#first i had to create the spells. then i had to create the skillbook-stats. then i had to create the skillbook-root.

[racke7]

So, because of the setback to my "grand idea" that was me accidentally nerfing my own mod. I spent this morning trying to think of a way to make certain classes interesting.

Like, Necromancer can usually be interesting by using teleportation and smacking people with massively damaging AOEs.

(Which is why Spectre, where "physical damage" is almost a side-effect to your true goal of stacking up debuffs that do very little (without game-breaking mods) always comes across as frustrating to me.)

And Rogue can be fun, because there's stuff like positioning yourself for backstabs, and then also having access to lots and lots of CCs.

(Turning people into chickens who will run away, after giving them a debuff that makes them take massive damage if they try to run? Always hilarious.)

Comparatively, Knight is "run up and hit them with your sword", and Ranger is "go to a high-spot and then click-kill on the enemies".

So, trying to make those classes more interesting is... hmm...

In the end, I found something that sounded very promising for a Knight-build, where they basically boost themselves with every skill, until they get access to a very strong attack. It's still very much "hit them with the sword", but it feels like there could be a bit of a dynamic involved.

The same mod-author had also created a Ranger-mod and Rogue-mod, and those looked like they'd stack pretty well with each other (a lot of "cause Bleed" and "if enemy is Bleeding, then" type of skills).

But then I, of course, got distracted.

And created an entire new Necromancer-mod from scratch.

I have no idea if it's even remotely "balanced" or whatever, because I just grabbed a few Hydro-skills and said "you do physical damage now". Which was... a very long and involved process. Especially to switch the skill-animations for other skill-animations.

But the end result was me having a bunch of Necro-skills that are purely damaging, causes bleed/decay/cripple, and doesn't come attached with all of the unnecessary bells-and-whistles of Odinblade that always seems to annoy me.

I'm... probably going to publish it once I've done some actual vague play-testing, and maybe one day I'll even be able to figure out how to get the fuckers to actually sell the damn spells.

(For now, I just craft them by combining "random bits of junk" with "necromancer books", because that usually makes it compatible with everything else.)

[thelongestdamnreviews]

Valkyrie Profile

Valkyrie Profile is one of my favorite games from ages past.  I remember renting this more than a few times repeatedly, slowly progressing through the game each time.  I was familiar with Enix and tri-Ace's Star Ocean The Second Story, so I guess that got me interested in it.  Though I played the PS1 version, it's available on the PSP too.  Both versions are the same game, but the PS1 version displays in a 4:3 format and has item sorting.  It took me about 26 hours to get to the end with Ending A on Hard Mode.  

Valkyrie Profile is also a pretty bleak game if you consider the setting.  Just watch the five-minute Prologue detailing a small portion of Platina's life, her escape from her horrible mother, and tragic death.  Things don't improve from there.  Several of the blurbs about the various locations mention war with another country, you're outright told you only have so long until the end of the world, and you also see several people die over the course of the game.  Considering the nature of the protagonist, that's necessary to get new allies to fight the forces of evil around the world. 

Yes, little girl just got slapped by her mom. 

You are Valkyrie, a goddess of fate and chooser of the slain, tasked by Odin to recruit worthy souls from Midgard to send to Valhalla so they can fight in the coming Ragnarok, the war of the gods but also the end of the world.  Though the game is timed, it is not in pseudo real-time like Majora's Mask, but instead you 'spend' the remaining Periods for each Chapter on doing Spiritual Concentration to unlock new dungeons and allies, to visit towns and dungeons, and to recover health outside of dungeons.  When out of Periods, you're given a report on your Einherjar's statuses, you're given points to create new items, you're given supplies in the forms of gear and skill/spellbooks, and you're also given a list of traits and skills that Valhalla wants in the heroes you send during the next chapter. 

This game is an interesting mix of gameplay features.  It's a side-scrolling platformer game with turn-based RPG fights that has shades of fighting game mechanics in it.  Still with me?  You start with the 'airship' level of travel on the world map, so you can fly to any destination you like.  Land on a blue dot and you enter a town to converse with the locals and learn a little bit about the setting.  A red dot is a dungeon, and this is where most of the gameplay takes place.  Valkyrie can run, slide, and jump to get around obstacles, she can swing her sword to get the first turn against enemies, and she can shoot crystals to stun some enemies for a moment or shoot crystals into walls to form temporary structures she can climb on or explode to leave a 'dust' platform that slowly descends.  Most dungeons won't require you to do anything crazy with the crystals, but it's a handy feature that's only limited by the number of crystal platforms you can have active at one time.

Not all of the dungeons are sideways/upside-down affairs, thankfully.

