VALKYRIA CHRONICLES (Zero Punctuation) 

Are you sure you want to join the reich? (Y)ahtzee (N)ahtzee

Holy shit he never found out you can save during missions.

I'm honestly curious as to what he'd think of Fire Emblem.

Valkyria Chronicles has been released on STEAM for PC. It has pretty low system requirements and costs $20. So if you missed it on PS3 you can now own it on PC.

Welcome to Fantasy!Sweden: where everyone's combat performance is based on what kind of ground they stand on, medics can heal 50 machine gun wounds in a single turn, and your dad gave you an anachronistic Abrams-style turbine-driven Tiger II that for some reason your superiors never confiscate to reverse engineer into more tanks.

I enjoy Valkyria chronicles and certain anime but by god listening to him rip into them is hilarious

I didn't mind the whole "bad guys shooting during movement" bit. It was kinda neat going cover to cover waiting for the enemy to reload. on another note, I agree, with such an abundance of chest-high walls and crates, more cover would have been nice, as well as corner cover.

Welkin isn't an androgynous teenage boy he's 22 HES AN ANDROGYNOUS YOUNG ADULST XD

Is it me or is it sad I know exactly which sniper he's talking about.

I agree with all the criticism of the mechanics *but* I think this game deserves some praise for unique aesthetics. Yes, the characters are in traditional anime style as far as faces and hair go, but the developers somehow used a combination of complex partial cel shading and voodoo texture manipulation to make everything look like a *painting*, which is pretty rad. I mean just making it look convincingly like anime alone would have been fairly impressive (many have tried and failed, though I do like cel shading most of the time anyway), but they went one up on even that, and made it look like anime that was a bit ambitious in the style department.

It's funny, if he actually scrolled down on the R&D menu, he would have found that guns eventually split into two or three variants that you can change in and out of and develop separately.

I think I've come to the realisation that i have to play every JRPG that Yahtzee reviews because to me it sounds like the best game ever every time despite his constant complaints about them as a whole.

I'm not normally this vocal, and I realize this is (highly) opinionated satire, but this guy can screw *riiiiiiight* off with his review. Been playing through Valkyria via Steam lately, and even as someone who isn't a big fan of turn based strategy, I'm loving it. Story is told almost exclusively through fully animated or partial (think visual novel style) cutscenes. The voicing is 9.5 times out of 10 top notch as well (with the odd awkward bit due to the necessity of having to sync the english dub to the original japanese mouth movements. Yes, the dub is great. Give it a try, you I-compulsively-play-these-games-in-japanese-only purists). Core gameplay falls more or less solely on your missions, which all the micromanagement that's griped about here will alter significantly depending on the choices you make during preparation; what squad members you have, what you arm them with, how you've leveled them up, who you have them working with, etc. There's a huge array of options which multiplies on themselves to create a whole spectrum of choices and strategies in how to approach and advance through a fight. Interception fire and counterattacking elevates the battles from a glorified game of chess to a much more cognitive and visceral turn based experience. Though I found the difficulty curve to be fair, the game is tough and will punish you harshly for poor positioning and wasted moves. Despite the ignorant claim in the video, there is indeed a save feature acessable at any time during your turn in battle (barring action phases when you're moving units around), so you can stop and pick up any mission from where you left off. The game doesn't pull it's punches with the story. Keeping things spoiler free: While it's a JRPG and has it's fair share of those sugary "friends/love/peace will always win" moments, exaggerated gestures, dramatic one liners, and animu romances, it never fails to remind you that you are, in fact, in a war. You will lose friends along the way, and not all wins will be victories. All in all, it's a really good game. This critique of it, even considering the source, is garbage. It's a must-play for anyone who likes these genres, and even if you're only somewhat of a fan of JRPGs, and can tolerate turn based strategy, I'd still highly recommend it. tl;dr - video's critique is biased, shallow, and petty. It's good. Give it a try.

"We all know whose bratwurst you lot were snacking on then." Hahahaha awesome

You can skip the cut scenes by pressing "enter" for the PC version.

As someone who genuinely enjoys VALKYRIA CHRONICLES for its steadfast need to tick every anime box including beach episode, this is one of the review of ZP that I absolutely will always come back to for giggles

"and some things just don't combine; like republicans, and compassion." - Yahtzee

Welkin's an "androgynous pretty-boy" and Alicia's an "angry girl" who "secretly" loves Welkin? Maybe it's just me, but those are all REALLY big stretches.

Holy shit!!! I LIVE IN SWINDON! WHAT A RANDOM THING TO SEE!

