Valhalla Knights 2 Review [PSP]

Posted March 16, 2009 by Michael Curley in PSP, PSP Reviews, Reviews.

Reviewed on the PlayStation Portable

In Norse Myth, Valhalla was the ultimate reward for warriors, an afterlife where they could find history’s heroes battling with each other all day, and having rowdy parties that would put any fraternity you could name to shame. In short, it was exciting and probably well worth the price of admission. I find myself wishing I could say the same for Valhalla Knights 2. This game is the sequel to the original Valhalla Knights for the PSP, and it gives the impression of being an entirely adequate game but not much more than that. Odin would be disappointed.

After a brief opening cutscene laying out the back story which in brief is that a goddess went bad a long time ago, a witch stopped her and she might return in the near future. Then you get to create your character. You have a choice between five races, each with their own specialties. There are humans; the jack-of-all-trades type, dwarves, who are physical bruisers, the halflings, that are quick and good with ranged attacks, the elves, who specialise in magic of all kinds, and the hilariously out of place Akatoki, who specialize in unarmed combat and look like male and female understudies of Ryu from Street Fighter. Once you’ve picked a race, you can pick your job; either Fighter, Mage, Priest, Thief, or Monk, which should be familiar to just about anybody who’s played an RPG before. Later on, you can add sub-jobs to further customize your characters.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the game is that after the initial set up you have a very rough start. This will turn off many who have gotten used to games easing you into the adventure. You’re given a sword and thrown into your first battle without so much as a tutorial, and it’s mostly because you have an overpowered NPC backing you up that you win at all. As you move on in the game, you’ll find a similar lack of hand-holding when it comes to the general mechanics of the game, which can become frustrating. The only way besides trial-and-error to figure out just what you’re doing is to go through the manual.

And then there’s the item system: Every item you find in a dungeon is unidentified, and cannot be used or sold for more than 10 gold until it’s analyzed. At first, the easiest way to do this was to spend 100 gold to identify them, or hope you found a separate item that did the same thing. Combined with the fact most early items resell for less than 100 gold, you could easily find yourself losing money just by trying to unload what you found in the dungeon. At least later on you can find a spell that identifies items for free, but this was the only time I had to use save-scumming to go shopping.

The gameplay is adequate, if repetitive. You’ll spend most of your time going through the game’s dungeons, performing quests for the local guild. There’s occasionally a fetch-quest style mission that takes place in town, but for the most part, the missions are some variation of “go outside and kill things.” The dungeons have a good amount of variety to them, but it’s easy to get lost with the game’s mapping system, since you can’t ever just look at the whole area you’re in. It also doesn’t help that all the dungeons are linked linearly, meaning that if you have a mission in the swamp, you have to hike all the way through the slums, the forest, and the river before you get there.

Run into one of the wandering monsters, and you’ll be tossed into battle. You can travel with a party of up to six characters, but you only control only your main character directly, with the others acting automatically. This leads to one of the things the game does pretty well, as for each character you can set their behavior parameters to govern what they do in battle. If you’ve got a priest and you’ve put all his points into healing and item usage, then he’ll hang back and support the others without wasting his time trying to slug it out. You can even set your main character’s behaviors, and set him or her to run on automatic like the rest of the party.

Battles take place in real time with no way to pause once it starts, not even while you’re trying to choose spells, which makes it next to impossible to control any of the mages directly. It also makes using items difficult as, by the time you find the potion you want to give to a teammate, they’re probably already down. It’s a bad thing if the best way to use a game’s special attacks is to just let the computer do it. The game also supports ad hoc multiplayer, for either versus or co-op, but I wasn’t able to try it out.

The game looks about as well as it plays, which is to say the graphics do the job, but don’t put in much extra effort. There’s a lot of customization in the game, including faces and hair styles for the characters, but it was difficult to find a combination that didn’t look wrong, as a lot of the faces didn’t seem to fit on the heads right. Except the halflings. Those little guys are adorable no matter what you do, which makes it hilarious when they charge into battle.

 

Like the graphics, the game’s sound is okay but not particularly memorable. There’s no voice acting in the game except for in the intro FMV, where it’s pretty good. You’ve got your standard array of monster cries, battle sounds and music that fits the settings, but is forgettable the second you move to a new area.

Overall, the game makes for a fun diversion if you can get past the first frustrating hours. It’s a decent dungeon crawler that lets you set up your party however you want, but the repetitive nature of the game might turn you off.

Tagged as Marvelous Entertainment USA, Valhalla Knights 2, Xseed games