 In battles, each member in your team of four is tied to one of the face buttons on the Playstation controller, so someone is Square, someone is Triangle, etc.  When it's your turn, you press the character's button to command them to attack.  That's simple enough, but the game's first actual boss battle introduces weapons that enable additional attacks.  Non-mages are able to use up to three attacks each turn, and that's controlled by the weapon that character is using.  In their stats, weapons have an O for which attack it enables, so you can have a really strong weapon that allows only one attack, or a decent weapon that can do all three.  Each character has their own set of attacks and you can only change the order they happen in (123, 231, 312).  Each attack has a direction it will knock the enemy into, so the idea is you work your team's attacks into a nice pattern so everyone's strikes hit.  But of course, enemies might be light, might be heavy, might fly, might block...

The game has a Practice feature where you can try your attacks on an enemy who's either light, heavy, or blocks, and neither side dies so you're given plenty of opportunity to try things out.  

Another reason you want your allies' attacks to hit is the way special attacks work.  Each attack when successful contributes a set amount of energy to the Heat Gauge, and when that hits 100, you're able to use Purify Weird Soul (or what's called Soul Crush in later games).  These are flashy special attacks that do a lot of damage and these too can contribute to the Heat Gauge, though it starts off with less in the gauge for each one in the chain you do.  They're mostly overkill for regular fights but they can put out quite a bit of damage against bosses.  You're then given Charge Turns before you can use them again, but you can reduce the time required by comboing enemies that are on the ground to release a purple gem that flies to anyone with CT.  Juggling a foe releases a crystal that grants a 5% EXP boost, stacking up to 40 times.  It does get button-mashy, but you can put out some great combos with the right team if you try to time everything just right. 

STEP ON IT PRESS BUTTON You thankfully have the option to just skip (if you already killed the monster with regular attacks for example). Also hi I’m using Retroarch here.

Magic is fairly basic compared to how warriors and archers fight.  Mages only get one attack per turn, and you need to teach them spells found in dungeons to expand their spellbook, though they only get set one offensive spell for their button.  Magic PWS is just the spell cast three times in rapid succession, but some weapons allow Great Magic which hits all foes...but it comes with the drawback of most early-game options having a chance to break when used this way.  My first time playing, I missed that you can actually activate magic from the in-battle Select menu to cast Heal, as well as buffs/debuffs.  Some spells like Fire Storm are capable of hitting all foes when cast from the menu, but with the drawback that you aren't able to combo off of them immediately. 

When you level up, you're given SP to add to skills like Fight or Tactics which raise stats, or skills like Demon Intelligence or Find Trap which don't have any effect other than fulfilling a Valhalla requirement if asked for.  You are able to find skillbooks for Automatic Skills, Support Skills, and Attack Skills and can allocate points to those too.  Each character is able to equip two Automatics and one Attack and one Support skill, though what's offered varies based on the character's class.  I liked how you only needed to use skillbooks once--for example, if you had the book for Auto Item and used it, then every character in your party and everyone who would join later would be able to put points into it.  You're also able to put SP into character Traits, some of which might be asked for in each Chapter.  These don't affect stats either, but they affect the Hero Value which determines their worthiness in Valhalla.  Something else that tripped me up my first time was negative Traits.  You can put skill points into those to lower their value, with the net effect of the character's Hero Value increasing just like raising positive Traits. 

Positive traits can be raised to rank 8, but negative traits can only be reduced to half their initial rank.  Some characters are just more heroic than others too.  

Valkyrie doesn't have a Hero Value but she has two other stats--Evaluation Level and Seal Value.  Evaluation is tied to the quality of heroes you transfer to Valhalla, but is also impacted when you open an Artifact chest at the end of dungeons.  Keep the item and you lose five points, or send it to Odin to gain one point.  You can largely keep every Artifact but not everything will have a use, but some of them are nice weapons and armor you'd definitely want to hold onto.  Consistently keeping a very low Evaluation Level unlocks the C ending where you're destroyed for being bad at your job.  The Seal Value is tied to Ending A, but it would require a guide or a lot of luck to enable due to the nature of how it increases and decreases. 

Not relevant to the review text, but I figured I'd show the map feature.  You can make the current/all layers translucent, and there's an item that can reveal every room that you haven't visited yet, but it won't tell you how to get there.  Nethov Swamp is a simple map, but The Tower of Lezard Valeth and the Tombs of Amenti are difficult to navigate even with this map.  

This game has three difficulties and three endings.  Amusingly, Easy is actually the hardest difficulty by virtue of it not having amazing gear, so while you get easy EXP and levels, you're operating at low power, basically.  Normal is middle-of-the-road all around.  Hard is interesting because every character who joins starts at level 1, but there are different dungeons only found here (but you don't get to play the Easy/Normal only ones in exchange).  New characters starting at level 1 sounds like a massive handicap, but you can put great gear on them to bolster their survivability, and there's a neat feature in the EXP Orb to help them catch up to the rest of your team.  When you complete puzzles and clear dungeons, you're given Event EXP that goes into the Orb, and you can then dole out the Orb's contents to your choice of characters.  Really helps given the nature of the game is to train up mortals to remove from your party until the very end of the game, so you can quickly get someone up to competence to replace whoever you sent. 