I find it funny how often Japan pulls the big-evil-empire trope in games and anime considering at one time they too were a big-evil-empire, more so than most others which had become quite cosmopolitan in modern times. Also, they're the only country left in the world which still has an emperor who is referred to by the rest of the world as His Imperial Majesty. Go figure.

You forgot to mention the strange buddy system that encourages you to team people up with other people because they might shoot out of turn as a team, but also don't like standing on the same ground as each other, don't like their friend's friends and 1/3 of the classes are incapable of shooting out of turn due to ammo limitations.

The army the main characters join in the game is basically a Militia. Everyone was more or less drafted for the fight. The reason teenagers are in the army is because everyone in the country is given some army training during school. Basically everyone in the country is a National Guard. Also the reason that Welkin was assigned as a Captain and granted a higher rank isn't because of the tank but more based on his lineage and education. Welkin is the son of a General / War Hero and is quite wealthy, he is also a University Graduate. That puts his worth a few step above everyone else in the military's eyes. Welkin's friend Faldio was also granted the same rank as Welkin, and he was also a University Graduate.

Guns can actually be upgraded in more than one way once you get past tier 4.

But Europa is what we call Europe. That's not weird.

It was a nice game... my biggest problem with it was how easy it was... "oh one of your soldier has been KIA? well you have 3 turns to evacuate him (free action) and then he can respawn in the next turn"... WTF... the enemy could mow down your entire squad and you would just respawn them 10 meters back endlessly Maybe this is trying to replicate soviet strategy?

I am curious as to how he would take Fire Emblem games. Please rip my favorite game series to shreds, Yahtzee!!!

0:57 If he made it further through the game he'd know that they rather quickly reveal that *every* side in this game has a hidden underbelly. The empire is rather the obvious villain, and they make no real effort to hide that. The Federation only views the Gallia (the game's setting) as a tactical point in their idealistic war and don't actually give 2/10ths of a shit about them. And Gallia itself has cultural issues of systemic racism against the game's rather obvious anthology for Romani/Jewish people. Is it the most subtle story in the world, no. But at least give it the credit it deserves for the work it does. Edit: Yes, I know that this review is 11 years old, but still I want to defend one of my favorite games.

Why are you doing reviews of games you clearly didn't get to the half? Weapons can be upgraded in different ways, someone important does die and you can save between turns inside the missions.

I love how critical this guy is. No one beats his. Fuck gamespot, fuck ing, fuck everything. Zero Punctuation is were its at.

This is one of my favorite games. I love the combat engine and the art style, and, unlike some people, I enjoy micromanagement :P.

the Gallia is third and smaller force ,not the federation. You can save in your turn . play with more attention.

God I would love to be able to see Yahtzee's face when he records this stuff

I wish he had done VC4. I actually liked the gameplay and style of VC, but share his opinions on the story and character writing, and I can't tell whether or not VC4 improved in that regard. I don't want to waste my money on it if it's just another anime story that forgot to bring the oversized magic swords.

I didn't know it is a 3-year-old game. I got it only recently. Obviously a late PC port. But I actually like it. The menu/UI or whatever is horrible but the actual game is fun. Also, no mouse control in the menus. Grrrr! I like how I can select and micromanage my squad. Reminds me of XCOM. There are some more unique attributes, like "being more accurate with ladies nearby", but near the beginning I haven't really used any of them. Maybe later, or on harder difficulties. Also, you never complained about having to upgrade guns in XCOM. Here it is exactly the same. The combat bit also resembles XCOM. There, the enemy also shoots while you move (Overwatch) and keeps shooting after but will miss when you no longer control that guy. The only difference is that here this "overwatch" is automatic (even XCOM had some untis with automatic reaction shots) and instead of shooting in the air, they actually stop firing. It is a turn based game. You could imagine that units don't move one after the other but all at once. The graphics are suprisingly good for an anime game. I hate it when they use still pictures in cutscenes, but here most things actually move. And they move well. When I saw the tank move, I could actually feel like that is a tank moving and not a box being pushed around. And every conversation is voiced. Something, most anime games don't do. Sure, it has the anime style, but clearly it wasn't meant for those who despise that particular style.

SO i take it Yahtzee will not be reviewing fire emblem fates than?

PLAY SENGOKU RANCE YAHTZEE!!! There are dolphins in it!!

VC is actually a really good game, especially for those who likes tactical games.

