Valkyrie Profile could’ve been one of Squeenix’s big series. But they just kinda started pretending it doesn’t exist. The first one was solid and had a good PSP port (that just got ported to PS4 and PS5), the sequel on PS2 was pretty good but a bit more traditional, and then there was a DS game that I haven’t played unfortunately.

So this spin-off was announced a little bit matter-of-factly in I think a Sony Direct. I kinda wanted to get it solely because it was a new VP game, pretty much. So I did, when the PC version came out 2 months late, and then I took like a month to actually play it because I had so much other stuff to play. And then I took a couple weeks to review it.

Well let’s go! This won’t be super long.

Developer: Soleil, Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: September 23rd, 2022 on PS4 and PS5, November 11th, 2022 on PC
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Action Hack n Slash

Review

This is a pretty normal norse mythology story thing. Ragnarok is happening because Fenrir and Odin fought and stuff. Odin is hurt, Fenrir was sealed but seems to be breaking out. So Odin creates you, a valkyrie, to purify souls so he can regain his strength. The Valkyrie isn’t really named properly (she gets a real name near the end, and one of the characters calls her Maria which isn’t accurate). She goes down to the world, fights monsters, and of course collects spirits stronger spirits to hire them on as Einherjar, basically warriors that will fight alongside her. There’s another valkyrie going around trying to stop you, Fenrir tries to tempt you, and you probably realize pretty quickly that Odin’s evil too because of course. It’s not a very interesting story.

PC performance is fucked. Not because it’s bad, of course. At 1440p, I was running this at a straight 60fps with no drops ever. The problem, of course, being WHY SIXTY FPS? This is a PC, if I’m running at 60fps perfectly with no drops, that means, for sure, I can go higher. So why limit it? There’s really no reason any of this shouldn’t be running below 200fps on my setup.

So this is a game mostly focused on combat, and exploring the mostly-linear levels that sometimes have little nooks and crannies with stuff in them.

You have several weapons you can use. They all function very much the same. There’s a ton of different commands for attacks with the heavy and weak attack buttons. Stuff like different button combinations leading to different attack, or attacking after dodging, or attacking after jumping, or attacking after parrying, or attacking after double jumping and such… Basically all the weapons get the same inputs, but different attacks come out of it. So you can kinda focus on one or two weapons you like. Though all enemies have weaknesses to 1 specific weapon each, it doesn’t end up really mattering. You also jump, dodge roll, use a magic chain thing to quickly get to enemies (and specific attacks can happen after this), guard, lock-on to enemies and activate magic by holding R2 and pressing one of the face buttons. The base combat isn’t bad, but overall a bit simplistic. It’s very button-mashy. Like, you have all these options, but really just using normal combos and dodging sometimes is all you really need to do. Also you can only set 2 weapons at once, but you can pause literally whenever to switch those 2 so… kinda weird that they’d limit it like that. Same for spells, there’s 4 spell slots but you can change them around as needed.

The other option in battle is to summon your Einherjar buddies. They just attack automatically for a set number of time. In the menu you can set the amount of time the Einherjar will be out, though that costs more mana (or whatever that was called). Each Einherjar has 2 attacks they’ll use, though doing sidequests unlocks more attack you can set instead of those 2 base attacks). There’s actually really nothing to say about Einherjar because they just kinda do their thing. Also there’s only 4, so you don’t get light or dark.

Also locking on to enemies gives you their weakness, using an Einherjar of that element or using magic of that element can break them if you do it enough (there’s a meter). And bigger enemies can be further broken if you break them. Summoning an Einherjar does add their element to your weapon attacks, which is useful. If you have all your Einherjar out, you can just press the combination that summons them to change your elements.

You’d think this is an RPG… It’s not, really. Just very minimal elements for powering up. When killing enemies and finding chests and stuff in the levels you get different kinds of stones and souls and stuff (as well as healing and summoning mana, but not MP, you get that from attacking things normally). Those can be used to power up your weapons. You also have 3 skill trees, some give new attacks or features to the combat, others are just stat increases. Each skill has a CP value, you can equip up to 500 CP worth of skills… which happens to be almost all the skills in the game. No idea why the CP system is a thing lol. OH, and weapons have a proficiency system, I don’t think it does anything other than lock out certain parts of the skill trees, maybe I’m wrong.

And of course talking to certain spirits gives you optional sidequests. You can see the rewards before doing them so you can only do the ones you want, they’re not important anyways. Some give you attacks for your Einherjar, some give you better magic (some magic you just get in chests), though better magic cost way more MP so it’s hard to justify for a lot of the game, some give you weapons, and there’s items that give you more max health, max MP and max mana. W00.

Oh and to get the real ending you gotta get all the green flowers (the blue flowers literally do not matter even though they’re all over the fucking place, why are they there? It’s dumb!). Kinda BS.

Overall

This was okay but overall a bit weak.

The combat is fine, the story feels like it’s missing… characters.. and while there’s an okay level of content, it all feels pretty eh.

I don’t think this is one I recommend, but it did make it in honorable mentions in the games of the year post… kinda barely.