Valhalla Knights 2

Release Date: October 1, 2008

Valhalla Knights 2 Review

The second verse is the same as the first.

Considering that you'll have to control the skills and abilities of your entire party, this can be quite a lot to keep track of, especially when you start to expand from a solo mission into a squad of six warriors. Unlike other RPGs, where you'll gain party members because of missions or situations, players can acquire new members by paying for them at the guild and tailor making their stats. Essentially, you're creating additional characters from scratch all over again, and preparing them for battle. You dictate the behavior of these characters in a fight, where they'll be arranged on a map, and allow them to perform according to their preset behaviors as you pound on monsters in real time. Thanks to the speed that battles run at, you'll frequently batter your opponents into the ground, either with sheer numbers or strength, particularly when you go up against lower level monsters. You are given the opportunity to send in commands to your party, but due to the speed of the battle (and the size of the party you move with), you won't really have the chance to tell your characters to use items or target specific monsters. As a result, you can't tell your party to focus more on a dangerous threat and leave the weaker monsters alone, which can sometimes result in party members being slaughtered before you can get a handle on the fight. Because you also won't know exactly what or how many creatures you'll fight in a battle, this can be a deadly problem.

Battle is a fast paced cacophony of death.

Even this wouldn't be much of a problem if there was an easy way to resurrect your characters or quickly return to the safety of town where you could heal your party. However, you'll frequently find that you'll need to slog your way back across a number of maps to reach the outskirts of town, dealing with load times as you move from one area of a map to another. At first, this isn't that big a deal, but when you start running out of Escape Cards and you are trying to return to sell off a large haul of items or need to bring back half your party, you realize just how laborious it is to slog back to town. This was a problem within the first title, and while it seems to have been balanced a bit more in this title, the same essential issues take place in Valhalla Knights 2, which is truly disappointing. Toss in the same issue with a map that is extremely small, even when you try to zoom out, and you can totally run into accidental ambushes or get lost as you explore.

Now, you're not always forced to go through battles alone, even if you've filled up the ranks of your party. You'll also have a chance to go through exclusive co-op missions with a friend that has Valhalla Knights 2 via ad hoc as well, exploring dungeons and collecting experience and treasure that can be used in the single-player game. What's more, you can trade items back and forth in the co-op game, or battle each other in an arena in versus mode, where you can wager gold or items on the winner of the outcome of the battle. However, there are issues with this as well, as the game will scale the co-op missions and encounters to that of the higher level party. This means that if you've gotten your party up to level 12 or 13, and your friend picks up the game, you're going to have to carry them through each dungeon, because they're going to get completely crushed. That frequently leads to both players losing characters and eventually the co-op mission. It won't restrict or handicap higher level characters during versus battles either, so one high level fighter will slaughter an entire squad of lower characters in the arena, which isn't fun at all.

How many earth tones can be thrown into a screen?

The visuals for Valhalla Knights are fine, but nothing that are going to blow you away. Completely different than that of the first title, with a different visual presentation of battle, character models that are found throughout each area, such as the monsters that fly or crawl their way across the levels, are good. The same can be said for the character models in the status screens, which reflect the various changes made to armor and weapon selections. Impressively, the game does manage to render party members and monsters in fights with minimal to no slowdown, even when a lot of action is going on at the same time. However, most of the environments are full of bland texture work and visuals, and facial character differentiation, especially when you're making a new party member, is extraordinarily weak.

The Verdict

With the same quest and exploration issues from the first title, as well as lots of micromanagement problems and missing information, Valhalla Knights 2 almost feels like a rehash of the original title with a brand-new coat of paint. While the story could have been intriguing, and the flexibility of tweaking every aspect of a party member is rather engaging, all of the negatives, particularly the slow nature of the story development, overwhelm the title.

IGN Ratings for Valhalla Knights 2 (PSP)
The story of the game is quickly abandoned for menial tasks, and the lack of information within both the game and instruction manual is simply inexcusable.
Character and monster models as well as changes in armor look good, but bland environments and map work hampers the game.
The music is boring, repetitive and full of uninspired clips thrown into the game for ambient effect.
It's easy to fly through combat, but when you have to deal with idiotic quests that don't advance the narrative in any way, the enjoyment of character creation or the rest of the game wanes.
Lasting Appeal
While character creation is deep and playing with a friend could be enjoyable in spurts, most of the other gameplay issues will restrict the amount of time that you'll spend wandering its dungeons.
(out of 10, not an average)
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Game Details

Genre: RPG
Release Date:
United States: October 1, 2008
Australia: July 9, 2009
Japan: May 29, 2008
MSRP: 29.99 USD
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