Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2

I'm going to keep playing and I'm going to finish it so maybe my review will change. However I can say the game starts off SLOWWWWWWW. You can't recruit students for a while. You start off with 1, a story trigger gives you 2 more, and you sit with that little group of 3 for a long time. The stamina system ensures that you simply can't do anything with just 3 students. To add insult to injury, if you spend too much time out in the field there's a chance the game with lock. Not freeze per say, but I've entered a battle, chosen an attack, and while the characters and enemy keep moving in their idle animations I can't enter any input at all, the screen buttons are all gone to select. Need to alt+f4 to get out. So now you need to make sure that your field runs are very short because you may just lose your progress if you stay having fun for too long. This gets made worse by not being able to save in the field, or manually at all. Just auto-saves after each cycle. Design choices meant to pace the game, paired with bugs, and painful systems come together to make the game boring and painful. There is a good game under there, and once I have a decent roster of students I hope it…

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is a colorful blend of academy management and light JRPG adventure, a game that invites you to take on the role of a school principal shaping the next generation of heroes. Developed by Agate and published by PQube, it expands on the foundation of its predecessor by offering a more robust school-building system, a broader cast of students to train, and a richer fantasy world filled with political tension and emerging threats. The core premise is engaging: you are tasked with rebuilding and strengthening an academy during a period of uncertainty, and everything you do—from nurturing students to completing field missions—influences both the institution's reputation and the fate of the wider realm of Valthiria. The academy management layer is the heart of the experience, providing a satisfying loop of recruitment, specialization, and long-term planning. Students arrive with randomized traits and potential, and you decide how to shape them—placing them in courses that determine their class paths, upgrading facilities that influence their growth, and ensuring the academy has the necessary balance of classrooms, dormitories, crafting workshops, and tr…

The RPG gameplay is painfully generic and the game systems are arcane and obscure. The game will hand you a goal and you have to google where to find the thing it's asking you to do because it's not going to explain it to you. At all. "Complete a Minigame" is one of the first few goals and nowhere are Minigames mentioned and time management is an important aspect of the game. I have to look up the thing about minigames only happening at a certain time of year. It doesn't say that anywhere. The original game had a lot of charm and felt a lot more engaging. This one seems to have extra layers of visual polish while they neglected everything underneath. This one certainly *looks* more engaging from the outside but it seems like it's all a show. There's very little to do in a semester and it seems pretty easy to get stuck if your student roster has a dip in a certain type of students. Still no control over where stuff goes and there's not really an effect on the environment past aesthetic. Nothing localized or customizable. This game seems to want to let you do your own thing and let you get yourself into trouble but it doesn't do a good job of explaining any of the systems you …

Would LOVE to give a thumbs up! (And would be GLAD to change my review). But bought the game, installed it, started it and game started. Great. Changed the resolution to 1080. Screens went blank, and ultimately froze the computer up. Tried verifying integrity of files. No good. Uninstalled/reinstalled - SAME issue. Even deleted the folders for the game. STILL an issue. Put a comment in the discussion board - hoping someone, or a dev would respond/help - Nothing.

For what it's worth I did enjoy the game but it's probably because i hadn't played the first one. I wrote a guide for this game because there was no information besides trial and error. the guide makes more sense as you play the game more and inevitably get stuck. Disclaimer: (the guide was written in a gmail draft so it looks terrible XD). That said it may help you early game as 0.1% was the highest achievement and now its 0.3% so if you already have it in your library and are looking for an assist you probably won't find much else in those terms. (it's on the community hub) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106435437

I was addicted to the original Valthirian Arc as a kid back when it was a Flash browser game. The combat was simple and repetitive - you just ran around the screen clicking on enemies - but it was really fun to develop your students, promote them to advanced classes, then get points when they graduate based on how powerful they are. For Valthirian Arc 2 they decided to go with a turn-based JRPG-style combat system, which is risky because of how grindy this kind of game is by nature. Turn-based combat can be slow and clunky, so it has to be [i]really[/i] strategic and interesting to stay fun for a long time. Unfortunately Valthirian Arc 2's combat is neither strategic nor interesting so I was struggling to continue playing past my 5th quest to kill slimes. One strange design decision is that every time you take a turn, any of your 3 students may take that turn. So you naturally end up spamming the strongest move on your strongest student over and over and ignore the others. The simplicity of the game is worstened by how forgiving it is. It might be relatively easy to kill slimes but if your quest wants you to defeat 10 of them your health and ability points might start running low…