Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume DS

[abigsmurf]

Been playing through this, I'm about 3-4 hours in.

Disclaimer : this is the first VP game I've played.

The plot is fairly interesting at the moment but suffers from what 4chan would call 'grimdark'. The story starts off with your father being taken by a Valkyrie, your mother falling ill with grief and your sister starving to death as no one is able to look after them. So far, that's about as cheerful as the game gets. Don't get me wrong, it's well written but it's just so incredibly sombre and the dialogue is so deadly serious that it doesn't quite give the kind of emotional reaction it's aiming for.

The USP of this game is the dark plume. In every battle, you've got to acheive a sin quota. You meet this quota by doing one of two things: charging up the sin meter through overkill, the more damage you do to someone after a fatal blow, the more sin you rather up. The other method is to sacrifice a character to the plume. This makes them basically godlike (multiplies their stats by a factor of 10) and wins the battle, as well as filling out the Sin meter. However once you sacrifice a character, they're dead for good and are taken out of the story (to prevent it from utterly breaking the game, you can only sacrifice characters who've permanently joined). It reminds me a lot of Dragon Quarter in that you can get powers to guarantee win a battle at a huge cost.

If you don't fill out the sin meter in a battle, it displeases your patron and she may send out ultra powerful assassins that are tough to beat as punishment. If you fill it out well, you get bonus items.

The battle system is fairly interesting. After every attack, enemies in attack range will counter at full strength (and vice versa), however when you attack all allies in range attack with you. This encourages you to gang up on enemies to kill them more effectively (and the need for overkill encourages this further).

The negatives: In one example of glaringly bad game design, I went to the 'wrong' location out of a choice of places and went straight into battle. In the battle I was joined by characters I'd not met and it was clear I was supposed to be carrying out some mission. However I had unknowingly skipped some vital dialogue explaining this by not visiting the 'right' place first. This is pretty inexcusable for an RPG.

The battle system itself, is clever and fairly fun. It is however, pretty slow, lots of slight pauses, turns take a while because of them switching to action sequences for every attack and it suffers from the annoying AI trait of enemies staying in the same place unless they can get within attack range (actually makes is slightly easier but it means battles take longer). Occasionally it's frustrating if you try to get a monster's health low only to find there's someone else in range when you attack or you do a critical hit and end up killing them without getting much sin (this is possibly deliberate although it's odd you can cancel counter attacks but not normal ones). Biggest problem with the battle system seems to be a lack of a quick save option.

Overall it's a fairly polished strategy game that offers more tactically and a larger challenge than any other DS strategy I've played so far. The plot tries a bit too hard and there are a couple of bizzarre design decisions but at this stage it looks like the roster of quality RPGs on the DS keeps growing.

[abigsmurf]

I've lost interest. I may stop playing it.

The battle system is frustrating as hell. You're usually outnumbered (you can only put 4 people out) and being outnumbered in this system is a huge deal as people nearby join in on attacks (and for some reason, lances in this game have a huge range similar to bows but without the dead zone).

The sin system is poor. The targets are far too harsh and even if you go all out trying to generate sin by getting an enemies HP down before ganging up on it, you could end up accidentally doing a critical hit which does about 3 times the damage, killing the enemy and granting 0 sin.

Using items consumes AP, presumably to stop you endlessly reviving characters but, given how outnumbered you are, you'll need to use lots of reviving items anyway.

The plot consists of standard tales of woe for characters who never speak after their chapter with a different tale each chapter. It's hard to get engaged in a humourless, grim plot that disposes of it's cast frequently.

This should be a much better game than it is.

[Psyduck]

I disagree, I found it relatively easy to win every battle first time (after a few mistakes while learning the system) and to collect enough sin each time too. There's the odd really tough battle early on but you either have to use the plume or level up in side-missions and be clever with tactics to do em.

[abigsmurf]

Yeah I posted that after the final battle in the second chapter.

There's simply no way to win that and get full sin without using the plume (only possible way would to go straight to the leader but it's impossible to generate 200 sin from one death). You cannot grind as the side missions aren't repeatable, the enemies were all vastly more powerful than you and have the stupidly long range lances.

I'm giving it another chance, the plot remains hopelessly morbid for the sake of being morbid but it may yet grasp me. I've nothing else to play on the train anyhow.

[abigsmurf]

Given it another go... and came up to another "outnumbered by 10 enemies who do huge damage" mission (straight after another, long mission with no saving in between). You've no way of knowing if it's a plume level until you've taken a pounding so it usually takes a Game over.

This isn't worth it, I'm not enjoying the central mechanic, the design choices with regards to the gameplay are awful. The story is tragic for tragic's sake. I'm going to sell it.