Rewatching this review after so many years, I get the feeling that Yahtzee didn't play through much of the game. His review helped me decide to buy it, though: all I had to do was filter his opinion through the "he doesn't like anime storytelling and JRPGs, I do" filter. I bought it back in 2008, and it firmly sits in my top 10 all-time favourite games since then. I even bought it again when it came out on Steam. I'm pretty sured I poured more than 200 hours into it, in total. It has flaws, of course, a certain naïveté to many design decisions, but even those contribute to making it quite unique, even when compared to its sequels. The story is simple, but I loved the way it touched themes like racism, the horrors of war that comes to ruin everyday life and all that, in a smart yet "PG-13" way. But most importantly, I absolutely LOVED the way it treated secondary characters (squad members): they have unique lines, unique potentials, unique relationships to other characters, unique reactions to the situations, and the more you play them, the more of their biographies you discover and the more of their potentials you unlock, and they also can permanently die if you make bad mistakes on the field. This is the kind of interactive storytelling that I would have expected Yahtzee to appreciate.

Although it's hardly without flaws, I think I really liked Valkyria Chronicles. Then again I think most of the things I liked weren't intentional, too. While avoiding spoilers since the game is out on Steam now, the game has a really, REALLY bad habit of trying to set up a moral or point and blowing it. The game tries to paint the whole idea of "War is horrible and when a soldier dies, s/he was a human being!" but the characters, from the tutorial on up, don't seem to be really all that bothered by people dying around them. Imperial soldiers gun down civilians and mock people (not always in that order, mind) like they're hoping this will be good resume material for joining Cobra Commander. Did invading soldiers just arbitrarily attack civilians, kill your fellow town watch mates and you had to personally kill them? No reason to not get right back into polite chats about bread and going to college.

You know the one thing that ruined this game for me? The discovery (upon consultation with a FAQ) that the end of mission rating system is based _entirely_ on a single thing- how quickly you completed the mission objective. Not how many enemies you killed, or how few casualties you took, only on how quick you speedran the mission. And this completely discouraged me from playing the game, because I'm a methodical, systematic sort of gamer who tries to do everything "the right way" (advancing my troops in formation so they can provide covering fire, methodically singling out and eliminating the enemies to provide a clear, secure path to the objective), so being told that "the right way" is to rush straight for the flag (or whatever the objective is) and bugger all the optionals just really cheeses my onions. And yes, I know you don't HAVE to give a shit about your rating, but considering the game still fucking gives you a C+ score and an implicit "tut tut" at the end of the missions (and there are Steam achievements for getting A ranks), I can't shake the feeling that the game resents me for it. Combined with the first really frustrating mission where you encounter your first major boss, who massively outclasses your force, it was enough to make me just put the damn game down and never pick it up again in the more than 5 years since.

Welkin's an androgynous pretty boy?

Without my pen, I am nothing. Without me, my pen is nothing

Stupidly biased reviews are stupidly biased. VC is easily the best turn-based strategy game ever after the original X-Com.

As he said in his Batman: Arkham Asylum review, "You don't ask a sewage technician to redecorate your bathroom, and you don't come to me to tell you how good a game is!"

I love how he reviews everything in a way that you know it's just his personal opinion on things, but it's a damn well-explained and logical opinion. Respectable, humorous and crude all at the same time.

The good thing about VC is that you have the same features as enemies do. So you can fire at enemies when its not your turn either. The problem comes when the enemy has 3 tanks or some demi god and you don't.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Yahtzee is "Hiding his power level". AKA Actually likes anime but hides it for fear of retaliation . I wasn't entirely sure for a while, but he's been literally referencing Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bepop, So it's kind of hard to believe that "all anime is androgynous shit" Garbage he keeps spewing. I mean, I don't blame him, It's a pretty shitty situation, and anyone who talks publicly about anime knows that feel.

Best Credits animation EVER!

funny that he describes the main characters as teenagers even though they're adults HMM

I was so glad when I found out you can't just stack all your units into a ball and bum rush their frontlines. Them being able to fight back within a certain range and area makes your strategic thinking more diverse. If you need to charge a street and they have sandbags, you can't just dogpile each in turn and overpower whoever is behind them. No, instead you need to take cover and place your units defensively. I thought it worked well, taking turns with gunplay just doesn't feel right.

Well The Empire in Elder Scrolls is a good empire.

Who needs superhot when there’s Valkyria chronicles?

something tells me he isnt very good at the game

Any comparison of this game's cover system to XCOM makes exactly zero sense man. JRPGs don't work like XCOM. And yes, if you're not into the anime stuff, you're really not going to get into a game like this. Not in a million years. It would be like forcing an FPS gamer to play freaking point & clicks. They wouldn't 'get it'. Valkyria Chronicles is a great game series and well worth having for an JRPG enthousiast. In fact, quite likely people into turn-based combat will like this rather fresh spin on combat. I think this Zero Punctuation review says more about the reviewer himself than this actual game.

