Game details Developer: Media Vision

Publisher: Sega

Platform: PS4, Xbox One, Vita

Release Date: June 27, 2017

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Price: $40 / £33 (

Links: PlayStation Store | Official website Media Vision: Sega: PS4, Xbox One, VitaJune 27, 2017T for Teen: $40 / £33 ( Amazon UK

Valkyria Revolution, despite its name and approximately similar art style, isn’t really a sequel to 2008’s incredible Valkyria Chronicles (or its slightly less incredible PSP sequels). In tone and gameplay, the differences between the two series are night and day, and Revolution looks considerably poorer for the comparison.

The new game, like its predecessors, takes place on the continent of "Europa"—shaped just like real-world Europe, but divided into fictional fantasy countries like Jutland and the Ruzi Empire. If you don’t recognize those two nations from Chronicles, that’s because Revolution takes place in an entirely new continuity.

That the sister series just happens to have nearly identical settings—as well as reuse terms like Valkyria and “ragnite”—is confusing and poorly justified. Taking control for the first time and meeting the game’s gang of barely introduced misfits didn’t do much to clear up why Valkyria Revolution needs to share so much DNA with its “predecessor.” My best, most cynical guess is that Valkyria Revolution was made to siphon off some of Chronicles’ cult status—not to mention the attention of fans still fiending for a true follow-up.

Valkyria Chronicles was a blend of third-person shooters and turn-based tactical games (think XCOM, but with direct control of your soldiers). Guns have been all but excised in this spinoff in favor of close-up choppers and loppers, like swords and axes. Soldiers can only sling lead from “secondary weapons” a few times per mission before running out of ammo. The result is a game superficially closer to Dynasty Warriors or other Musou games than the series Valkyria Revolution emulates so sporadically.

A-one, a-two... Actually, just one

Like other Musou games, Valkyria Revolution is mostly about using glowing blue weapons to hack through swaths of fodder enemies. Ninety percent of foes couldn’t hold a candle to my plucky squad of anime archetypes, who were seemingly able to catch bullets with their teeth and cut through molecules with their blades. If your complaint with Musou games is that they’re too easy and too mindless, Valkyria Revolution will not allay any of those complaints.

Occasionally, I bumped into slightly meatier “Commander” units that provided a little bit of challenge. In the long run, though, these slightly more competent foes just made my brightly colored death squad stronger.

Killing Commander units is one of a number of ways to fill a combat bar that sits at the top of the screen. The higher this gauge, the more often friendly soldiers can attack enemy soldiers or use other actions. The gauge resets at the beginning of every level, but it’s usually full again after about 30 seconds of decent play.























With the objective bar full, you’re pretty much free to bust out fireballs and sword swipes with abandon, without waiting for the game's Active Time Battle-style system to slow you down. This makes it much too easy to mindlessly tear your way through foes without having to pause for rest or strategizing.

On top of that, you don’t have to hammer different attack buttons in specific sequence to power different combos. Just a single tap of the combo button sends your currently selected soldier into a fully automated sequence of attacks for a few seconds. I ended up using this button to dispatch the vast majority of red shirts I clobbered across in Revolution's oft-recycled levels.

The utter simplicity of the battle system was a double-edged sword that cut straight to the heart of my ability to enjoy the game. The clumsy stagger-step between every action is a pain, but it’s basically all there is to Valkyria Revolution’s combat. Without that constraint to push against, the game boiled down to just walking forward and pressing a single button. In the end, actions end up being somehow simultaneously too halting to carry out smoothly and too simple and one-note to provide any kind of friction at all.

At times, I felt flashes of fun in the game’s “clever” mix of Active Time Battles to direct character control. But that's all they were: flashes. Valkyria Revolution doesn’t have the balance or finesse to carry its idea across the finish line, and it lacks any sense of rhythm or pacing to match its namesake.

Killer Queen

Take my battle against one of the game’s early bosses—a titular Valkyria. The boss came with half-a-dozen different mechanics to counter and consider. She sings a disparaging song, flips between different kinds of magic weaknesses, summons smaller enemies to her aid, can have her own spells interrupted, and makes certain parts of the zone where you fight her do damage over time.

To put it one way, she’s a great big bundle of ideas. None of them matter, though. To beat her, all I had to do was get up close and spam the spell button.

In-game time freezes while selecting and casting non-physical attacks, and Valkyria Revolution provides nigh-unlimited mana with which to cast spells. These two facts combined meant that this complex, much foreshadowed fight against a major boss boiled down to five minutes of pressing the same two buttons to cast the same fire attack over and over. In-game time barely even progressed as the boss, for all her moving parts, couldn’t move at all.

It’s a “trick” that works on just about any enemy, so long as the battle gauge fills up fast enough (which it usually does). This “trick” also indicates the greater lack of forethought into how Revolution’s many gears move in concert (which, for the most part, they don’t). And that’s where Valkyria Revolution fails to find its own fun.

Paper tigers

Outside of combat, things are just as skewed. The story revolves around a gang of provocateurs—The Five Traitors—leading its homeland of Jutland into war against the evil Ruzi Empire. The Traitors are just looking for revenge and a chance to possibly save their kidnapped friend, but through jingoism and propaganda, they spark a war.

Written out succinctly like that, the story sounds more interesting than it actually comes across in the game. Instead, it is told in flavorless, achingly long cut scenes. Assuming you chew through the story missions, rather than focus on side quests and some minimal crafting, Valkyria Revolution often feels like 30 minutes of talking for every 15 minutes of fighting. That ratio is much worse at the start—in the first hour or so of Revolution, only about 5 to 10 minutes is actual gameplay.

The game’s truly chintzy exposition dumps don’t help. The characters are inexpressive, and maybe it’s just nostalgia speaking, but I could swear Valkyria Chronicles had better facial animation nine years ago. More than that, they smack of dated Japanese RPG overdesign and clichés. The “main” member of The Five Traitors is an insufferable edgelord covered head-to-toe in leather belts. The spy and only female member of the group, meanwhile, wears an unbuttoned purple pea coat and nothing else. The voice acting is just mostly bad. Suffice it to say, style and narrative is not this overly simplistic RPG's saving grace.

Valkyria Revolution is not an exciting return to the Valkyria series of yore. It’s not even a decent attempt. Unfortunately, it’s also not a very good stab at what it otherwise does try for. At times, I could see the sapphire of a game Revolution could have been—a new blend of two genres, carrying on Valkyria Chronicles’ spirit, if not its specific intent—but that’s not the game I played.

The Good

A bright, “painterly” art style that plays off Chronicles’ watercolor look

Some interesting ideas about how to blend two RPG genres

The Bad

Dull, astoundingly long exposition dumps without the flair to back them up

Loads of cliché characters not worth caring about

Simple, lopsided, and entirely too easy combat

Some cringe-worthy (and often blatantly sexist) character design

The ugly

It’s a bummer that this is what we got instead of a new Valkyria Chronicles for consoles.

Verdict: There’s a good game to be built on the bones of Valkyria Revolution, but the game itself is too one-note and ill-considered to get anywhere near it. Skip it.