Customer Reviews

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First of all, the Japanese version included 60 MB of voice data, including extensive voice overs for story events and battles. Square-Enix has removed all voice overs for the story events, and replaced it with NOTHING. They even deleted the original Japanese voices, so no voice overs are available for the story events. All because they didn't want to pay a little extra to record additional lines from the voice actors they had already hired to narrate the battle voices. You can consider this version of the game to be INCOMPLETE.

The gameplay is rather tedious. There are no dungeons or platforming elements as in VP1. Instead, they have been replaced by a series of isometric maps on which the enemies and 4 of your characters move one-by-one, similar to games like Final Fantasy Tactics but not as fun. Each time one of your characters comes into contact with the enemy on the map, the game cuts to a separate battle screen and a battle in the style of VP1 occurs.

Each story battle has a sin meter that you must fill to 200% in order to win good equipment and items. This mechanism causes the difficulty level to snowball in one direction or another, either becoming nearly impossible or too easy. For example, if you miss 200% sin in one battle, you miss the good items/equipment that will help you win the next battle and fill its sin meter. So you miss another sin requirement and the game becomes progressively more difficult until it is nearly impossible. The opposite occurs too, where each completion of the sin meter makes the next sin meter and next battle progressively easier, until there is no challenge at all. Thus it is so important to get 200% sin in each battle, that you end up resetting and restarting the battle for every small mistake and instance of bad luck that causes you to miss the sin requirement.

Lastly, the story is short but reasonably interesting, and includes 3 different paths. The music is decent but repetitive, and frequently recycles tunes from VP1. The graphics are not ugly but they lack the beauty and style of previous VP games, instead resembling a standard SNES game circa 1995. I would only recommend this game to huge fans of the Valkyrie Profile series, who must know everything that happens in that universe.

The title of my review is something that has also been said of "Nethack," "Spelunky," "I Wanna Be The Guy," and many, many other games. It's technically true, as each of those games can be compared to a sadistic misanthrope who enjoys killing you in the most arbitrary ways. However, the emphasis in this case should be on "you," as I have never played another game that went this far out of its way to make the player feel like scum before crushing him. Trying to kill some rebels? You're attacked by a literal knight in shining armor, who tells you to repent before killing you in a single barrage. Choose to ally with the rebels instead? Your former mentor didn't, and he's devastated by your treachery before he kills you in a single barrage. Try to stay out of it? Well, too bad for you--you're facing another rebel leader instead, whose lover you cold-bloodedly murdered, and guess what she can do in a single barrage? Yet here's the thing: None of the fights are unfair, merely difficult, and the skill, creativity, and save scumming you'll need only make your eventual victory more satisfying. What's more, if you win without sacrificing the lives of your allies, you'll eventually get the opportunity to fight people who don't make you feel like scum for killing them, and you'll get the feeling that the development team has grudgingly accepted that anyone so committed can't be totally worthless. Of course, by the end your opponents can kill your entire party in a single barrage, but what's life without a little challenge?

This game is a lot of fun but it is very difficult. It took me a few hours to get the hang of the battle system and by the time I did I realized I needed to start over in order to have any chance of beating the game. I've played about 15 hours worth so far and it's still a lot of fun. One wrong decision can result in a Game Over, so every move counts.

Game Completion note: Finished main story, got the "best" ending.

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume begins well. Meaning that you go through a tutorial battle, then accidentally kill your best friend. That's not a spoiler; t happens in like the second battle. And so the story goes. You control Wyl, a young man (of course) attempting to kill the Valkyrie who took his father's soul on the field of battle. The game is heavily influenced by Norse mythology and all that jazz, and the dialog is appropriately formal. After that, the story seems to calm down a bit. Wyl is given the Covenant Plume, with which he can massively boost the abilities of his allies (read: automatic battle win), but they die at the end of the battle. I never used this except in the beginning. Maybe that's why the game was a bit hard on me. Anyhoo, the version of the story I went through (there are 3 endings) had Wyl involved in stopping a civil war and coming to peace with the Valkyrie. It was nice. A bit anticlimactic, but it works.

I think the story was the best part of the game. The battle system less so. It's your traditional Final Fantasy Tactics style isometric grid with you and your enemy taking turns. When you attack an enemy, you switch to an active battle system where each character is mapped to a button (A, B, X, Y). You then proceed to attack the enemy by pressing the button corresponding to the desired attacker. A combo meter keeps track of consecutive hits, and when it gets to 100 you get to do a special finishing move. The bosses do this at the end of their turn anyways. Cheap, but you can deal with it. It's interesting, but gets repetitive after a while.

The presentation is very nice. The music is ... interesting. There's no other work for it. There are nice orchestral pieces and then right next to them, fast and driving rock music. Not exactly fitting for the setting, but it wasn't bad. It just wasn't good. I liked the orchestral pieces. Graphics get the job done. Finishing moves are spectacular. Pre-rendered opening is sweet. I only watch the first half, because the second is not as epic, in my opinion. Nothing special though.

