Valkyria Chronicles 4 Review:
So I went through and beat the main game and all of the post-game content and I've clocked in around 90 hours. I think when the director said 100 hours to 100% the game he wasn't joking, it was a pretty close estimate (assuming you don't skip any cutscenes). If you just want to beat the game and not bother with side/DLC content or character missions I think it should take maybe 40 hours give or take. I highly doubt people will skip character missions though as they're fun to play and easily accessible.
Let's see if I can write a traditional review from the viewpoint of a gamer who actually had time to engage the whole experience.
MUSIC:
Hiroshi Sakimoto is back and whipped up a bunch of new tracks for us. Nearly the entire game uses new music for everything and the new battle themes are ace. If the dramatic battle music for VC4 doesn't get you hype I don't know what will. I'd like to give props to all the stream viewers who had immediate FF Tactics nostalgia while I was playing.
There is some music I don't like; the "amusing scene" music got on my nerves after a bit.
Also there is slightly too much reuse of VC1 battle music. There are four new VC4 battle themes but they reuse the 10 or so VC1 tracks during the game as well, intermixing them. I feel like battle music is the "signature" of a game, so if Sakimoto can't come back for a VC5, I would encourage Sega to find a new composer instead of reusing themes for certain battles again.
GRAPHICS:
VC4 uses a spruced up version of the CANVAS engine. Right off the bat you can tell the game is not only much more beautiful with a much more varied color palette but also with environmental tricks that didn't exist in VC1. Things like snow deformation and snowfall, rainfall, Valkyrian Blizzard effects, snow and ice-encrusted catwalks and streets, etc. This also extends to things like explosive effects and flames. It's quite something to see a grenade strike close by in this game with the highly improved effects.
Perhaps the biggest buff the PS4 version was able to give the CANVAS engine was the ability to render way more objects and at higher detail. It is not at all an exaggeration to say that this really changes the experience up. In certain missions it is possible to see up to 30 deployed enemy units, something that wasn't possible before. Squad E's detail can easily be seen by just how nicely crafted both Laz and Claude's outfits are.
One thing I wanted to bring attention to is that the game's side characters are a little bit more cartoony in terms of visual design compared to VC1. It's actually unique compared to other games in the Valkyria series. VC1 opted for a bit more realism on the overall scale of style vs. realism, VC2 cranked up the anime style to maximum, and VC3 was more or less Nomura.jpg, so to see a more comical cartoony style for a decent chunk of the cast is actually quite interesting. Though I will say it can cause some clashing sometimes when a cartoony character like Rita is compared to a more realistic character like Jenny; well, no big deal.
Now let's talk about the downsides. This game is in sore need of anti-aliasing. I understand the stylistic choice of CANVAS, but the effect of CANVAS is not lost if you apply AA; quite the opposite, it enhances it. Some of the fuzzier parts of the game like the grass is an eyesore and seeing the jaggies on the winter coats or the hair is a shame. Keep in mind this only applies to battles; the portrait cutscenes definitely have some form of AA or higher res display or higher quality models. The enemy soldier models really need higher quality textures as well; some are really low-res for no real reason, and it's even weirder when things like caltrops and enemy tanks got improved textures in comparison.
The game is 30fps on PS4 and that's a shame, and I don't really understand why that is. Perhaps Sega wanted to play it safe since the 60fps modification to VC1 caused glitches on both the console and PC version with people falling through the "floor" and tanks being unable to ascend or descend hills properly. Or maybe adding in all those big enemy numbers and big maps made maintaining a stable 60 impossible on PS4.
So while there is room for improvement, I thought they did a great job.
UI:
VC4 features an improved version of VC1's UI. A lot of the hang-ups and errors from VC1's UI have been eliminated or improved.
- No more huge delays when assigning weapons or assigning tank blocks.
- Can now assign weapons from the mission briefing and R&D.
- Way less delay from moving from menu to menu.
- Less appearance delay for almost everything.
Plus convenient features like being able to skip the briefing cutscenes before battle and the portrait cutscenes during battles. These might seem small on paper but they are huge for reducing frustration.
Battle UI improvements include (some incorporated from the portable entries):
- Special symbol for when units are crouching or crawling when viewing from the map.
- Special symbol for when units are out of ammo on the map.
- Special symbol for when units are low on HP or AP on the map.
- Highly improved icons that actually tell you what a buff and debuff is and plenty of room to show them all.
- Actual color distinction between destroyable and undestroyable terrain from the map; no more frustration when trying to guess what can actually be destroyed.
- Red coloration around the border when you're low on health.
Now as for the downsides. More detailed because it's hard to write downsides for UI without going into detail.
