With the success of Valkyrie Anatomia, one would think that this would be the perfect opportunity to bring back the Valkyrie Profile series. While many of us expected a tri-Ace developed Valkyrie Profile game, Square-Enix decided against the idea and instead handed the series over to a different developer. Soleil, a company known for making beat em up games was chosen to take over the development of the series in place of tri-Ace and as someone who considers themselves a fan of the Valkyrie Profile games, I found this decision to be completely asinine, given the fact that tri-Ace were the people who made the series so great to begin with, I knew going into this game that it was going to be a disaster. Now one might argue that tri-Ace was too busy working on Star Ocean The Divine Force to work on a new Valkyrie Profile but at the same time, Star Ocean The Divine Force is a Square-Enix game, much like Valkyrie Profile, so they could have worked on Valkyrie Profile 3 instead but Square-Enix being the blithering idiots they are, decided to release yet another Star Ocean game instead. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Star Ocean but the Valkyrie Profile series has always been the pinnacle of tri-Ace’s capabilities, so to see them not working on the latest entry is bitterly disappointing.
So with all that in mind, it’s important to expect something completely different with Valkyrie Elysium as it is a completely different game entirely from Valkyrie Profile. Valkyrie Elysium is not a JRPG like many would be led to believe, it is one of the most unapologetic 3D Beat Em Ups I’ve played in recent years, given the fact that the skill tree in this game is designed specifically to restrict the player’s growth, something that even Devil May Cry doesn’t do. The issue with the skill system ultimately comes down to the fact that to learn new skills, you not only need to learn previous skills but you also need a specific color of gem and those gems can only be acquired upon reaching certain points in the game’s story, therefore they are a barrier for players looking for growth.
The biggest let down with this is that one of the few things carried over from Valkyrie Profile is the crystals that rain from enemies when they are attacked. In the first game and Covenant Of The Plume, these crystals would be converted into bonus experience points as a reward for playing well. In Valkyrie Profile 2, these crystals would not only reward bonus experience but they were also a currency used to purchase sealstones which were very valuable items that players could use to turn battles in their favor. In Valkyrie Elysium however, the gems dropped from enemies can be found just about anywhere and are used as currency to learn new skills, as well as weapon upgrades. The issue is that when you acquire all the upgrades up to a certain point, many of these crystals become obsolete, requiring a different color of crystal and with limited upgrades to spend them on, as well as skills, they just kind of sit in your inventory collecting dust which is such a waste given the fact that the game clearly encourages you to play well to collect them, it completely eliminates any incentive to do so beyond a certain point. Sure, many other games have similar issues but given the fact that Valkyrie Elysium’s skills don’t take many crystals to learn, they’re easy enough to acquire to the point that there’s no reason to farm them, since you’ll have reached the cap… or at least near the cap by the end of the level regardless of how well you performed in battle. Restrictive skill systems is the most anti-tri-Ace thing you can do and this sickens me.
It’s obvious that the developers wanted to focus on the game’s combat above all else being a beat em up and all. The thing is though that while the combat looks visually appealing, I find it to be pretty mindless in execution. Now don’t get me wrong, there is value to be had in watching Valkyrie perform crazy attack strings and there’s quite a bit of flexibility to be had in regards to movesets. For one, you have the cancel combo system seen in the Dynasty Warriors games where you mash square and cancel into triangle for a finisher. Now you would think that you would use this a lot but I found myself using it very little late on in the game upon learning new skills. Once new skills become available, Valkyrie’s moveset becomes a lot bigger and with that you will unlock moves that are heavily abusable, one such move is the soul steal which guarantees that enemies will drop souls upon being hit by it. The lower the enemy’s health gauge, the more souls you will get. This allows players to abuse the einherjar system to rack up insane hit counts and restore the arts gauge faster.
It’s easy to rack up 999 hits with the help of your einherjar.
