In the ever-present artistic struggle between playing it safe or trying something new at the risk of failure, most of the games that Kemco releases fall in the former camp. Sure, almost every game has something unique about it, but it’s often buried in minutiae that even most genre fans don’t pay much attention to. Their latest game, from developer Hit-Point, is the most unusual RPG they’ve published in quite some time. I’m an old hand at this genre, as regular readers know, and my initial reaction to Valkyria Soul ($3.99) was a disproportionate amount of excitement. The game looks like nothing Kemco has released on iOS before. The tone of the story is different from Hit-Point’s usual breezy fare, and it even has a more competent translation than we typically see from that developer’s works. The game doesn’t even have the standard top-down dungeon exploration, playing out instead from a pure side-scrolling viewpoint.
I doubt that’s coincidental, mind you. There are clear lines you could draw between this game and Valkyrie Profile, but I’d have to caution you against that. While it’s only natural given the likely disparity of resources that went into the two games, Valkyria Soul is quite different past the surface similarities, and can’t hold a candle to Tri-Ace’s classic. I imagine no one expected a Kemco game that was likely developed in a matter of weeks to reach those heights anyway, but I just wanted to make that clear. Obvious inspiration aside, it’s hard not to be impressed with the first several minutes of Valkyria Soul. This is a developer that generally reuses assets from game to game, and one that seems to almost never put much care into the story or characters. Valkyria Soul has a great plot, fairly good characters, and entirely new assets. It makes a good first impression.
From there, things are more up and down. The main character, a fallen Valkyrie named Reginleiv, gets ample time to develop over the course of the game, but the rest of the cast doesn’t. A couple of them make sudden shifts in their contributions to the plot, but the explanations of their reasons for doing so are given very little effort. It ends up coming off a bit hollow. Part of the problem is that this is a very short game. I spent a fair bit of time just messing around to make sure I saw everything, and my clear time was just over eight hours. There is some post-game content you can dig into after you finish the game, but it mostly consists of hunting more powerful bosses in dungeons you’ve already seen, and contributes little to the story. Nobody has time to develop naturally, so you either get undercooked archetypes who stay the same the whole game like Odin, or thin characters who make sudden pivots for incredible reasons.
That said, I enjoyed the story quite a bit anyway. It’s probably the best thing about Valkyria Soul. It uses Norse mythology as its basis, with many of the characters you might expect to appear in such a setting. The start of the game shows Reginleiv on trial for the murder of a fellow Valkyrie. She’s found guilty and sentenced to 500 years of imprisonment, but after just 50 years she’s suddenly revived by Odin’s familiar, Huginn. The great disaster Ragnarok has come, and Asgard and the rest of the Nine Realms are in total disarray. Every hand is needed on deck, and that includes Reginleiv. It’s far from a unanimous decision, however, and Regin immediately comes to blows with many of her allies. It’s not helped by her prickly personality and penchant for destruction. Luckily, the opposing side has just as many problems. Surtr and Utgard’s uneasy alliance has come apart, and there are other forces at play that seem to be working towards independent goals. While the individual characters might be lacking, there are enough of them going in so many directions that the story managed to pull me in quite nicely. It helps that I’m a sucker for Norse mythology.
If this were a review of a graphic novel, we could end things here on a positive note. Sadly, the gameplay alternates between interesting disasters and competent recycling. The battle system is basically the same as the one found in Band Of Monsters (Free) or the recent Seven Sacred Beasts ($3.99). You field a monster team of up to three members who auto-battle unless you step in. New monsters drop from battles, and you can either fuse them to a soul to use them as regular attackers or feed them to one of your existing monsters to help them level up or evolve. It fits the theme well enough, but it’s a bit disappointing that the biggest new idea here is flipping which side of the battle screen your team occupies.
The difficulty balancing is completely broken, too. The challenge was smooth with a few tricky spots until I hit one particular boss that I couldn’t beat. After a bit of grinding, I bested him, fused him to a soul, and proceeded to walk through the remaining three-quarters of the game without throwing so much as a cure item. As soon as you get a strong enough monster, the game no longer needs your input during battles. That’s boring enough, but the battles themselves often stretch out far longer than they ought to. The battle interface has a button that lets you kick the speed up to three times the normal rate. I strongly recommend using it.
The battle system lacks new tricks, the challenge balance is messed up, and the whole thing is a slog, but it at least works conceptually. I can’t say the same for the dungeons, which basically have you zooming down Hanna-Barbara-like endless corridors with the same repeating imagery and the occasional new color palette. Though they’re played from a side-view, these dungeons have some maze-like elements to them. You’ll find the odd door at the top or bottom of the screen that takes you to a new area. There isn’t any sort of in-game map for these dungeons, but the game keeps things relatively simple in terms of layout designs for most of the adventure. When it finally does start putting together more complex mazes, things get really confusing in a hurry. The backgrounds in each dungeon are utterly indistinct from one section to the next, with no landmarks save the occasional healing stone that usually serves as a clue that you’re on the right track. Encounters are visible on the map and generally avoidable if you slow down, but each section usually stretches out so long that I ended up holding down the dash button and just dealing with the battles.
The overall lack of variety in the visuals is, I suppose, the cost of all these shiny new assets. The Valkyrie characters all seem to share the same body and handful of animation routines, just with a few details and accessories to separate them from each other. Most of the other NPC characters are just generic suits of armor that are palette-swapped and accessorized from time to time. The monsters offer a bit more variety, but even there, you’ll be seeing designs from the first dungeon showing up later in new colors. The biggest way this hurts the game is in the dungeons, however. As I’ve mentioned, they’re already confusing enough thanks to the unusual perspective. The backgrounds make that worse with their bland homogeneity, and although the developer has made excellent use of color to try to stretch the assets out, you’ll probably notice that the green, pink, white, and brown forests all look very similar to one other. The overall lack of animation jumps out, too. Many of the game’s dramatic scenes have to happen off-camera because there simply isn’t any way to present them with the game’s limited set of movements.
I appreciate Hit-Point trying to shore up their weak points and work outside of their comfort zone, but Valkyria Soul just doesn’t work very well. There’s a decent enough story pinning the whole thing together, but the rest of it is a mess of poor balancing, dull combat, and dungeons that are both confusing and tedious. I’d go so far as to say it’s not simply a case of a good idea that they didn’t have the resources to realize fully, but rather an idea that probably wasn’t going to work well in any case. Those who are heavily into Norse mythology might be able to keep enough interest to leg out the game’s short adventure, but anyone else who buys in would probably do well to just quit the game and delete it after the first half hour. You’ll be a lot happier that way.