- You can't save during briefing. Which is odd because it's not like you can get trapped there. So if you reorganize your squad or your assigned weapons from the briefing menu's Barracks option and then head back to the main briefing menu, you have to back out to Book Mode, save, then return to briefing, just to save your loadout. If you don't do this and you feel like you are failing the mission due to your equipment or starting position, you will have to load back to Book Mode and reassign everything all over again.
- Every time you load a save or return from HQ, regardless of where you were originally in Book Mode, it kicks you back to the main story pages. So if you had a bad start to a Skirmish and reload to Book Mode you have to go through all the way through multiple selections to get back to the Skirmish menu. Also every time you reload your save from the title screen it always takes you to the last story page and not where you saved in the Skirmish or DLC menu. Kind of a pain.
- There is no way to tell if a map has an ace on it before you start a mission. Additionally, there is no way to tell if you have killed an ace in a mission via the UI. Since there's a trophy tied to killing all aces, the only way to make sure you have actually killed an ace is to painstakingly check your weapon list and cross-reference a wiki, which is absurd!
- Aces really need special coloring to distinguish them from regular and leader units like VC2 and VC3.
- The only way to tell if you have completed a mission is by either referencing the book page directly or by looking at the mission list in your room. Problem; the mission list in your room references the name of the mission and not what chapter it takes place in. The chapter name and the mission name are different so it can be a real annoyance pinning down the mission. Some new missions don't appear in your room's mission list because an "unlock" consists of the first few cutscenes you have to watch before the battle appears on the page and THEN it shows up in your mission list (but by then you've found it). The game sticks in a small little "NEW" bookmark when a new chapter appears but you have to turn the pages slowly to get to it; and the pages turn pretty slowly, not to mention the chapter selection menu has no "new" indicator. This is a real annoyance! I was frazzled by why I hadn't unlocked the trophy for clearing every mission with an S-Rank, only to discover that I was missing a character mission (Crystal and Minerva) with absolutely zero indication to show that it wasn't unlocked or that it was something I needed to clear. The game should really show you on the Book Mode chapter selection whether or not a mission has been cleared!
- Unbreakable barricade walls (marked with a black X on the map) are hard to see from the overhead map and because of that sometimes you'll get the wrong idea as to what areas are accessible and what areas are not. This is because the black X doesn't really match the shape of the barricade wall. Small complaint.
- A few characters have too many "full-screen potential activations", especially ones that are easy to activate. Kai is the biggest offender. You'll select her, and she'll interrupt you multiple times blocking your view while you're just trying to do something simple with these full-screen interruptions. It's a real pain and there should be an option to turn them off. If I hear あいつみたいに one more time…
- Why on earth is the Order (and Ship Order) menu still hidden inside the pause menu on the overhead map? It should be a dedicated button without menu shenanigans. I checked the trophy list and more people beat the game than used 15 Ship Orders. Considering how strong Ship Orders especially late game that means a lot of people likely forgot that Orders were even in the game. Also why are Orders still limited to that small crappy list presentation? I should be able to see all the Orders at once when choosing instead of dealing with the annoying scrolling. I don't lose anything by having a full-screen Orders menu. These are VC1 leftovers I could do without.
- The barracks menu where you swap soldiers into your squad could really use an overhaul. Not being able to tab between soldier types and having them all on the same list leads to a lot of annoying scrolling. Not being able to see all 8 potentials of a soldier at once is annoying. Make it easier to tell if a weapon can be reassigned or not. Make it so that the cursor stays at the same place when moving back and forth between menus.
- Every cutscene in the game is skippable EXCEPT two short scenes during the final boss fight that repeat often enough to be annoying.
So lots of improvement but there's still room for improvement.
GAMEPLAY:
The meat and potatoes. The gameplay has a solid foundation from VC1 but it comes with a boatload of improvements which makes gameplay much better. Scout rushing has been largely eliminated thanks to careful restrictions of R&D which don't allow you to brute force main story missions with overpowered armor upgrades, enemies hitting harder, grenadiers, and the complete removal of anti-interception order "Caution". There's still some problems of single-unit rushing in the game (from Shocktroopers) but because of the varied mission objectives, the high enemy damage, and the tougher defensive choke points you'll find that it's too inefficient and too risky to move quickly unless you give your front-line units proper support from grenadiers and engineers.
If you lose in a mission you now have an additional option to restart from the briefing menu. Before in VC1 you only had the option of retrying from the start of the mission or reloading a save. The majority of the missions have removed the "protagonist dies = game over" as a loss condition, so they would really like you to use the tank (lol).