Speaking of einherjar, it appears that upon summoning them, you have absolutely no further control over them. Despite this however, you are able to learn new abilities for them, though the game never tells you how to actually use them. It turns out that upon summoning them, they will use whatever einherjar attack is set to them, then they follow up with their normal attack for the rest of the fight. I honestly find this to be a wasted mechanic as all you’re doing is summoning them, you’re not inputting commands like you can do in games like Chaos Legion, Castlevania Curse Of Darkness or Nights Of Azure. It would have been interesting to have the option to have them trigger their einherjar skills freely at the cost of soul gauge, similar to Chaos Legion’s assist moves but there’s nothing like that here. It just feels like a waste of an idea that accomplishes nothing besides making the game a hell of a lot easier. At first, prior to getting your second einherjar, the game can be rather tough and bosses will be quite challenging but all that disappears once you have a full roster of Einherjar with the soul steal skill, you’ll be watching your einherjar do all the work while you occasionally dive in and slash at them for souls to keep summoning einherjar to the field. It seems to me that the einherjar could have been removed entirely and the game would be more better off as a result, it’s tedious having to constantly summon them into battle, even though you can adjust the time they are out, you’ll still have to resummon them constantly in long fights, they might as well just remove the summoning mechanic entirely and have them all out on the battlefield by default like the original Valkyrie Profile games did.
Now the einherjar system might not seem like a huge issue at first as you could choose not to use them but the biggest problem with einherjar summoning is that it takes up one of the game’s vital buttons, R1. The problem with this is that R1 is the button commonly used to lock on to enemies in most beat em ups but in this game, players have to use R3 to lock on to enemies as well as reset the camera and this makes combat an absolute nightmare when you’re surrounded by multiple enemies. To make matters worse, there’s no minimap so you will often encounter stragglers somewhere off screen which you have to look for because the camera isn’t facing them. Of course this leads to you getting attacked from behind quite often as well. The problem with R3 is that in order to press it, you need to use your thumb, with R1 you can use your index finger, allowing you to change the camera angle without letting go of the face buttons. Anyone who has played a lot of beat em ups, particularly at a high skill level knows how crucial this is as having to constantly move the camera with the right analog stick just isn’t practical. Fortunately any frustrations brought about this issue tend to occur early on in the game as by the time you start accumulating einherjar, you become so powerful that you can heal yourself constantly by replenishing the arts gauge with einherjar attacks, though I imagine on higher difficulties that this would not be the case so it is still a problem throughout the entire game. Despite all this, the game heavily encourages you to use your einherjar as doing so leads to stat boosts after every mission, so even on higher difficulties, you’ll still want to abuse this mechanic as there really is no downside to doing so besides a brief downtime when summoning them into battle.
On top of Einherjar, you have divine arts which are essentially spells you can use at the expense of your arts gauge. Aside from the aformentioned heal spell, there are several other spells which each have different elemental properties, some of which are AOE spells, others are single target spells. The primary purpose of divine artes is to fill up a stagger gauge a significant amount, letting you freely combo enemies without them being able to move, though you can also increase the gauge slightly by having an einherjar summoned who has the same element as the spell that the enemy is weak to. Later on in the game, some of the spells can fill the screen and this can become somewhat of a visual impairment in the middle of a fight, especially when combined with the einherjar attacks, it can be hard to see what’s going on at times but fortunately all you need to worry about is soul steal spamming and so long as you keep soul chaining, you should be more-or-less fine on lower difficulties but on higher difficulties, this could be a real pain to deal with, as if the game’s lock on controls weren’t problematic enough.
In regards to defensive play, you have a guard and a evade button. Guarding allows you to parry enemy attacks and counter them, while evading gives you I frames during an enemy attack, very generous I frames I might add. Honestly I found little opportunity to make use of the guard or counter moves since so many fights have you fighting enemies that bombard you from all sides, with AOE attacks you have to avoid, it just feels easier to use the dodge since it gives you plenty of I frames and the pay off for guarding doesn’t seem to be worth the effort, at least on normal difficulty. Perhaps people will be able to find some use for it in the higher difficulties but it would be very tricky to pull off, especially when you consider how chaotic the fights are, props to anyone who can manage it though. Some skills allow you to automatically summon einherjar for free with no soul gauge cost by performing these maneuvers but why bother when soul steal makes souls so easy to come by? I suppose it removes the temporary downtime from summoning einherjar into battle but it didn’t really feel as if it was necessary for me to utilize any of the techniques required to automatically summon the einherjar. The one thing that does bother me though is the lack of an aerial dodge. While you do get a double dodge as an upgrade early on (which should be obtained immediately), the lack of an air dodge can make fighting in the air somewhat risky because it could mean landing into en enemy attack. Some enemies also like to grab you which can be really annoying as sometimes the game requires you to spin the left analog stick to escape.
