Yo, I beat another game. This game is 30 bucks (new and used as I write this) and it's pretty hard to find. Made by SquareEnix, but originally an Enix game. It's a sequel to ValkProf1, but don't go expecting it to be the same sort of game. Yes, you have Valkyries, yes you have dead people, yes this game reeks emo from every pore. But it's different. While Valk Prof 1 was about gathering up dead people with Lenneth to fight in Odin's war, Valk Prof 2 is a prequel in an alternate time line. It's basically a big spinoff of the third - very hard to get - ending in game 1. The gameplay, plot, storytelling, and generally everything else is dramatically different. Therefore I wont be reviewing this to compare both games, but to review 2 as a game of it's own.

(aesthetics)

Characters - 3/5. Generic characters. You have the leading female schizophrenic whimp that heals, the archer, the buff guy, the mercenary, his female counterpart, and the magician. This is leaving out the random dead people you resurrect and send off to Asgard to get bonus points- who are also generic archers, fighters, magicians, and so on. It's basically the cast from a D&D game with a Yggdrasil/viking/Odin feel.

Art and movies - 4/5. Very beautiful art and designs. You should buy this game just to see the pretty scenery, very detailed characters, and over all colorful feel of the towns, dungeons, and places. The only two things that keep this from the extra point are that the dungeons - while moderately different per dungeon- do feel repetitive and dull from time to time. That and the characters in the movies are doll-like in movement. Ie, they can't move their fingers independently and a pat on the shoulder or nudge from one character to the next looks odd. The movies are skippable, as are the fighting attacks, which is very good for a game.

Voices - 3/5. Good voice cast. Most of the voice actors are popular in anime and game media. In fact, one of the dead people I resurrected had the voice talent of Vash the Stampede, which amused me. Downsides? They say the same lines over and over again while fighting - monsters and characters alike. When you get all the Valkyrie's together in your party, or even two of them, and have to listen to them say, "I will destroy your soul!" (or whatever the line was) repeatedly 15 times a battle, you really want to grit your teeth. That's saved as there is enough variety in character speech that it's bearable throughout the game. The other downside is that their lips don't sync up to the voices.

(Game play - the important part)

Fighting - Beginning 4/5, middle 2/5, ending 5/5. Each character is a button (you get four per battle). Each character has a set of attacks you can choose from outside of battles in the menu. You can go about the game button mashing or trying to get all the attacks to line up in a string. If you get so many hits in, you can do uber attacks. The beginning was pretty challenging, but once you get started and feel like you're expected to level up, it gets very tedious and boring. The bosses are average, the last two boss fights are godly and very hard - regardless of your level. Outside of the boss fights, in the middle of the game, I could simply turn off my head and mindlessly hit buttons for hours on end. You can kill off most enemies in one or two attempts. You fight enemies on a 3d board, can split up your team, and run around like a nutjob trying to get the gauge up to attack again.

Dungeons - 3/5. 2d map, you jump, you run, you run into enemies to start battles. In game 2, you can shoot photons to crystalize enemies, but you can't make neat crystals off things to bounce off of (like in game 1). I found this lame, but more challenging as you had to position enemies in certain places in order to get to treasure chests. There's the same amount of enemies per dungeon area and every time you kill them off their 'spirit wake' (or black blob thing) stays behind - basically as an explanation for why, when you re-enter the room, there's a new set of the same enemies again. The spirit wakes can also be crystalized. There's very little in the way of puzzles, but some dungeons get new bosses later in the game.

Equipment, items, etc - 1/5. I don't know why, but there are way too many items, armor, and other junk to keep track of. You get the regular armor pieces (helmet, weapon, chest armor, arm and leg armor) and four slots for items you rip off enemies through the game. By the end of the game you have so much enemy item junk in your possession that it takes upwards of 15 to 30 minutes to equip your characters worth a shit. To get good weapons, armor, and items, you need to sell off the enemy junk and old armor in shops (specific kinds that they want). But you can't just sell off everything, as it doesn't carry from shop to shop. So if one shop wants _ number of one items for a sword and another shop wants _ number of the same item for a shield, you have to go to both shops to dump off the individual numbers they want. The items also have such minor purpose (you raise your fire protection by 3%!) that it hurts the eyes to repeatedly look through them all. Good games have easy to remember items and weapons - where you don't have to think too hard to equip your characters.. This game absolutely paled when it came to this - they were trying something new and failed miserably. I eventually gave up trying to get the good weapons.

Spirit Orbs - 4/5. Unlike the items, you get these spirit orbs in the dungeons and trade crystals you knock of baddies to keep them. The crystals are straightforwards (You get stronger! You're protected against fire!) and make the dungeons more fun. I find using these far better then bothering with the items. Some orbs hurt you, some help. You can put the orbs on podiums around the dungeons to make the entire area effected (so you can put down something that'd make attacks 1/4 as strong on a podeum, and that effects all enemies).

MiniGames - 1/5. There are some tasks/chores you can do in the game to get better weapons. There's a thing with reading hidden poems in the towns, a thing with feeding cats, dogs, and chickens and getting smaller items from them (to sell later for rings), giving a boy money 30 times, and every dead person you set free reincarnates in a town room somewhere on the map. If you go to find these revived pre-dead people, they'll give you items that are worth it. Except for revisiting characters you've previously had in your party, all of these tasks are dull, tedious, boring, and unsubstantial. They don't tell you you'll get the item. Most of the quests (the animal one, the boy one, the poem one, etc) don't have immediate results and you're supposed to somehow know without looking at a guide that you need to go to some place in some later chapter to make some exchange to get the items. That bothered me as I looked at a guide towards the end to find this out and I was already way past the point of no return.


(Lastly)

Music - 4/5. It's okay and something you'd enjoy on a CD. Fake instrumental junk. Gives mood to the story. Some dungeon musics can get annoying, but that's nothing to really complain about.

PLOT! - 3/5. Very close to 4/5, except for some glaring things. First off, this game is all movies and plot. You fight through dungeons to get scenes. This is a fault of Square as Enix wouldn't do this. (Enix cares more for fun gaming and less for pretty movies). The Entire plot feels like some Shakespeare drama fanfiction written by a teenage under hormonal distress. People die. People die ALOT. People die so many times in one sitting that you begin to wonder the point of people dieing. Some characters die five+ times. This is understandable given the content of the game, and I can live with death. But they repeatedly kill off characters you can become attached to and it gets annoying. And it's not just that, but every time a character does die there's 10 times the emo wrapped into it. A character can't just die, they need to have some dramatic scene, a load of skeletons in the closet, and the whiney main character crying over them for hours at a time during, before, and after the death. Then it repeats itself. Some of the deaths were classic, some were dumb, some got old quickly.

There were parts in the plot I liked. Characters you are familiar with in the first game show up. These were all very well-liked characters. There are twists and so many different individual stories going on at once (in one big plot) that you can't tell what's going to happen next. Sometimes you feel a character is going to die, but they just aren't. And (due to the previous paragraph) you're on the edge of your seat waiting to see how it'll happen. One character, specifically, is good at not dieing, and therefore does a very awesome job with the story and makes things considerably interesting.

Death, lots of death.





Overall this game would get, to me, a 3/5. I've played worse, I've played better. I've played more addictive, I've played less addictive. If you liked Valk Prof 1, even if this game and how you play it is dramatically different, it's worth having on the shelf for the simple purpose of having on the shelf. Since there are only so many copies out there, the game is starting to become rare and the used price of it is gradually going up now.