Disclaimer: This is a heavily edited version of a review I posted elsewhere. In the original I gave this game a 8/10, but after some thought I'm bumping the score up a little.
Senjou no Valkyria is an interesting game. It is a well beloved and critically acclaimed game, but I think it deserves more attention. Especially because of the masterful way that it blends turn-based tactics and real-time action.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's start with the basics: Senjou no Valkyria is a tactics game where you play as a squad commander in a fictitious WWII setting. The story is nothing to write home about and you've seen all of this before. Your city is being attacked by the evil Empire. You enlist and you are assigned as a squad leader after doing some heroic deed. You and your band fight in a series of battles against the Empire. And so on.
The battles are the real meat of this game. The battles are turn-based, divided in player and enemy turns, a la Fire Emblem. At the beginning of each mission, you are given your objective and you choose a number of squad members to deploy in your corner of the map in a top-down view map. You get a set number of action points each turn, spend one of them to select a character to move and make an action with them. So far, pretty basic turn-based tactics stuff, right?
So you start your turn, spend an action point and select a character. That's when the magic happens. After choosing your character the games perspective changes from the top-down view and becomes a full-blown third-person shooter. You are the character. You're there in the middle of the battlefield, at street level with buildings looming over you. No grids on the floor. You're actually walking around aiming and shooting at things. Like in a traditional tactics game you can move up to a certain distance (depending on the class, scouts can move farther, etc.) and do only one action (shooting, throwing a grenade, etc.), then the turn ends. But within these confines you're completely free.
And it's not like you can walk around freely and the enemy will do nothing just because it's not their turn. The enemies shoot automatically at you when you get in their line of sight, and the damage in this game is high, so you have to be careful, going from cover to cover while people are shooting at you, like you would in a third-person shooter. This also works for your units, so it is important to position and face them in a direction where they can see and shoot at incoming threats when they appear. This makes the battlefields feel alive, and not just a case of "my turn, your turn". That's where this game shines, this masterful blend of turn-based tactics and real time action.
Real-time tactics games is a hard genre to do right. It is comprised of two halves that often fight with each other: if the game is too fast, you don't have much time to devise your tactics, and if the game is too slow, the action will not be very exciting. So, making a good real-time tactics game is a tough balancing act that not many developers can achieve. Senjou no Valkyria bypasses this problem in a way that it gets the best of both worlds: the tactics are turn-based, but the action is real-time. I've never seen this concept so elegantly done in a game before, or since for that matter. It is so good that sometimes I start thinking how other tactics games would be using this system.
In Divinity: Original Sin when you tell your sorceress to cast a fireball you watch a cutscene of her walking to the specified point and casting the spell. Now imagine that you were the one doing this instead, or you were the one aiming that bow, or climbing down the stairs and slashing that orc. Now, instead of the generally small environments where D:OS's battles take place, imagine a huge battlefield, swarming with enemies, with bases to capture, snipers shooting at you, tanks rolling around, and mortar fire raining at you. Welcome to Senjou no Valkyria.
Ok, the battle system is great, but how about the maps and missions? Having a good battle system without having good maps is the same as having a platformer with great movement options but all the stages are flat. Well, the mission design is uneven, most of them are very good missions and but there are a few tedious ones. But there is a great amount of variety here: escaping in a forest at night with mortars raining from the sky, running from a huge tank inside a canyon while slowing him down with falling rocks (a highlight of the game) and even good old JRPG boss fights against an invulnerable superboss.
Unfortunately some of the missions have a problem that plagues many tactics games: reinforcements that come out of nowhere and move the SAME turn. Most of the times I've died it was because of these guys spawning and destroying my tank before I could do nothing. Reinforcements are a cool way to spice up missions, I understand, but at least warn me where they are coming from or don't let them move the turn they arrive so I can prepare! Fuck that shit.
Speaking of dying, the game has a permadeath system. If the body of one of your fallen squad members is touched by an enemy, he's dead for good. But you can still save them if you rescue him with one of your other squad members. It won't happen much: I won many maps by just using the tank to, well... tank hits and still got A rank.
To finish: the game is also gorgeous, with a pleasant art style, well directed cutscenes and the CANVAS engine - which is only a fancy filter the developers made - gives everything a beautiful pencil drawing look. Unfortunately, the character designs tend more to the side of generic, especially the less important squad members. The story and music are just there, not bad, nothing impressive. But the setting is cool.
All in all. An amazing battle system. The way that they blended the different halves of the battle system is new and the elegance in which they did it nothing short of genius. I heard Code Name: S.T.E.A.M uses a similar system, but has grids. All I know is that I want more of these kind of games in the future.
★★★★★