⇒ Review: Valkyria Revolution ⇐

Woohoo, my first thought when a Japanese game comes for Xbox! A known franchise as Valkyria is always welcome and I’m sure many of you have been waiting a long time for this. You can imagine how painful it is when you actually start playing and you begin to notice that the game isn’t like you expected… read more in this Valkyria Revolution review!

THE GOOD

• Hidden behind some very  questionable design is a pretty exciting and meaningful story. The war between Jutland and the big and powerful Ruzi Empire is far more interesting than most other RPG-stories, a shame it can never reach a full potential because most of the other things are far below expectations.
• Valkyria Revolution can be very proud about one thing and that’s the soundtrack. Japanese games have a trademark for beautiful music and Revolution is a fine example. The dream-like but dark and mysterious classical score makes you dream and wonder, fantastic!

Mixed Feelings

• Gone is the turn based fighting system from previous Valkyria games, now everything runs in realtime. Depending on how the stage war is going your attack meter runs faster or slower, when you want to use a special or magic attack the action freezes so you can consider your strategy and aim better. Developer Media Vision made a fun action fighting system but sometimes its pretty obvious that the strategy elements like cover are an afterthought. Likely to keep the existing player base from Valkyria happy.  Overall though, the hack&slash fighting is fun and keeps Valkyria Revolution a float, but I really wonder if the existing player base will agree with this.

THE BAD

• Visually Valkyria Revolution isn’t on-par with other Xbox One titles, only the character models look great with a handcrafted painted style but the handful of environments look empty, unrealistic and simply boring. The real issue with Revolution is the plenty of cutscenes with terrible animations, frequently you don’t even see which character is speaking. Characters walk and turn around just like in the previous console generation from years ago. it’s a real sore eye to behold and frankly unacceptable, even for a budget game.
• Cutscene after cutscene after cutscene, and between every small cutscene is a loading screen. Listen, I absolutely don’t mind a game with long cutscenes or in other words heavy-story games (Metal Gear for example) but it has to mean something. The cutscenes from Valkyria Revolution are long, bad animated nonsense, my religion classes years ago were far more interesting. It’s such a shame and I honestly don’t understand what the developer was thinking. You have a great character cast, you have a pretty good background story and many good plots.. and you come up with half assed terrible cutscenes.
• Not only cutscenes have bad animations, the fighting system suffers from it too. Seeing the same attack over and over again will cause some repetitive feelings.
• The UI (menu) is one of the most confusing things I have ever seen in a video game. I still don’t fully understand how I level up abilities or characters, it’s completely buried in unclear menu’s without any good explanation. How to change your party’s tactic is another difficult to complete task, you have the options but so hard to figure out.

Initially, I was glad to finally have a Valkyria game for Xbox. After playing Valkyria Revolution I’m left with a big disappointing feeling and wonder what the hell happened with this fantastic franchise. I will remember three things about this game, a great soundtrack, good background story and one of the most disappointing experiences from 2017.