Anyway, let’s go through the game in brief. It’s a half real-time and half turn-based SRPG – which in itself seems like a crazy idea but it injects some life into an old genre. You control each character in real time from a third person perspective, almost like a TPS. There are also quite a few nuances with the combat engine, the best example is that if you move into an enemy’s cone of vision you will expose your characters to a free attack, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
I’m also not going to dwell on the eye-catching art style that they chose to use – everything looks like a watercolour painting or a pencil sketch. I have no idea how the technology works, but it needs to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated. In a world where every other game has is the plastic look of UE3, anything that takes a different approach should be commended.
What I really want to focus on is the story and the story telling. So it’s been a while since I’ve watched a full anime or manga series mostly because I don’t have the time or self-dedication to devote myself to watching something that will take months to get through (the heady days of the 90s, with Initial D and Sailor Moon and GTO, are behind me) but Valkyria Chronicles is the most “anime” text that I’ve experienced in a long time.
Everything that confuses and bewilders me about anime is in this game. For a game set during a brutal war, it feels strange to have 14 year old characters being shot at by soldiers who are essentially SS troopers. I know that the genre often features characters that are extremely young – but imagine if the cast of Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan were all teenagers. It’s just an odd convention that takes a bit of getting used to.
Then there’s the other anime convention that has always confused me – are these characters white or Japanese? It’s set in a fictional Europe that they’ve so creatively dubbed “Europa”, but the characters are drawn exactly the same way that characters in other anime series are drawn. What makes it all doubly strange is that there are “black” or at least “dark skinned” characters, so it’s not as if race doesn’t exist in the convention of anime. I just don’t know enough about Japanese culture or the conventions of manga/anime to know if this is just an art style, some form of deep-seated wish fulfillment or even just the typical privileging of whiteness.
Taking out the mythology of the “Valkyria” and the steam punk nature of the technology, the game is basically a retelling of the Second World War – including the holocaust (the Darcsen being locked up in concentration camps, use as forced labour and then being executed as their overseers abandon their posts? It's not subtle at all). Now, I don’t want to attribute the qualities of one game to an entire nation, but given the role that Japan took during WW2, it seems odd that there is a romanticisation of the European front of the Second World War. Perhaps the only interesting divergence from real world history is that the “Allies” in the game’s fiction are almost as evil as the “Axis” powers in the game’s fiction. I just wonder what the game would have been like if it was set in a fictional Asia, with the “Korean” country trying to resist a fictional China and Japan. Again, this is just one of those odd socio-cultural aspects of being Japanese that I'm not sure I'll ever understand.
As for how story is presented in the game itself, it’s typically Japanese – long cutscenes intermixed with bits of gameplay. I was mostly caught up in the story, as clunky as it could be, so I didn’t mind it so much but I can understand how someone might be totally frustrated with having to sit through hours of videos and text bubbles in order to actually play the game (it's better than Metal Gear Solid 4 thankfully). That said the way they presented the story is probably one of the cleverest ways I’ve seen someone do a menu screen since Psychonauts. The game is set up so that as you play through the game, you are essentially reading a book about the war aptly titled The Valkyria Chronicles, with each chapter of the book being a mission in the game. When most games simply use a text menu to select cutscenes and missions, it was just nice to see someone take the time to integrate the menus into the fiction of the game world.
While I wished that they took some of the thought that went into designing the menus into figuring out ways that they could have told the story during gameplay, I definitely appreciate the game for what it is. Yes, it’s undeniably a Japanese game but it is also innovative enough that it becomes a standout in a genre that is somewhat stuck in old conventions.
(Now if I could only finish Persona 3... or Persona 4!)
Oh, and here's an interesting picture I found on NeoGAF that apparently comes from 4chan that pretty much sums up the weirdness in the game:
No comments:
Post a Comment