I really applaud Sega for trying out many different types of missions and mission surprises. There is one cool mission where you storm a fortress and unlock a second section (without flag backup!) and there's also a few multi-level maps where there are more vertical challenges that didn't exist before. The big maps are really awesome and I like the addition of canopies to protect yourself from grenadier fire. A big chunk of missions consists of defeating boss characters or trying to finish missions with boss characters breathing down your neck, which is a lot of fun.
Speaking of bosses… the bosses also are a real threat too, especially Klaus who has a tank with extremely lethal debuffing gunfire that fires while he is moving and some incredible AP values. I think they could have made Crymeria stronger as a boss but I suppose that's up to debate, since if you're not familiar with the game mechanics she might be really tough to handle. Chiara and Nikola are tough cookies when you fight them and they were an enjoyable threat with their high HP and headshots but I think they could have been more of a threat during their own turn, especially considering the player-controlled versions have flashbang grenades that they don't use.
Though most people will notice the tank Hafen only costing 1CP to use at first, the biggest addition to gameplay strategy is Direct Command. With this special ability applied to leaders, you can choose up to two units to join you and follow you across the battlefield. This solves the "low AP units are stuck at the base" problem that plagued VC1. Other additions or ideas from the portable games such as the Order "Immediate Reinforcement" allowing you to call up a unit on the same phase using 2CP and engineers being able to revive units with Ragnaid are a huge help to keeping the flow of battle going.
Grenadiers are an extremely welcome addition to the game. Using them is way too much fun. Whether you're sneak-attacking an an annoying ace to prevent him from dodging or just trying to blast away some crouched enemies, they are almost always highly effective units. Sniping a tank's radiator from long distance is also very satisfying (though a bit hard to do until the last half of the game). They are amazing support units and fit right into the fold of Valkyria Chronicles.
I should also mention in that some of the other classes have received some significant balancing. Lancers have buffed defense allowing them to be tanky units. Engineers have higher base AP and can revive downed units with ragnaid. Lancers and snipers can now team-fire. Lancers being able to team-fire allows you to pull off some silly nonsense in the first half of the game before you get access to more serious anti-tank firepower, which is a lot of fun.
The Orders are largely the same from the first game, but they added in a few Orders from the portable games (increase grenade damage, reload all units, etc.) to increase their scope. Grenadiers can be ordered to increase their effective damage range. The defense boost order is still good (too good in certain battles) but evasion and attack boost are too situational and aim boost still sucks, which is unfortunate. Most of the orders have a use still so that's what is important. Penetration became much less of a god order since it requires specific shocktrooper setups to be used properly and Anti-Tank Attack Boost fulfills more or less the same purpose.
Now that I've spoken about the positive sides to the gameplay, let's talk about the downsides. A few problems that were inherited from previous Valkyria games make their appearance here. Let's talk about statistic-based stuff first. Crawling in grass gives too high of a defense bonus, and being in a base doesn't give a high enough defense bonus. The innate defense of lancers is way too high and allows them to more or less completely ignore interception fire unless it's a fusillade. Which brings me to a different serious problem;
Under no circumstance should scouts or shocktroopers have defense-boosting potentials. This creates too many big issues and places these units with defense potentials a cut above the rest when it comes to selection.
For some unexplained reason they brought back the Leader system from VC1, which is its worst iteration. For those who don't know what I am talking about, "Leaders" in VC games are characters that have bonus command points assigned to them directly. Deploying the Leader allots you an extra bonus command point as long as they are alive and standing on the battlefield. The problem is that command points are extremely valuable and a single command point could be the difference between getting an S-Rank or not, so you are more or less forced to deploy Leaders all the time. And since you can't reassign any of the Leader points from the four main characters, you find yourself constantly deploying those same four characters over and over. This makes it so that side characters become heavily neglected, especially characters from the sniper, grenadier, and shocktrooper classes. The game gives you one free Leader assignment but it can only be given to a character with Corporal rank or higher, which means you have to use a character 40 times (instead of the more convenient rank-up system from VC1). All in all it's pretty awful and it makes using side characters feel forced instead of natural, where you are literally selecting a character and ending your turn immediately once you've secured the S-Rank to build up their "usage points".
There are too many missions where you start off with everyone on the main base, meaning losing the main base to the enemy is nearly impossible. Though I suppose that's not a serious problem considering the bulk of the challenges are offense-based, but on missions that ask you to defend points, it's not a good thing. Tanks should not be able to prevent capture of a base as all you have to do is park your vehicle there and enemies have no chance of destroying it.