In the Lord of the Rings analogy, yeah, but that was just an explanation of how a setting can deter someone from a game. In the former paragraph, I was talking about graphics.

can't agree with the review. Probably my favourite strategy game ever. Along with disgaea, and civilization. Still love this review though, cracks me upp everytime :D

He should have played Fire Emblem: Awakening. He would have had a field day with the support convos, DLC, and permadeath.

All I could think about when I watched this, was how much Yahtzee must really suck at this game. To clarify, though, that's not a statement of but-hurtedness. Nobody watches a Zero Punctuation review not expecting to see a game being ripped on. I just couldn't help but notice that a lot of what he ripped on were game-mechanics that you either learn to master, or get owned, such as crossfire, and the masochistic frustration with having to learn oddball mechanics made up a lot of why I enjoyed the whole experience. One caveat: The Snipers. Boy do I hate how utterly useless snipers are in this game. I'd be cool with how painfully easy it is for them to die if this balanced out their uber-awesome-sniper-ness, but in reality, there are very few missions where they are actually useful. I should know-I was pretty damn stubborn in trying to force a use out of them.

*read the first line of you command* *though: Fuck of, don't judge him for his job* *reading the secound* *though: got me... shame on me...*

He should have tried Fire Emblem.

There's an actual Zero Punctuation facebook page that lets you know every Thursday that he uploaded a video at like 1am in the morning on the actual site.

"Some things just don't combine, like Republicans and compassion." Perfect.

The way I saw the Valkyria Chronicles series is that it was the result of a Sega employee watching Band of Brothers and deciding that they could do it better, and with more magic. And boobs.

Gameplay was decent at best, but the story was way too anime-ish for my taste. Fuck anime, stop putting it in video games or for fuck's sake at least keep it in pedophile simulators like Katawa Shoujo or Neptunia.

Me: Jesus it's three in the morning! I'll just finish up this video and go to bed... *FOUR HOURS LATER* My dad: Did you just stay up all night watching Zero Punctuation again? Me: Ugh, yeah. Sorry. I'll just finish up this video and go to bed.

N-odd years and Z-who knows how many rewatches of this video later, I've come to the realisation that I have to pop up in defense of Valkyria Chronicles here: None of the protagonists are standard JRPG fare (or rather, they're much toned-down versions of standard JRPG fare with normal-colored hair and everything), the non-blood-related sister is not sexualised in anyway and the reason her adoption is pointed out is because she's part of another race, and the protagonist isn't made a squad commander because he brought his own tank but because he went through mandatory officer training in the university he was studying, all of which was clearly explained. Meanwhile Largo and Rose, despite being older, didn't do academia and thus got stuck with being NCO's for him.

just love the credits

This game is have too many cutscenes, but you could say if they just melded each of the cutscenes between battles into one big one, you wouldn't complain. I think the "the enemy can shoot at you on your turn" thing is good. Obviously, it works both ways and means you can actively defend on the enemy's turn by strategically placing your units. I bet if this didn't happen, he would complain that you just stand around like idiots as they run up and shoot you in the face. I liked this game.

Oh, look children, on our right we can see a troll! Wave at the troll kids! But whatever you do don't feed him.

When I beat that thing, I was so happy, then a few chapters later came the Super Train.

Let's put it this way. I watch this literally RIGHT after seeing CGR's review. It's like sitting right in front of an extremely hot bonfire after you've gotten hypothermia. XD

Does this guy like actually like games?

Why are you injecting your political views into a game review? Annoying.

Having watched just about every episode of Zero Punctuation (twice) it is entirely possible that a little bit of Yahtzee got inside of me.

