[quote name='Josh7289']Valkyria Chronicles is a strategy RPG, so there's no playable game world. You move from chapter to chapter, with each chapter containing a few cutscenes and a battle or two. Outside of battle, you're limited to basically choosing who will be on your team, and how you want to customize/improve your team. If you've ever played Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, or other SRPGs you should be familiar with the setup.
The unique thing about VC, though, is its battle system. During battle, you and the enemy take turns ordering your units around on each of your respective turns, so it's a regular turn-based SRPG system like that, but as soon as you actually select one of your units to control, the game switches to a real-time behind-the-back camera view, and you're given full control over that character until that character runs out of "Action Points" -- that is, until you've reached a certain limit of movement. During this time, you'll basically be able to do whatever you want, but you can only fire at enemies once during that movement.
You can also use characters more than once per turn. Each turn you get a number of "Command Points". Its costs 1 CP to be able to control most units, though you could, say, spend 3 CP on one unit on one turn to control that unit three times on that one turn (and you can attack with them each time), though they'll start off with fewer Action Points each subsequent time you use them on one particular turn.
And of course there is the gamut of special abilities and the like that individual characters or individual weapons will have.
As for the story, I haven't finished the game yet, but from what I've seen, it's not going to blow your socks off, but the story definitely has a strong foundation that gives you a will and a reason to fight. Where I am in the game right now things are starting to change a bit, and the story may start heading in a slightly different direction, but I won't say anything more than that (namely because I still
don't know exactly what's coming; I'm only about a third of the way through, heh).
If you want a quick summarization of the plot: "It's a fantasy world that basically has WWII technology. The continent Europa is divided into three countries, and the two largest countries are currently at war. When one of the two countries invades the third (small and neutral) country (your homeland), you join the militia, become the leader of a squad, and are tasked with defending it." There's more detail to it than that, and there are other themes such as romance, and racism is touched upon, too. What I wrote above is definitely not all there is to the story.
And I realize you've already played the game, Padinn, so you should be familiar with the battle system, but I tried to write this as a general overview of the game, so I included the parts about the battle system anyway.
As for myself, I truly do wholeheartedly recommend Valkyria Chronicles.[/quote]
Yup, I went ahead and bought it. It's fun
I'm still looking for a good more traditional FF10 type RPG. I'm trying out demos of Tales, Blue Dragon, and Sonata today.
Anyone know anything about the new Star Ocean game coming out? Would that be the type of game I'm looking for?