Side character missions don't seem to have enemy level scaling so more often than not you will bulldoze the mission without much of a challenge from the enemy, which is unfortunate. I think the wiser move would have been to make custom levels, weapons, and map layouts (levels and weapons separate from the leveling you do at HQ). A few side missions are like this, so it's a shame they weren't able to do this for all of them.
VC4 goes back to VC1's critical multiplier system where criticals do 3.5x the normal damage. After thinking about it for a while, I don't like this system. It basically makes headshots the only option and balances the game away from bodyshots nearly entirely. Because of this, guns that rely on number of shots and weapons that rely more on splash damage like mortar lances are pretty useless, and it places way more importance on range over utility (like a DEF down weapon). I think this is more of a personal preference than a downside in the larger picture.
STORY:
The story goes as follows; Gallian citizens join the Federation Army and after several battles are recruited to join Operation Northern Cross, a battle plan that involves taking multiple icebreakers and blitzing the imperial capital, with the end goal of launching a large assault on it and forcing the Empire to surrender.
The four main characters started as childhood friends but drifted apart over time. Claude was a young scaredy-cat, Raz is the guy who thinks with his chaotic gut more than his head, Riley is a somewhat impulsive daughter of an inventor and as her father features prominently in both the plot and her backstory, and Kai is a no-nonsense friend who joined the army due to the machinations of her brother and Raz (which is an amusing side story that has more implications later).
It's extremely difficult to talk about the story without spoiling it. I will say the story is extremely well-threaded. Elements introduced early have great payoff later. There are a lot of fun scenes and sad scenes and some great showdown scenes. I feel like the characterization was done best of all. Minerva is my new favorite character and she easily has the best dialogue in the game. Each character brings some personal drama with them on the battlefield, and I thought they did excellent work making sure this drama wasn't overbearing to the point of ridiculousness.
If there was a weak part I want to bring up early, I felt that some of the dialogue was too simplistically written. This is a problem that plagues a ton of video games but I urge any video game writer to study efficiency in human conversation because man, some of the back and forth dialogue is painfully extended, especially during some of the side missions. I know some people say "The Japanese language is just like that" but I sincerely doubt this. I really do appreciate Raz because he gets right to the point in a natural way faster than anyone, haha.
Regarding the villains, Chiara and Nikola are more of an "unintentional comedy" angle, though I am not sure if that was their intended character design. Belgar was a nice slimy guy but since he's a scientist and not a soldier his impact wasn't felt very much. He largely operates behind the scenes. Klaus is amusing but his plot progression is tied closely to Crymeria, meaning his interaction with Squad E is very minimal. The same goes for Crymeria being tied to Klaus. Forseti is positioned as your main villain, but he doesn't begin directly opposing you until midgame. Forseti has a great connection to the overall plot and interesting backstory but because he's introduced so late his late-game part felt rushed. So while each villain brings something to the table I felt like a real standout villain that was impeding us was missing. They have good chemistry with one another though.
I can see potential complaints with Crymeria being an emotional wreck and needing someone to support and rescue her, but I think her design is obviously meant to be an exact opposite of Selvaria and as a victim of experimentation I don't think it's wrong to write a story where someone like that needs to be saved by someone.
If you remember VC1's story correctly, it was about a power-mad emperor who wished to seize ancient technology to not only conquer Europa but to strike back against those in the Empire who denigrated him and his family to the point of murder. VC2's story is about patriotism, while VC3 focuses heavily on the Darcsen theme and covert operations. VC4's theme is almost squarely about weapons of mass destruction, a theme only lightly touched upon in VC1. It's much more in-depth this time so it's far more enjoyable.
Complaints about the story; there are some scenes, especially near the end of the game, which make no sense whatsoever and break suspension of disbelief (including someone getting shot when they had no reason to be shot, someone taking 15+ minutes to bleed out and die despite being surrounded by able personnel, a villain who somehow manages to perform some long-distance infiltration in a manner of minutes, someone literally dying right in front of someone else but being ignored in favor of military courtesies). One part of the game has an enormous backstory dump which really could've had more inferences earlier. I think they could have spent more time making more realistic scenarios during those times in the story.
FINAL VERDICT:
Excellent game that you should pick up. I have to give the biggest props to the battle director as while I was playing the game I thought everything was designed with the intention of being interesting, fun, and balanced. You can feel the care and polish that went into mechanics and new ideas.
I do have reservations about the clearly lower budget in regards to cutscenes and battle music. But what is there is great enough for anyone with even a slight interest in this game and the series. And everything is voice acted down to the last line, like always, and the Japanese voicework is (mostly) top notch.