I'm surprised yahtzee was trying so hard to argue that the hybrid gameplay was bad when the biggest fault of the gameplay mechanics is without a doubt the final boss, which goes down as one of the most needlessly frustrating.

in earthbound you were 10 year-olds killing GOD

I love valkryia chronicles, and watching this makes me laugh so fucking hard omfg

I started playing this game recently, and I can sympathize with Yahtzee's problems. Firstly, the chapter select thing really is a pain in the ass. If you want to give players the option of rewatching cutscenes, that's fine, here's how you do it: You add a pause menu to the cutscenes which has the following options: Save, Quit, Chapter Select, Headquarters, Restart Cutscene, Skip Cutscene. Boom, big problem solved. The shooting at you while you're moving... I can see where they're going with it, trying to make the game feel frantic like a real battlefield, but it's just a little too... specific to the character who's acting. On the upside, your troops will also shoot enemies moving near them, but it just ends up being a bit of a pain in the ass. Speaking of ass, the tanks control like them. Seriously, these things will get caught on anything and everything from a sidewalk to a pebble. Also, the voice acting is mediocre. You'll find some good performances in this game, but most of the characters don't emote nearly as well as they should, and some of their lines just sound awful. I'm definitely having fun with this game, but I can totally see Yahtzee's frustrations.

How many different ways can he say "the outfits are terrible"? I think there's been at least 10 unique ways so far. XD

Oh yeah I allmost forgot!! Japan "helped" the Nazis in WWII!! Mind blowing huh?

Don't be daft, turn based doesn't always take the same form. I've played turn based strategies where enemies take precautions when you enter their vision even if it's not their turn.

I disagree in almost every regard with the creator's opinions. It seems it has been sensationalized a bit for the sake of gaining ad revenue, but this game, when taken into the context of jrpgs and turn based strategy games in the same vein, Valkyria Chronicles demonstrates very few of the tropes the creator ranted about. In my opinion, the graphics were interesting, the story heartfelt and refreshing (aside from a couple pretty obvious otaku pandering moments), the score awesome, and the gameplay was addicting. In short, this is a very underrated game worthy of a look if you're into this sort of thing. How this game could receive negative press is beyond me (even the covering mechanic and strategy elements ranted about are quite literally nowhere near as bad as the author made them out to be).

I would love to see a tank do a cannonball.

let me summerize my feelings: ''ngaaaauuuhaaaaauuuuhaaah!'' xDD

Holy crap man you are an actual decent human being. ON THE INTERNET! Kudos.

I can understand that Yahtzee's style is to find anything bad and expand much more on that than on the good, but I can't help but wonder if he, during the cutscenes, somehow ended up playing an entirely different game, as the main three are basically nothing like he described (Welkin's not androgynous, nor terribly pretty, and is in fact considered to be great at his job from the get-go. Alicia's... Fairly mature actually and not at all tsundere. The sister's more just a cheerful emotional support sort of thing.)

I agree that the menu and shit was a mess, but the story is actually quite good. The Gallians are quite romanticized but clearly they show you it's them who write the story. The Imps are shown to be "evil" at first glance, but then you are shown that they're people too, and even the main villain who's a huge dick has some morals ahead of his time (like he doesn't give a shit about social standing) and even condemns a psychopathic war criminal. Some enemies are sympathetic because of their individual stories, like Selvaria or the other tank commander. Also they portrait a realistic racism in both parties (up until a lot into the game, two of your commanders are huge jerks to the MC's darcsen sister and many soldiers have the trait "darcsen discriminator") and the fact that the Gallian princess reveals that her lineage are all darcsens directly affects the following game in which a racially motivated uprising begins. In sum, even though you are shown the perspective of the Gallians as more epic and righteous, the game has a lot of human moments in both sides, dealing with frustration, greed, cruelty, compassion, and a basic understanding of the humanity in the other. Good vs. evil is a simplistic way of viewing the story, which may not be the best at moments, or have the best execution, or add shity anime tropes like the beach episode, but the points it tries to show come across very well. Also, it's hella fun and you can save mid-battle.

Okay, now I just think Yahtzee has an irrational hatred towards Japan.

Well since it involves anime and japan... I MUST PLAY

0:33 Oh no, Yahtzee is being attacked by the Orb of Confusion!

"Muddy Menu-driven Micromanagement motherfuckery." Damn

3:51 Voice crack.

super mario galaxy ,wind waker , final fantasy 6 and call of duty 4 he loves all those games

So much weeb-salt, god damn..

He didn't notice the manual save button.

Yahtzee dude... you can save at any time, and when you los you get the option to leav the battle compleatly, save, then level grind. if you forgot to save, thats your fault!

Games good, a lot of the cristism here has been fixed on P.C. It's worth a shot since it's only $20 and if you like it you get 50+ hours worth of content!

The death for characters with less screen time joke was awfully misplaced, it was obvious that the sister was going to die the moment you saw her character design, she's the designated tragic death character and Yahtzee should have seen it coming even if not playing as far.

I love VC, but I also love Yahtzee giving it his normal angry review. It's entertaining and not going to make me like the game any less

this isn't a review its a rant