VALKYRIE ELYSIUM

I would recommend this game on sale, $30 USD or less. The Valkyrie Profile series is one that I've only really seen in passing, but always had a slight interest in. And the Steam release for Valkyrie Elysium was the only really accessible one for me. [b]Combat[/b] I did my playthrough in Valkyrie difficulty, so that's probably influenced the fun I had playing. From what I've gathered online, it seems that higher difficulty = high enemy aggression/damage and facing higher tier enemies earlier. What I'm not sure of is if difficulty affects HP, to me it felt like even early game enemies were damage sponges but I'm not sure if that's simply due to this being a combo building game. In combat, you're able to swap between two weapons without having to open a menu. Each weapon has their own set of combos that you unlock by upgrading the weapon, but the actual combo inputs themselves are essentially the same across all the weapons. For example, if you know what your aerial combo is for one weapon, then you can expect that using the same input with another weapon will do a similar thing. Some enemies will have a weakness to a specific weapon, and enemies are pretty much just recolors so …

the game was great until they introduce the weapon weakness mechanic which makes the combat less creative you have to use this sword for this dude and that sword for the other dude how about I decide when to switch weapons mr game not cool im ok with magic weakness but weapon and magic weakness is too much

A solid 7/10 adventure through a bit of Norse mythology, Squeenix style. + Battles are fluid and feel awesome when you get in the zone + The Einherjar/element system works really well, you can really do some damage if you know what you're doing + Soundtrack is suitably epic, if not as memorable as others + Valkyrie's design is awesomesauce +/- Lacks the large roster of Einherjar from Valkyrie Profile as well as its deeper systems, but is a lot simpler in that regard as well, so YMMV +/- Action based combat (think similar to Devil May Cry) rather than turn based like in the past games. I personally don't mind either but this may be a turn off for some people - The gameplay loop gets very repetitive after a time - Some of the environments look fairly cheap or undercooked - Can be hard to tell when to block or parry incoming attacks (I sort of gave up after a while) - The story and characters are serviceable, but not the greatest Not on the level of its more famous predecessor, Valkyrie Profile, but I still enjoyed my time with it.

It is definitely a good game, but definitely just get it when on sale. I finished it in 20 hours only, and completed all in the main story. Additional comments: -The world is a bit dead, with little to no interaction, just you walking around places with infested monsters, no interaction with any other NPCs rather than your party and important NPCs

This is a perfectly good game. I'd even call it "very good". Maybe not great but it's competent and well presented, fun and engaging. VP series fans upset that this isn't a turn-based JRPG were way too hard on this game. SE actually did the reasonable thing in calling it Valkyrie Elysium, clearly denoting it as a spinoff title in the same world. It's not VP3. It's VE. Does the world feel empty? Sort of. There aren't major hub areas filled with NPCs which is fine by me. I just want to enjoy the combat and story so I'm happy. Maybe SE could pull off a VP3 attempt with the old combat but I doubt it. They'd absolutely mess it up so people should be happy VP exists and just be satisfied that this didn't try to copy it.

If you were disappointed in Ninja Gaiden 4, give this one a go (turn up the difficulty to Very Hard recommended)