Written by Brian Beck, 10/12/2006
Played on:
PS2
Valkyrie Profile was a major cult classic. It had a unique blend of gameplay, a decent story and one of the best combat systems ever seen in an RPG. However, it was a royal pain in the ass to find copies of, commanding prices in the low to mid $100 range on Ebay at points for sealed editions. The re-release for the PSP added a bit to the game but made it more accessible. More importantly, though, it put the franchise in the minds of RPGers once more. That was a major step because Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria was on the horizon.
Valkyrie Profile 2 is more of a prequel to the original than a true sequel. There’ll still be some familiar characters in the game – Arngrim is still a sword-wielding badass of a warrior while Lezard Valeth also makes a return as a powerful mage. You’ll also be reintroduced to some familiar areas from the first game. You’ll get to see Dipan before its fall and meet King Barbarossa among many other cities that were around in the first game.
That doesn’t mean there is a lack of new stuff in Valkyrie Profile 2, however. One of the most drastic changes this time around is the combat system. In the first game, you didn’t really move your characters around during battle. Each character had anywhere from 1-3 attacks and you used the face buttons to determine just who got to attack. Hitting enemies while in the air netted experience crystals while grounded enemies netted purple crystals that refreshed your CP gauge.
This time around, there are still blue experience crystals and purple crystals, but they don’t quite do the same thing. That’s because each characters ability to or not to attack is determined by an AP gauge. You’ll start off most battles with 100 AP (the only difference being when you are surprised by an enemy and start with 0) and each attack will cost a varying amount of AP. Each character has a wide variety of attacks to choose from with a ton of different effects – managing your AP during battle is vitally important. If you don’t spend all of the AP, you can attack again immediately after if the enemy isn’t ready to swing back.
Weapons also behave differently in Valkyrie Profile 2. While they will still determine if you can swing anywhere from 1-3 times during a combat turn, they also have one more important factor this time around. Some weapons will allow you to perform a special attack when you get the special gauge to 100. That weapon, however, may be weaker than another one that doesn’t allow special attacks. It also may allow you to only swing once or twice during battle, making the building of the special attack gauge harder. Each of the selectable attacks also has an amount of points it will add to the special gauge when you hit. As if the system didn’t already seem complicated enough, some attacks swing high while others may swing low – they may not hit a flying enemy or one that is really small. In other words, effectively organizing and determining your characters attacks before battle is vital.
Something else that’ll need to be planned as you play are the sealstones. See, the World Tree, Yggdrasil, crystallizes energy or some such and creates sealstones. When carrying these, they’ll have some sort of effect on your party, be it positive or negative. Where the fun really comes in, though, is in putting these on pedestals in dungeons. See, you can use these pedestals to pass a sealstone’s effect to all the enemies in a dungeon. You can only carry one at a time though – setting up positive ones in your inventory and negative ones on a pedastal is vital to optimizing your success. You’ll also eventually be able to pass these stones through dungeons via springs, but it will cost you blue magic crystals to make a stone retrievable anywhere in the world. This’ll probably be most used when you want to powerlevel (which was also made easier by enemies that respawn when you leave and return to the screen). Sealstones, overall, made for an interesting addition to an already deceptively deep combat system.
Another major difference is the way you’ll build your party. This time around, you’ll have some human characters in your party and the Einherjar will compose the rest. Instead of flying around and collecting party members as you did in the first game, though, you’ll find weapons scattered around the world that allow you to materialize Einherjar that are already “inside” you. You aren’t out to release them for some sort of pre-Ragnarok or anything, either. Instead, you’ll free them from their service at a certain level and turn them back into humans. In exchange for this, they’ll give you some nice stuff – weapons, armor or other items that’ll be useful on your quest. You can go and check up on them as they go about their lives, too.