Love at first fight…
There are numerous weapons to acquire throughout the game and each enemy has a weakness to a particular weapon, encouraging you to swap between them. I found myself using the Baleygr the most since it seemed to have great crowd control potential, particularly with its triangle move which was also great at harvesting gems. Each weapon has a proficiency rating which is tied to skill unlocks, you will have to use all of the weapons should you wish to unlock all the skills associated with them. Sadly though you cannot switch weapons mid combo which is a shame because that could have made combat a lot more interesting. You will also find potions from treasure chests to heal yourself but there is an inventory limit and using them decreases your score at the end of a stage, like in Devil May Cry. I found the heal spell to be good enough for the job personally but if you’re having a tough time, they can help. Ultimately if you’re looking for a fun challenge, Valkyrie Elysium will probably disappoint you greatly but if you don’t mind a mindless beat em up, the combat will deliver a moderately enjoyable experience.
Visually speaking, the landscapes look nice and all but I personally consider Valkyrie Elysium’s character design to be a huge downgrade from the character design in the Valkyrie Profile games. That being said however, I do think that the character designs are serviceable and aren’t terrible, I just think that they could be better and being a Valkyrie game, I’ve come to expect the visuals to be top of the line, so I can’t help but be disappointed in that regard, then again it’s all subjective really, some people may actually like the new character designs but they’re just not for me personally.
No shortage of trees and ruins in this game.
The music on the other hand doesn’t disappoint, if there’s one thing that this game does right, it’s the soundtrack, though I wouldn’t expect any less from Motoi Sakuraba at this point. While not his best work in my opinion, I do think that he does a fantastic job nonetheless. Interestingly enough, Valkyrie Elysium handles the battle music the same way that Nier Automata does, in the sense that the area music transitions into a combat variant of the same song and I think that this compliments the nature of the game’s more seamless combat well. I’d like to see more beat em up games do this in the future. It’s very different from the soundtracks that Motoi Sakuraba has done in the past but it does have a few similarities to his past work if you listen closely enough. Funnily enough, the game’s soundtrack probably the only thing that makes you feel like you’re playing a Valkyrie Profile game.
The story is without a doubt the worst part of this game as the characters are as bland as you can get. While it goes without saying that Valkyrie has the personality of a potato, the einherjar aren’t really all that better. I had a really hard time even remotely caring about any of the einherjar in this game, to me they were just sentient elemental attributes to attach to Valkyrie’s attacks. To be fair though, the game does have interactions between the einherjar and Valkyrie over the course of the journey but many of these conversations come across as awkward due to Valkyrie’s lack of personality. By the end, all the einherjar are pretty much singing from the same hymn sheet. The plot is pretty boring too, I mean all you’re told to do is purify souls and find these 4 gifts, that’s pretty much it, the plot doesn’t go anywhere else besides the obvious plot twist that harkens back to the first game which is executed in the most generic way possible. Just about everything in this game’s story feels generic and soulless to the point that there isn’t even a single soul to be engraved upon. Pretty much every location is a barren empty ruin with very few people residing in them and the few that are just happen to be in 1 place. The world feels so empty and mostly lifeless that I really don’t give a shit about saving it. Even Valkyrie Profile 2 had towns filled with plenty of NPC’s, this game has barely any of that. Also where are the rest of the Aesir? You’re not telling me that Odin and Valkyrie are the only gods on Valhalla surely. Where’s Freya? Where’s Thor? Where the fuck is Loki? None of these characters are here and this only serves to make the game feel even more lifeless.
Ok roll call, who the hell are you people again?
There are numerous side missions but pretty much all of them are forgettable and many amount to the same thing such as the einherjar quests which are more-or-less the same for each one. much like the story, they are criminally monotonous and only serve to extend what would otherwise be an extremely short game. Despite being a serviceable beat em up, Valkyrie Elysium is a half assed attempt to bring back the Valkyrie Profile series. Soleil were clearly given a mission that they weren’t prepared for and the only people to blame are Square-Enix for getting them to do it instead of tri-Ace. Square-Enix have essentially betrayed the entire Valkyrie Profile fanbase with this game and they should be ashamed of themselves for making this game a thing. As a Valkyrie game, Valkyrie Elysium is an abomination, as a standalone game however, would I recommend it? Well if you like mindless 3D beat em ups then it may be worth picking up for around twenty pounds but if you don’t care about mindless 3D beat em ups, give this game a pass.
Story/Plot: Bad
Visuals: Satisfactory
Gameplay: Satisfactory
Music: Great
Lifespan: Very Short
Difficulty: Easy – Medium (Medium at the start, Easy by the end)
Would You Replay? No
Overall: Satisfactory
My Message To Square-Enix after finishing Valkyrie Elysium:
Cynical Gaming Blog 