Valkyria Azure Revolution Personal Thoughts

A lot of people assume that the success of the PC version of VC1 led to Sega choosing to develop VAR. But that is not true. They started development of VAR in 08/2014, and the PC version's release is 11/2014. Decisions regarding this series are always made with the Japanese in mind first. The development interview of VAR said "we wanted to make a game that appealed to the typical Japanese (as in person) RPG player". The only thing the PC release of VC1 inspired was the release of VC1 Remaster on consoles.

Many people like to cite the 1 million sales number. But sadly, this incorporates the PC version. Despite an enthusiastic (and sometimes accusatory) fanbase, Valkyria games don't sell at full price. Even in Japan in 2008 on the PS3, VC1 sold a paltry 77k copies at launch. In North America it did far worse (33-40k), only moving units once the price was very heavily slashed, and only managed to double its initial NPD result one year later, silently and slowly eking forward.

I think the idea behind VAR and creating the Valkyria Project was a smart one (as mentioned in the interview). You don't have the fanbase size to properly develop a true HD sequel to Chronicles, and you also want to remake VC2 and VC3 but there's no way that's affordable, so what are the options? Expand the fanbase overall by creating a franchise with different genres utilizing different games. If the overall fanbase increases, then perhaps you can rely on a more stable sales foundation to sell future games. It's definitely a longshot and idealistic, so I have to admire them for trying in this risk-adverse market.

But they made way too many mistakes. While I understand that they didn't want people to be confused into thinking they were developing another Chronicles, they didn't include enough gameplay and visual callbacks to the Valkyria series, not really making VAR connect enough to the Valkyria "themes", thus making it look like just another random fantasy RPG. Their messaging on the English side of things was nonexistent, so foreign fans thought they were abandoning the Chronicles games entirely or creating a hacked up Chronicles sequel (you know how fans of JRPGs act when there's no English info around, imagination just runs wild). Japanese fans were unimpressed and as dev went on the quality wasn't there at all. If you've played FFXV or Tales recently then took a look at VAR then what on earth would inspire you to drop the day one cash for it unless you're a hardcore fanboy like me?

Sega had noble goals but their corporate efficiency, marketing execution and understanding of appeal is pretty awful. If you have a signature niche series, is it really worth announcing a spinoff that has almost zero callbacks to its source material and can't match basic ARPG standards? Is it worth having zero English information even if a localization isn't announced, thus letting fan imagination rather than facts dictate the flow of information before you even get a chance to market your game to Western fans that you reference in interviews as being an important reason to continue developing Valkyria games? While releasing playable demos of the game is smart and likely saved Sega from a financial disaster, is it really smart to put out a demo which is so barebones functional that people write off your whole game?