Valkyria Chronicles 2 Summary

Valkyria Chronicles 2
Spoiler-Free!

Available on the PSP. You can play on your Vita but in order to do so you have to buy the game on the PSN store from your PS3, connect your Vita via the USB cable to your PS3 and transfer the game over because Sega never whitelisted VC2 on the Vita PSN store. VC2 is Vita TV compatible.

With this game Sega decided to abandon everything all of the previous game's foundations. The overarching narrative is introduced and then promptly takes a backseat to painful anime hijinks. The game takes place in "military school" but make no mistake, there's nothing military about this school. It is merely another anime high school with copy and pasted characters with no creativity or relevance to the story. Every character is retrieved from the anime garbage bin and is promptly forgettable and disposable. Death is cheapened to a joke, you have little girl sexualization that permeates the game, and the narrative has no tension or stakes. Because the game wants to fulfill a high school anime fantasy rather than maintain a competent military story it suffers from severe character bloat on top of the already terrible dialogue, awful plot choices, and poorly drawn up mission incentives.

The battle system was reworked to work on the PSP. Rather than have one large map to battle on, there are multiple interconnected small maps that use flag checkpoints to move back and forth. This is actually a unique and novel way to battle and is fun. However the balance of the title is completely and utterly broken; even if you've never played a strategy game before, you can completely crush the game's balance once the tutorial missions end. There is only one challenging mission in the entire story, but it's challenging for all the wrong reasons and shows in its lazy design. The conditions for A-Rank were also completely untouched from VC1, meaning that the same problems of speed over tactics remain.

To add on to the disappointing story and characters and the broken battle system is the grinding. The game demands grinding from every part of its existence. From forcing you to complete unrelated missions to advance the story, to demanding that you gather rare materials (the number of different materials, and LEVEL of materials is staggering) and Ace drops to move ahead in R&D, to rely on random-drop "credits" (that also have a huge number of types and levels; hooray for multi-tier, multi-level RNG grinding) that are tied to specific missions in order to try out other classes. The grind crosses from incredible levels of unnecessary time-wasting to completely insulting to the player base, and it's worth considering whether this was Sega's punishment to their fans for not buying VC1.

To top off all the terrible writing, broken battle system, and ridiculous grinding requirements, we have one of the worst pre-battle menu layouts in all of strategy game history. Assigning weapons and tank parts anything else that may suit your fancy just to play in an optimal manner requires you to go back and forth through menus constantly.

My recommendation: Watch a highly-rated military series or movie on Netflix/Hulu/YT, read up the wiki on VC2's story elements and prepare to play the next game. If a strategy game doesn't respect your time and effort then there is no reason you should give it any.