Valkyria Chronicles a refreshing masterpiece

So I have posted about a playstation 3 game before called “Valkyria Chronicles” a few times already. After finishing it last night, I am proud to say it is one of the most refreshing if not best games I have played in the last 15 years. The game has a unique game style completely original(or at least to my knowledge) gameplay and beautiful art style.

There is a few key things to this game that really made it stand out to the rest. One as you can see above is the beautiful sketch/shaded art style that was used for the game. it is freshly original and absolutely stunning to view. All of the characters felt fresh, with a definite ode to the Japanese art/manga styles, yet shown in a brand new way.

The next great point of the game was the Characters of the game. The characters that were mainly represented was that of the individual members(core) of Squad 7, the Gallian Militia squad of citizens made soldiers who joined up to fight for there countries freedom. They characters showed true emotion and human characteristics more than the typical video game. There was prejudice, hate, love, fear, and true friendship displayed by the games narrative. This really brought the story together for me and made me feel like I was truly part of the Squad.

The third and most important factor of course was the unique and refreshing game play. The game offered what in reality was more than one way of being successful. There was the deployment stage(strategy) which you positioned your characters and what type of character(sniper,scout,machine gunner,anti-tank,tanks,engineer/medic) into specific starting places on the map. This allowed you to plan your starting point. The next of course would then to choose what character you wanted to take control of first, with a limited # of character movies per turn. This allowed you to use multiple characters, or a single character multiple times(but with penalty) and move your units to face the oncoming attack forces. Then when you picked the character in which you are ready to play you would then go into a first person mode, complete with enemy cross fire with a limited amount of moving you can do before you are forced to perform an action or end a turn.

It all sounds very different yet it led to a great and interesting way of playing a game none other than I have ever experienced. If you own a Playstation 3 I highly recommend that you purchase this game, there is even a demo on PSN that you can download to try before you make your decision. They just released some downloadable missions for this game and I am going to be checking those out soon after, as any additional experience I can have with this game is a good one.