Should you play it? If you're a fan of turn based strategy in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, yes you should play it. If you're not, this won't convince you otherwise. If you like a nice story, you should play this.

While there are some good things going for this game, a lot of the innovations are either tedious or silly, and most importantly, the game suffers from an AI that is dumber than a box of rocks. Let me start off with the AI, first of all.

The battle system - the battle system is slightly silly and not a plausible representation of how spacetime would normally work. It's quirky and based on goofball spacetime bifurcations kind of like in Disgaea: anytime you're in range of an enemy and an ally initiates an attack, you get a free attack. For a party of 4, this can mean that your party can attack up to 16 times in one turn. It's not really a plausible mechanism, and there's no reason why people should be able to perform actions 4 times as quickly as usual just because other people are around. A more reasonable approach would be to make characters pool all of their attacks into a unified attack, so that the combos and whatever still stack and the enemy still only gets to counter-attack once (if they even survive at all). Needlessly proliferating the total number of actions characters can take is just random and cheesy, and it severely limits the effectiveness of splitting the party into two halves, say - which means there are less possibilities for mixing up strategies in a halfway effective manner. It pigeonholes you into rigging up a geometric configuration that maximizes the total number of attacks, rather than prioritizing targets in any strategic way.

The Sin system is not only tedious, but it turns the usual principles of strategy inside-out just for the lulz. Instead of efficiently managing your attacks to just barely squeeze past a rough battle against an aggressive, evenly-matched foe, you're presented with a ton of overpowered morons you're supposed to overkill one at a time - otherwise, the money and items you need to succeed in the game are withheld from you for not producing enough "Sin". However, it's not hard to produce sufficient "Sin", just tedious - you just gang up everyone on one target after another - lather, rinse, repeat - the whole game long, and endure the repeated finishing attack cutscenes on top of the already-lethal damage you already dealt.

The AI. It is massively stupid, and is probably the biggest, most striking cut corner the whole production. The enemy characters are entirely catatonic until there is something to heal or attack within range that turn. To compensate for this, they stack the odds against you otherwise, making battles into a very tedious exercise in which "strategy" means drawing aggro just enough to pick off lone enemies one or two at a time. This is why it's trivial to max out your "Sin" if you're doing well enough to beat the map at all - most of the enemies will ignore you for most of the fight, and everyone is attacking multiple times anyway because of the spacetime goofiness, so it's not like you have to make careful choices on who to take down and ration out damage - you hit everyone ever time for full damage, and only two per turn anyway because the rest patiently wait for you to approach them while you beat up their comrades, like mindless the mindless horde of circling thugs in a cheesy martial arts film.

The real trouble comes in rescue missions. These are the only missions that turn out to be hard, if not impossible. Your "rescue" target usually does pathetic damage that only serves to provoke near-fatal counterattacks. Not only are they pathetic, but their attacks don't combo with your party, so the spacetime exploitation wackiness doesn't kick in to bring them almost up to par. They don't even move, and in one mission, you're supposed to rescue a priestess who starts out within range of three enemies, any two of which can kill her in one turn... and she doesn't move away at all. There might be some way to use some kind of spell to draw the attacks to another character, but I didn't stick around to find out because at this point, playing the game any longer would just have been an exercise in feeling like throwing the DS through a window. This wouldn't be at all necessary if the AI just weren't so totally stupid.

This came a few missions after another rescue mission, which I will describe: The computer has a mage and a lancer. The lancer is within attacking range of your rescue target, and for some reason attacks from one square away instead of two to avoid counterattacks. Well, whatever. You can heal your rescue target faster than he can damage her, so no problem there... or so you think. After several turns, she finally wears the lancer down. So the mage walks over to heal the lancer. Then the next turn, the mage is close enough to the rescue target that suddenly he has the bright idea of adding some attacks of his own... but in the world of VP:CotP, two attackers means *four* attacks per turn, because of the spacetime wackiness - and there's no way to heal fast enough (this is assuming you haven't used the Plume on your only healer in a previous battle, in which case you just can't win and you have to start the game over). Suddenly the rules of the game are totally changed because a monumentally stupid AI got just the right nudge from a hidden timer you probably wouldn't have expected; instead of being primarily a game of strategy, the wonky, stupid AI turns the game into a nonsensical, isometric version of Choose Your Own Adventures, where you just have to experiment and see how the AI of your overpowered-but-stupid opponent will react, and start over if you do the wrong thing.

You can't win without exploiting the AI, and if there's no one to rescue, you can sit around recovering as long as you want, making it more like a turn-based version of the boring early parts of World of Warcraft where you hunt non-hostile creatures. If you want to juggle resources and take chances as foes advance from all sides in the heat of battle... this isn't the right game for you, at least half the time.

