Game:

Valkyrie Profile (1999)

Duration: 10:09:13

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Part 4. There aren't many PS1 era JPRG's that I haven't played, and somehow this one managed to slip through the cracks. The focus is heavily on dungeon crawling and is extremely light on the story. Party members are introduced briefly through short stories and then nothing ever really amounts to them. You can chose to send them off to Valhalla and help Odin or keep them in your party. The mechanics aren't really well explained in the game itself or the manual. So you really have to experiment with stuff. It eventually becomes apparent what you need to be doing but things really are only alluded to and sometimes it feels like there are red herrings. The game explicitly tells you that there are 3 endings. Cool. The game also tells you that keeping treasure from Odin is bad and that you want to please him. So my brain went the logical route and turned everything over to Odin thinking that was what the game wanted from me. It was wrong and I'm pretty sure that it hurt me in the long run. That's a blind playthrough for you. There are also multiple difficulties for the game, but it doesn't do a great job of conveying that you are going to be missing out on large swaths of content by playing on anything other than hard. It seems there may be more story content for the other endings, considering that there is a story thread that goes largely unresolved. Lezard is introduced than largely forgotten. Gotta say that's not a great way to conduct a story in a game. There should be some sort of resolution and fulfillment of the main story outside of a secret ending. It's a little frustrating. Locking the main story behind a convoluted system for the good ending is pretty bad game design. The game itself is interesting. It's largely a dungeon crawler JRPG. The dungeons are presented as a 2D platformer. For as much jumping and platforming you can do in this game they really are clunky, which is a bit disappointing. On the other hand though, combat is pretty cool. Each character is designated to a face button and depending on their weapon and attack you can chain combos together to build up a meter to launch some pretty devastating special attacks. It took me until the end of the game to realize that most equipment outside of weapons and accessories are useless. You can set up a Final Fantasy XII like gambit system on items and they can make you near unkillable. You don't get money from fights, just experience. At the end of each chapter you are rewarded with money for the shop, which also gets new items every chapter. Then new items seem largely useless as well. So I rarely ever used the shop outside of buying a new weapon every few chapters. With the lack of story though the game has a very heavy focus on dungeon crawling but the dungeons are insanely limited. Each chapter is segmented into periods and you get 24 each chapter, certain events take more periods than others. Visiting Towns takes 1 period and dungeons 2. There is rarely ever a good reason to return or even go to towns outside of recruiting characters. Sometimes your companions have secret hidden items in a town but it seems to be rare. With all that said, by the time you visit each new dungeon and recruit all the characters for that chapter you are left with quite a bit of time and the only real thing to do is return to previous dungeons and fight enemies for a few levels. Hard mode addresses this I think with extra added dungeons. That's disappointing and I regretted not playing on hard. Usually hard means more grinding in these earlier JRPGs and I was thinking I was saving myself some needless pain. I was wrong. Honestly, I think this is a bad game for a blind playthrough. I rarely if ever advocate for spoiling yourself on game mechanics, but you can get so much more out of this game with just a little bit of early research. It's really disappointing and that to me is not a great design. They really want you to play this 70 hour game more than once and that is asking quite a lot. I am sure 2nd playthroughs go a heck of a lot faster since you then have more knowledge of what the game expects. I'm just not a big fan of that approach. There is a very cool post game dungeon that really tests your skill. The downside is that some of it is locked behind doing hard mode. One of the few times FOMO really got to me. I like to get the most out of a playthrough and due to no fault of my own I was locked out of a ton of stuff. It's pretty easy to hold against the game. And I do. I don't think this game is bad by any means. i did have fun playing it and very much enjoyed the challenge of the post game dungeon. It just has a bunch of things that don't sit well with me. Since the game employs an RNG type mechanic to what characters you get and dungeons there is a lot of replay value, which I know lots of people love. I'm just not that big on dungeon crawling JRPGs. Enjoy my blind playthrough.

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