The game definitely feels like a signal call to any Valkyria fans left out there to see how many are actually left vs. extremely loud people on social media by relying on the solid foundation that VC1 built. Combine that with its standalone nature and you can easily pick up this game as your starting point in the series.
DLC NOTES:
The DLC in the game is very overpriced for the Japanese version. I'll list it out here:
Edy's Special Mission: Pre-order DLC
Squad 7 DLC: Special Edition only. 11,000 JPY = ~$100 USD
Squad E's Missing Captain: 1,080 JPY = ~$10 USD
Squad E's Beach Vacation: 1,620 JPY = ~$15 USD
Hard-EX (Expert) Skirmishes: 1,080 JPY = ~$10 USD
The Two Valkyria: 1,620 JPY = ~$15 USD
Season Pass Including the above four DLCs: 4,320 JPY = ~$40 USD (Saving $10)
This DLC (and its pricing) was all revealed at the last minute, likely in response to pre-order numbers to fleece the hardcore, and not even attempting to hide that it was content that was completely finished prior to the game's release. I find this rather sad and extremely scummy.
What you get for finishing each DLC:
Edy's Special Mission: Ability to use Edy during the main story
Squad 7 DLC: Ability to use Squad 7 main members and Edelweiss in the main story (Welkin, Alicia, Rosie, Largo, Isara)
Squad E's Missing Captain: Exclusive weapon drops
Squad E's Beach Vacation: Swimsuits for Claude, Raz, Riley, Kai, Minerva
Hard-EX (Expert) Skirmishes: Exclusive weapon drops
The Two Valkyria: Ability to use Crymeria, Selvaria, Nikola, Chiara during the main story along with their swimsuits. Nikola and Chiara's weapons also become available to use.
Criticisms of these DLC: (Criticisms do tie into the fact that missions don't scale to your level and thus, it's too easy to turn them into a cakewalk).
Edy's Special Mission: No dialogue or cutscenes whatsoever. One intermediate mission and then you can use Edy. Honestly felt like a waste of time.
Squad 7 DLC: Great cutscenes and dialogue, but the missions were much too easy and the unlocks aren't really worth it, and this is coming from a huge VC1 fanboy. You'll be spending so much time unlocking the side character story missions for VC4 that you won't have a chance to use the VC1 guys.
Squad E's Missing Captain: Amusing cutscenes. Other than that, there's nothing really good to get from this at all.
Squad E's Beach Vacation: The missions in this one actually put up a fight if you don't fight at max level. The game is essentially challenging you to unlock all the swimsuits as early as possible. I think the swimsuit quality is fairly weak minus Minerva and Kai, so by majority it's a bit of a letdown. Up to you if you think the swimsuits and the sexy cutscenes and still shots are worth $15 to be honest.
Hard-EX (Expert) Skirmishes: Exclusive weapon drops. The challenge on these are not half-bad but they could stand to be tougher. VC1's Hard-EX missions were much, much tougher than these. I'm a bit half and half on whether I could recommend these. If you're a VC1 expert I think you may be let down.
The Two Valkyria: Selvaria is a stupidly overpowered unit for many missions, since she is a Scout class and is more or less totally invincible you can completely break through the enemy formation, destroy all mines, distract all enemy attention and make missions cakewalks. Crymeria is not overpowered amusingly enough because invincibility on a Grenadier class is not important and her interception fire has terrible accuracy. Chiara and Nikola are really interesting characters but their character-exclusive flashbang grenades also break the game. So my criticism is that (in spite of Selvaria's sexy swimsuit) that unless you're very interested in paying money to completely smash the balance of the game, this DLC isn't worth the heavy price tag.
The Squad 7 DLC and Edy's DLC was never put up for sale. So if you wanted to make sure you got all the content you had to be willing to spend over $140. I sincerely don't think at most a handful of missions is worth $10+; probably the only DLC that's somewhat worth your dollar is the Hard-EX DLC for the cool weapon drops and the challenge, and even that's pushing it.
If you look at the USA release of the game, it appears they're following the exact same release of the game and DLC as the Japanese version (Edy mission exlusive preorder, Squad 7 DLC exclusive to the limited edition) and I highly doubt they're going to step on their Japanese branch's toes by suddenly offering the DLC for less or actually selling the Squad 7 DLC. I'm not here to preach about what you should and shouldn't buy, just giving my personal opinion, but awareness is key to decision making and I want people to be absolutely aware of what they're paying for and why I think this is some very scummy business (and no, "every other company does it" doesn't suddenly make it better for you, the player).
I recommend the game but I am very disappointed in Sega with what they've done with the DLC and its pricing. And I don't think Sega / Atlus USA is in any position to do things differently for us.
