Bro any time I think about Valkyria Chronicles I laugh my nipples off, the game is fundamentally flawed gameplaywise but, simultaneously, it’s stupidly fun, which is the recipe for any club banger, it has a story that weaves flawlessly between “that’s pretty poignant” and “this is some goofy goober shit”, it’s got the horrors of war but also this fucking pig piece of shit mascot, Hans,
It’s an amalgam of white and black without any gray: It exists on extremes, and it never intersects, it’s playing two parallel lines and coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never see cohesion but that somehow enhances the end product in ways evidently no one intended. You have narrative comparisons with the persecution of jews and, at the same time, the game ends with the bad guy getting German Suplexed.
But I think the funniest aspect of Valkyria Chronicles The First is that the main character is the farthest thing from a war hero they could possibly muster with the expertise of a stoic Japanese swordsmith from the mountains crafting a god-cleaving blade: Welkin.
This Scout From TF2 Put Through An Anime Filter looking mother fucker was chilling in his hometown talking about how much he wanted to be a teacher and showing people his really good sketches of animals because he’s also a gifted artist, when suddenly, the Dudes attack, and his reaction to the Dudes attacking is “hang on, I recall my dad hiding his actual service tank in the shed in the back” so he goes and, yeah, his dad’s tank from a previous war is just there, chilling, so he takes it for a joy ride while the town baker, Alicia, armed with a rifle and infinite action economy due to the afore mentioned flawed gameplay, sweeps the entire god damn platoon of heavily armed machine gun troops.
The entire game is Welkin using his love for nature and his baker love interest to inflict insane personnel and materiel damage to an entire empire: Welkin and Alicia will come across a heavily fortified bridge, and the dialogue will go something like
“Welkin! They will pulverize us with the heaviest machine guns known to man if we step one foot in that bridge! They practically developed wooden low-orbit bombardment stations! What’s the plan!”
“Well… Look at that duck over there. It’s flying from the east to the west, right? Well, YOU SEE, that duck is known as a Balkunese Socioduck, and those, during this season, migrate from west to east, and they only exhibit this irregular flight path if a Matrisgel Weasel family is molting by the juniper berry bushes, their favorite food. Matrisgel Weasels only ever molt if they are put under the exact amount of stress caused to them by the sound of distant tank threads on the road, and they are known to hide in sturdy, stable soil.”
“Welkin, SIR, what the fuck does this all mean?”
“If we follow the smoldering shrieking of the molting weasels, we’ll find a SECRET PATH that will, as always, let us ambush, flank, and surprise our foes! Alicia, you know what to do.”
“Ogggeyyyyy”
and then, invariably, no matter the level, thanks to Welkin’s impressive knowledge of fauna and flora, and Alicia’s literally infinite action economy in a game that wasn’t properly beta tested in-house during development, they combine their powers like a piss poor Captain Planet and kill the absolute shit out of an entire Empire’s worth of dudes, and it’s legitimately one of the most fun and charming games you’ll ever touch if you remember to not take it too seriously. I fucking hate Hans but I love this game.
Video games will stick a vaguely posh human name on the big scary monster’s health bar to let you know they were once human, but isn’t that a bit limiting? I think walking blasphemies against the natural order should be allowed to be fancy lads if they want to be. That hundred-foot pillar of screaming teeth is called Dr. Throckmorton Pomberley. What are you going to do, argue with it?
The thing that I adore about the Disco Elysium fandom is that, despite not blocking or avoiding spoilers in any way, I have never once been spoiled on a single plot point of the game. I still have no idea who committed the central murder of the game, or even if we ever solve it.
I do, however, have a vast second-hand knowledge of Kim, his interests, his hobbies, his responses to Harry’s shenanigans, and what dialogue options will produce which reactions. This game is not about solving a murder it is about becoming best friends with Kim Kitsuragi and that’s how it should be.
So how many people know it’s also a game with a giant stick bug
