Game Reviews

Valkyria Chronicles 2 boasts the same brand of deep, strategic combat as its console-based predecessor, but occasionally falls victim to a lackluster narrative and temperamental control scheme.

It’s hard enough for sequels to live up to their predecessors, but Valkyria Chronicles 2 faces the extra responsibility of introducing the franchise to a new platform. The combination strategy/role-playing game attempts to repackage its unique blend of stylized artwork and gameplay complexity for the PlayStation Portable while adding new elements to the formula its PlayStation 3 parent made famous.

As a portable game, Valkyria Chronicles 2 is everything a PSP player could hope for, even if they didn’t play the original. It has hours and hours of content and battles packaged into convenient chunks that don’t eat up more than half an hour at the most. The tutorials, while long, are easily skippable and can be reviewed after the fact with an in-game system that also keeps track of cut-scenes, in case you skipped those, too. You could, in fact, play through the whole game without ever watching a cut-scene or paying any attention to the plot and have an enjoyable strategy-RPG experience.

And that’s why Valkyria Chronicles 2 fails at being a sequel -– players can skip the whole story, and many might be sorely tempted to do so when they find out the game is basically a Japanese schoolgirl anime. Instead of picking up where the original game left off with the same squad in a neutral country surrounded by war,