as you destroy a random number of beasts wherever you'd like (monsters that inevitably respawn if you leave the area and return, mind you). While there's something to be said for going through missions to gain experience, the plot of the game is frequently abandoned in favor of these stupid chores, which seriously hampers a lot of the enjoyment that you'll have with the game.



Fortunately, the character creation is where Valhalla Knights 2 truly stands out, just like the original game. Initially, players select from one of five races, each with their own job specialties. Much of this goes along the standard RPG lines, such as elves being better at magic, dwarves being better fighters, and traditional job classes, like being a fighter, wizard, or thief. Obviously, the job that you choose will dictate the abilities that you have, such as being skilled with magic, defusing traps or fighting with your bare hands. As time goes on, players have the opportunity to expand these skills by acquiring up to two additional job classes to strengthen your character. These can be either basic jobs, or more advanced jobs, like becoming a Samurai or an Enchanter. This provides a lot of flexibility in how you want to establish your character and leaves much of the decision making in your hands.



There is a caveat to this flexibility, which is that you are forced to micromanage every single ability for your character, because you won't gain them by simply leveling up. Mages and Priests initially start out with one spell, so you'll have to track down magical spell books to improve their knowledge or they'll become incredibly one-dimensional magic users. What's more, you'll have to constantly be on the search for higher level magic as you go on, because after a while, your spells become much less effective against enemies. Another twist to the entire skill situation is that some spells don't initially appear to be spells themselves when you find them, so you may accidentally give your fighter or monk a spell that they'll never be able to use, wasting the magic. For instance, appraisal or search looks like something that a thief would be innately qualified to use and learn, but because nothing in either the game or the instruction manual indicates that these two are spells instead of skills, you'll assign these to your characters and later discover your mistake when you wonder why your character can't use them at all. In fact, because the instruction manual leaves out details and the game won't always fill in these blanks, you'll stumble your way through gameplay and only discover what you need to do after a few hours of experimentation.



Considering that you'll have to control the skills and abilities of your entire party, this can be quite a lot to keep track of, especially when you start to expand from a solo mission into a squad of six warriors. Unlike other RPGs, where you'll gain party members because of missions or situations, players can acquire new members by paying for them at the guild and tailor making their stats. Essentially, you're creating additional characters from scratch all over again, and preparing them for battle. You dictate the behavior of these characters in a fight, where they'll be arranged on a map, and allow them to perform according to their preset behaviors as you pound on monsters in real time. Thanks to the speed that battles run at, you'll frequently batter your opponents into the ground, either with sheer numbers or strength, particularly when you go up against lower level monsters. You are given the opportunity to send in commands to your party, but due to the speed of the battle (and the size of the party you move with), you won't really have the chance to tell your characters to use items or target specific monsters. As a result, you can't tell your party to focus more on a dangerous threat and leave the weaker monsters alone, which can sometimes result in party members being slaughtered before you can get a handle on the fight. Because you also won't know exactly what or how many creatures you'll fight in a battle, this can be a deadly problem.



Even this wouldn't be much of a problem if there was an easy way to resurrect your characters or quickly return to the safety of town where you could heal your party. However, you'll frequently find that you'll need to slog your way back across a number of maps to reach the outskirts of town, dealing with load times as you move from one area of a map to another. At first, this isn't that big a deal, but when you start running out of Escape Cards and you are trying to return to sell off a large haul of items or need to bring back half your party, you realize just how laborious it is to slog back to town. This was a problem within the first title, and while it seems to have been balanced a bit more in this title, the same essential issues take place in Valhalla Knights 2, which is truly disappointing. Toss in the same issue with a map that is extremely small, even when you try to zoom out, and you can totally run into accidental ambushes or get lost as you explore.



Now, you're not always forced to go through battles alone, even if you've filled up the ranks of your party. You'll also have a chance to go through exclusive co-op missions with a friend that has Valhalla Knights 2 via ad hoc as well, exploring dungeons and collecting experience and treasure that can be used in the single-player game. What's more, you can trade items back and forth in the co-op game, or battle each other in an arena in versus mode, where you can wager gold or items on the winner of the outcome of the battle. However, there are issues with this as well, as the game will scale the co-op missions and encounters to that of the higher level party. This means that if you've gotten your party up to level 12 or 13, and your friend picks up the game, you're going to have to carry them through each dungeon, because they're going to get completely crushed. That frequently leads to both players losing characters and eventually the co-op mission. It won't restrict or handicap higher level characters during versus battles either, so one high level fighter will slaughter an entire squad of lower characters in the arena, which isn't fun at all.



The visuals for Valhalla Knights are fine, but nothing that are going to blow you away. Completely different than that of the first title, with a different visual presentation of battle, character models that are found throughout each area, such as the monsters that fly or crawl their way across the levels, are good. The same can be said for the character models in the status screens, which reflect the various changes made to armor and weapon selections. Impressively, the game does manage to render party members and monsters in fights with minimal to no slowdown, even when a lot of action is going on at the same time. However, most of the environments are full of bland texture work and visuals, and facial character differentiation, especially when you're making a new party member, is extraordinarily weak.

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