World War Moink (Valkyria Chronicles)

Can’t find a Valkyria Chronicles thread, so, gonna put this here I guess. Just a heads up that I loathe action grind games like Dynasty Warriors with the intensity of a thousand suns, so, the new Valkyria Chronicles game being one of these is like a living nightmare to me.

Valkyria Chronicles: Azure Revolution will undergo “significant revisions based on fan feedback,” in response to the Battle Demo Ver. 1 people got with Valkyria Chronicles Remastered:

  • We have received three times the amount of feedback from the Battle Demo Ver. 1.0 demo that we thought it would receive.

  • There were many harsh opinions.

  • The battle system has changed greatly from the demo. Details will be shared on the official website, but it is more RPG-like now.

  • Since the demo battle had action elements that were too intense for an RPG, you couldn’t think through things as you fought, so we’re introducing a new action gauge for both enemies and allies.

  • It’s been changed so that players can optionally stop time when using weapons and magic.

  • Since it bears the Valkyria name, I felt the demand for tactical battles. Specifically since you can put together your unit and fight, so in order to skillfully use your allies, we’re making it possible to customize their thinking. It’s been fixed so that you can give them direct instruction.

  • The party has been upgraded from a maximum of three participants to four participants.

  • Field encounters have also been removed.
    Next demo’s due to come out at the end of August.

Goes without saying that major changes at this stage of development does not exactly scream “well-realized video game.”

Here’s some gameplay of what the demo looked like, and holy shit is it bad:

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On a happier note, Sega just put up a survey about Valkyria Chronices Remastered, that I’d really encourage all y’all to fill out. It asks at the end what your interest would be in a Valkyria Chronicles 3 translation, and since this goes directly to Sega, this is probably our best shot at showing them there’s interest.

http://valkyria.sega.com/vcr/survey/

I have no expectations of them salvaging this game, but they seem to have gravely miscalculated the interest of fans in “Valkyria Chronicles, but without everything that made those games distinctive” as a “spin-off.”

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I feel like one of the big things the original Valkyria did was to make the battles in a strategy game feel more intimate, with each unit having personality and having the player control their actions completely. I think the intention of the action gameplay is to emphasize that intimacy. Imagine the potential of controlling a small squad in the scope of a larger flowing battlefield, turning tiny victories into a big victory, if they really utilized level design and made combat effectual.

The demo is obviously a catastrophe as far as accomplishing that goal. Look at the sequence that starts at 14:10 in that video. That’s just bonkers. The demo looks ridiculous and it’s because the damage math is so incomplete. It’s clearly been tested only on a technical level. This is a game with permadeath, so the enemies need to be threatening and the player needs to be instilled with the fear of death. It’s also an action game with ranged and close combat between a dozen plus human combatants so we need to do more than a 1/10th of an enemy’s health when we hit them with a sword the size of the character swinging it.

It is really, really late in the process to be changing the core concepts of systems. I want to see the changes though and I hope it works out, because it’s a game with real credentials behind it. The outlook is not so good though, and it’s a sadness.

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They’ve been doing a lot of surveys lately and Im happy about it. I guess they weren’t kidding when they basically said “we’re sorry for being shit lately” a few years ago.

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Fixing damage numbers on a AAA game should take them a week.

Or a month to go through a dozen iterations (seriously, I’ve had my head in spreadsheets for the last month doing exactly this and I don’t feel like a genius). There’s something seriously wrong when you release a game in this state to the public, and not even the tradeshow public, but the internet public, the least pleasant of humans. It’s not what a credible company would do!

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Imagine how much of a nightmare it is to tell level/encounter designers that the entire combat system has changed from Action RPG to FFXII charging turn team management with release scheduled in a manner of MONTHS. The encounters shown don’t work even within the scope of an action RPG though, so what the hell!

In AAA dev, everything you’re seeing is on an at least 6 month time lag, especially public demos which are likely independently developed slices.

It’s entirely possible that the earlier demos were a different fork than the main tree, honestly.

Yeah, adding pausing doesn’t magically give you interesting choices in combat!

As far as the pipeline delay in AAA – true, but the work of fixing the numbers should be fast and easy enough that the game should never have been in such a bad state. Because this is what I’ve been doing recently at a 200+ studio and they weren’t that bad even when they didn’t have someone whose job it was to fix it.

How can you even know if your game is fun at all if your values are squatting there preventing it from being fun? How is that not obvious?

(The wonderful CourierRice was kind enough to split this into a VC topic for me)

Can’t even wrap my head around the idea of ranged combat in a hack 'n slash. Like, they just stand there while you snipe them like wooden ducks at the shittiest carnival in the state.

Also I know this is an unnecessary emotional reaction but I hate hate hate that the shield guys trigger into a defensive pose when you slowly scroll your aiming reticle over their big dumb faces.

I think the only way this could approach dumb fun is if it was some kind of co-op multiplayer deal, where everyone controlled their own character and you slogged through enemies/goaded them into charging your bishie melee tanks.

Having an AI-controlled RPG team hugging your shoulders in a single-player sounds god-awful.

If they wanted to go real-time they should’ve taken a page out of Freedom Fighters’ playbook and done it as all-ranged, like in established VC and World War 2, then allowed you to tell your teammates where to take position. They would then attack the enemies within their range while you managed the larger battle and enemies.

As much of a turn-based dork as I am, FF got real-time tactical actionshootin’ down perfectly.

ahaha, they actually react to your aim telepathically? I skimmed through the video but…damn, have they ever played a shooter?

There was a strong throughline in the first Valkyria Chronicles to Skies of Arcadia and earlier Reiko Kodama games. What I saw of the sequels suggested that that reasonable tone had completely vanished into shonen silly, but that didn’t necessarily preclude some strong strategy gameplay I’d never see just because I don’t have time for that.

I didn’t think they’d drop the ball on gameplay as well especially when they had a strong heritage to follow.

why are her boobs so huge

There must be a law about anime sequel boobs

Weird. My boobs didn’t get any bigger from Select Button to Select Button ][

skeleton boobs follow ghost rules silly

ValChron is in my personal all time top three games. I have gotten all the metals three times. I do not understand who this new game is for. Shouldn’t it be for me? Like I get that people like monster hunter, but there have got to be better properties to monster hunterify.

Sylvaria’s Breasts are pretty redic even for anime.

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I was listening to 8 4 Play and they were saying that the Rep at TGS was saying “are you familiar with Musou games” to people before the demo.

I always thought the rationale was that Valkyr had huge honkin’ shamrocks, as like a genetic thing. But then other characters show up that are Valkyr and are relatively normal, so

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Huge Honkin Shamrocks