The Hard-only dungeons also have Flame Gems that unlock rooms in the post-game dungeon, so you could pretty much see everything in the game running through it twice.  Start a Normal save, sleep through the Chapters until Freya nukes you (Ending C), play normally and get Ending B, then start a Hard save and follow a guide to get Ending A and the Flame Gems too.  There are some dungeons available in any difficulty so there'll be some overlap, and you can get every character but one without Hard Mode, so it's your call if you want to one-and-done it or not. 

Like Star Ocean 2, there's a Voice Collection of your characters' battle cries, hit grunts, and death quotes, as well as some foes'.  This is at least shared across all saves so you can use different characters to slowly fill it out either in one go-through or through several.  The voices are all done by the late-90s Pokemon cast in the west, so you might hear someone familiar.  This still applies even in the PSP port though the CG cutscenes use different actors for everyone but Valkyrie.  The voice acting isn't bad but it's still in that "first generation we really had voice acting" kinda stage. 

I was a fan of Motoi Sakuraba's music in Star Ocean 2 and that still applies here.  The towns have somber music befitting their settings, and the dungeons have a pretty varied mix of music.  The standard battle and boss themes are high-tempo and some fights use unique music--some tracks from SO2 even show up in the postgame dungeon, even. 

Despite the fact he's actually close to my frontline, I still can't attack him with my melee troops because of how the game works with its 'row' feature.  

Even though you're a Norse goddess and there's other Nordic divinity in the game, there are no Vikings at all.  Midgard is largely Medieval Europe in setting, though there's an island nation that's based on Japan.  Might be kinda jarring for those expecting a more faithful to the myths kind of game.  And then there's the Egyptian pyramid in Hard where you fight a mummy at the end...

You would expect an RPG to have a focus on story, but there's not really much here (at least outside of Ending A).  The world's gonna end, so go find people to send to Asgard so we don't lose in the coming war with the Vanir.  RPGs tend to work on some ratio of story and gameplay, and VP has a much larger gameplay bias.  You're not given a reason to go to dungeons other than "well, evil is there so go kill everyone", but then there are no fetch quests or anything of the sort to deal with.  That may or may not be a drawback for some, but it's a change for those used to hours of exposition in their RPGs.  You just get it when you recruit people instead.  Valkyrie Profile Silmeria and Covenant of the Plume both work the story/gameplay ratio back towards the story side, at least. 

DAWN OF THE FIRST DAY ~220 days remain~

You see the scenes of characters dying, but they then don't show up in the story after joining your party (to account for them possibly being sent to Valhalla).  This then means that nobody really gets any character development since you see them a bit before they die for the most part.  All of their personality is contained in their recruitment scenes and their voicework during battle.  It's even worse because the first section of the game is fairly lengthy, involving Arngrim and Princess Jelanda, and you even control Arngrim for it!  You might expect the other character recruitments to go the same way but they're much shorter and automatic...but then you get two for one in this case and it further showcases the setting of Midgard and how bad things are.  There is no banter between people who knew each other in life, but I recently learned there are three special scenes when you transfer two certain people in specific chapters--who knew without a guide? 

Another thing that I had a problem with on this go-through is that you send your people to Asgard to fight in the war, but you're only given snippets of what happens.  You don't see any battles happen, just text overviews with a couple of conversations if that.  I know the point of the game is to have Valkyrie stay on Midgard and take the souls of the virtuous, but it felt like a missed opportunity to have the divine war, the entire reason you're collecting souls in the first place, be so out of focus.  Shame since some of the battles sure sounded cool. 

This is not one of those battles, but this is how the transcription goes for the most part.  

Though you're given a lot of time to go collect people and clear dungeons, I never really felt like I had to grind even on Hard mode.  Granted, there's a skill combination that snaps the game's difficulty apart.  The game is naturally harder without it, but levels don't really seem to have a dramatic impact on stats it felt like.  That could be why Easy mode is so difficult since you're lacking on the gear side of the equation and even maxing out skills doesn't make up for the slack. 

I haven't looked at the prices for the PS1 version for a long time but I don't think I want to know.  I got discs-only in okay condition for $50 years ago, so it might be worth pursuing the PSP version so you're not paying out the ass.  I mean it's a great game and all, but it rivaled Suikoden II for the price people wanted for it on eBay due to the low print run.  If you're gonna go for this version anyway, good luck.  I had a disk-read error during The Lost City of Dipan that thankfully was avoidable but you never know how bad the discs you'll get will be. 

So yeah, VP is a bit of a weird RPG where everyone on your team is dead and you juggle monsters to level up faster.  It's not the best choice for someone looking for a gripping story, but the battle system is pretty unique and it can be fun trying to time everything just right so you wreck your enemy.  Ending A definitely changes the story/gameplay ratio and delves into Valkyrie's past, so it's not like it's completely devoid of story.  And hey, since you'll probably need a guide already to get it, why not take the Hard route so you can fall back on the guide when you get stuck on one of the puzzles?

No winpose for you, Valkyrie.