Knights of the Round... And Round... And Round...
Valhalla Knights' old-school gameplay is almost good enough to excuse how broken the rest of the game is. Almost.
Published: April 17, 2007
These behaviors don't really mesh perfectly, but the AI characters are at least smart enough to realize that they shouldn't all swarm one enemy by default or do things like kick off a special attack once they've built one up. As they level up, you'll gain more points to allow for both offensive and defensive guidelines, but by the end, I was usually on a near-constant swap between characters (pressing Select lets you pause the game and pick a character to issue direct orders to) if I wasn't slashing blindly in over-crowded arenas. Call me a control freak, but at times the game requires it for bigger boss battles, which may be yet another turn-off to newcomers.
And it's a shame, because as antiquated as some of the concepts are, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous. We made the comparison to Vagrant Story in our preview because, well, everyone sort of made that leap on their own, but I really can't knock a game that looks as good as it does with huge shafts of light pour in through windows, yet still manages to have some (limited) personality while skulking through a crypt. The textures also share the VS' knack for looking good even at low resolution (and filtered by the PSP hardware, of course). Sure, parts of the castle can blend together a little too much, but you'll spend so much friggin' time in an area that by the time you've moved on to the next section, you know it like the back of your hand. That may not be a good thing to some, but I never really got tired of the visuals.
The battles, on the other hand, started to grate a little. It wasn't so much the palette-swapped enemies (if they're darker, usually they're tougher), or the limited number of them in any given dungeon chunk, it was more that they respawn pretty quickly, so you'll see them constantly. On the plus side, it does give the game a chance to throw tons of stuff on the screen with people hacking and attacking and casting all while maintaining a fairly respectable framerate. You'll also get a nice sense of animation in the blows -- handy, since again, you're going to see them a lot.
If the visuals are reminiscent of Vagrant Story, the audio actually channels parts of various Final Fantasy soundtracks if that makes any sense. While in "safe" areas like the town, the music is a lilting, vaguely Celtic tone to it, while exploring the dungeons gives a general ambient track with long, tense string notes and once things finally roll into battle, it's a driving series of staccato notes. It's all really quite well done, albeit a little on the repetitive side due to there not being a huge number of tracks. With no voice acting, the only other things that will leak out of the PSP speakers are light footfalls (and honestly you'll probably need headphones to even hear those), growls and snarls and sword clanks, the thump of spells hitting, and they all fill in their part well.
Gussying up old-school gameplay and truisms with modern visuals and throwing it all onto a portable medium isn't a bad thing, it's just that so little was done to actually explain a lot of the gameplay that the end user is forced to just sort of randomly screw up until they get it right. When it all clicks, the allure of constantly bulking up your characters with more experience, weapons and armor just to run back in and thump some enemies is plenty addictive to those that are easily bitten by the particular bug.
For everyone else, however, the extremely high learning curve in nearly all aspects coupled with the game's monotonous repetition is likely to drive them off. We said it in our preview earlier that the PSP is home to more than a few good RPGs, but lacks that one great entry. Valhalla Knights, simply put, isn't that game. It'll be like ambrosia for nostalgia-addled RPG vets, but for everyone else, it'll probably go down like a shot of bad tequila; burning the whole way and then leaving you with a sick feeling in your stomach.
