By: RJ (@rga_02)

• Valkryia Revolution
  
• Developer - Media Vision
  
• Publisher - SEGA
  
• Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStaion Vita
  

Alternative universes provide a fresh take to well established stories. However sometimes that fresh new take ends up being more rotten than what you can find in your nearest dumpster. Valkryia Revolution is sadly rotten packaged software that belongs in that dumpster.

Valkryia Revolution takes place in an alternate universe of the Chronicles series. Focused on the Liberation War between the Kingdom of Jutland and the Ruzi Empire, the game has it all to be a great game. However the story overstays its welcome and becomes less appetizing than meat you could buy in your gas station freezer. The story is presented through overdrawn cutscenes that should of have ended after the first thirty seconds, and to make it even more worse, the animation within the cutscenes are very poor. You could probably animate something better out of a flip-book.  I do hope you have a high level of tolerance, because you’ll be encountering this level of “high-level” quality cutscenes more often than you actually play the game.

This brings me to another negative, the gameplay.  Someone has to honestly try really hard to screw up the gameplay of the Chronicles series but somehow it was achieved. They stripped out what made Chronicles great and turned it into some action-RPG in the vein of games like Type-0. Unlike that game though, little thought was given with the new system especially in regards with performance. You can do your basic attacks, spells, etc by selecting your character of choice, but Lord Almighty, battling is such a mess. A lot of the time, the camera movements are something you would expect out of a Worldstar fight video – and even then, you’d probably find something better on that site. The game also suffers from frame-rate drops when there are multiple enemies on the screen. Other than performance issues, it also seems like tactics were also an afterthought in this game as well. You can get by this game by just running towards your enemy without a care in the world.

However not everything in this game reeks of a stale piece of meat. The soundtrack is pretty gorgeous. At times it seems like they blew the entire budget and focused on the music, but the orchestral sounds itself aren’t able to save this game.

Valkryia Revolution was disappointing to put it politely. It was really upsetting to see something that could of have been great to be relegated into something so rotten.