The multiple plot threads and endings and such are nice, but they killed this game by making it clumsy and awkward. You might find some fun in there in spite of all that, but the hard parts aren't hard for the right reasons, and if you're like me, you'll be more relieved that they're over than pleased with your strategies.

For fans of Strategy RPG's, you can't really ask for a better game. Insane amounts of customization, excellent story, likeable characters and great music. Just know that this game is hard. REALLY hard. Story deals with Wylfred, whose father was slain in battle and Lenneth Valkyrie claimed him to fight in Valhalla. Wyl's family becomes poor, sister dies, mom goes crazy. So he embarks on a quest to kill the Goddess Valkyrie. I highly recommend this game for fans of the original, but newcomers beware: this is not the game for you if you're new to strategy games.

Like all of the Valkyrie Profile games, it has a good story and great character development (although not quite up to the level of Lenneth- which was extraordinary). That being said, this game is very hard. Hour after hour, try after try, just to beat certain battles. The difficulty definately takes away from the enjoyment of the game.

I have play Final Fantasy tactics , Disgaea , and some other games I can't remember. This game makes you careful how you move and fight on the battle map. When you fight someone or they fight you all allies within attack range get to join in and if they have special attacks they can do even more damage.

well I don't want to say to much and spoil things or not give it enough credit the Valkyrie Profile games are good fun.

I actually have the Japanese version with chinese translation. It has the japanese voices, chinese text. The voice acting is pretty good, although I don't understand a single word, but it does fit the scenario pretty well.

The game is just plain difficult. Many battles needs to be played many many times to reach perfection. Without perfection, you won't get the best after battle bonus items, which makes the next battle even harder.

At certain points it's very hard to let go as well. It's difficult to let the character you built up die. And to boast, there isn't much characters to being with and each character is very unique, it's not just a army of characters you don't care for.

The good thing is there's multiple endings, so there is some replayability. So far, I've only completed it once, to get one of the endings, supposedly you have to go thru the game without using the plume skill, which is really difficult beyond imagination.

If you have patience and don't mind resetting and starting again, this is a game for you. Tactics games aren't for everyone, and this one in particular needs players who's really into tactics genre games.

This game is really enjoyable. The combat system is still the classic system, but its mixed with strategy elements, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. Except that it isn't as cut and dry in mechanics. This game requires tactical formations instead of just telling the character what to do. After that, though, its the same as the other Valkyrie Profile titles; each character is assigned to a face button (X,Y,A,B), and has a limited number of attacks, followed by a Soul Crush special attack, which is the equivalent to a FF limit break. By continuing the assault after the target is dead, the player earns Sin points, usually up to 100. Each level has a required Sin level, and failure to reach this level results in a difficult boss fight against a phantom of one of the characters. The only way to win this fight is to use the plume to quadruple the stats of one of your characters, which results in the permanent death of the character at battle's end. This can be used in normal battles as well, which helps to reach the SIN requirements, and also changes the story and gives the main character a new tactic for the rest of the game. There are three possible endings, which are actually decided early in the game, and each has its own list of characters. Also, the Sin level is split into three ranks: C is required to avoid the boss, but B and A ranks result in items and weapons that are tremendously useful at that point in the game. The game is told in archaic, or Shakespearean, dialogue, so it can be confusing but is still enjoyable. Although the game starts out difficult, it gets easy over time, and defeating any ending allows for the game to be restarted with all weapons and items, and any tactics learned in the last playthrough. This makes it ALOT easier to beat the other endings, and also allows you to teach the main character all the tactics from sacrificing allies. Beating all three endings unlocks the Seraphic Gate optional dungeon, which is a popular challenge in earlier VP titles and a good prize to work for. Each story is short, and since each is different, it is enjoyable to go through them all, instead of being tedious like other rpg's. It also doesn't require the grinding of other rpg's, but it doesn't give you time to grind optionally either.

PROS: Great story, combat is a great combination of new and old techniques, graphics are fun, archaic speech, the game gives you CG cutscenes to look forward to, characters are cool and art is beautiful, and voices are good for the most part

CONS: Some battle quotes are horrible. VP used to give us stuff like "These foes actually dare to stand against us?...The Folly." and "It shall be engraved upon your soul!" Now we get cliche crap like "My patience is not to be tested!" and "Why don't you go away?" Some voices are annoying too, and the cutscenes have no voices. Also, the 'C' ending deserves its title, cause its way to easy, wastes your time with its shortness, and has a pointless ending that is meant to punish you for sacrificing too many allies. Thankfully, the 'B' and 'A' endings are good (There is also an epic fail ending, where too many characters are sacrificed in a single chapter, and Freya comes and murders everyone.)

Overall, though, this game is worth getting. It was the hardest in the series, but since it had no grinding, it was the shortest, and it was good enough to get me to beat it, something I haven't done with the other titles in the series