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In 1998, Final Fantasy Tactics got me into strategy RPGs. For years, FFT was the basic template for most console SRPGs. Ten years later, Sega brought the genre into the contemporary generation of consoles in grand style by releasing Valkyria Chronicles in the US.

From the first time I saw the announcement trailer for Valkyria Chronicles, I fell in love with it. Valkyria Chronicles featured full 3-D character models in a 3-D background, done in a very Miyazaki-esque art style.  At a time when Japanese games were looked on with disfavor in the US and had largely migrated to handhelds, Valkyria Chronicles was the 7th gen Japanese RPG I dreamed of. Even Square Enix and Atlus weren't really delivering at that time. To top it off, it sported a majestic soundtrack composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, the main composer for Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII, and a number of other great games. Sakimoto is the king of SRPG music.

Valkyria Chronicles was produced by a lot of the same people that worked on Sega's popular-in-Japan dating sim/SRPG series, Sakura Taisen, but went far beyond the framework laid by this series.

It would go on to become my favorite game of the entire 7th console generation, beating out games like Ni no Kuni, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyward Sword. It was a mature, Miyazaki-esque take on the politics, horrors, and heroism of World War II, set in a world ravaged by the lust for a powerful mineral, Ragnite. Unfortunately, it started out as a very niche product. On top of the fact that it was niche, Sega picked the worst possible time to release it - against Call of Duty: World at War and Fallout 3. After Sega lowered the price, it sold pretty well, but Sega didn't make much money off of it due to the price cut. . 

Today is the tenth anniversary of the original US release Here's my retrospective on what has been my favorite new video game series launched since the turn of the century.

Valkyria Chronicles (2008)

Valkyria Chronicles was actually the game that finally got me to buy a PS3. I had a 360 and a Wii, but I was pretty burned by the 360's hardware issues. I had already bought the game before the PS3, because I wanted to find a backward-compatible 60GB fatty. I made a 3 hour drive from Oklahoma to pick up my 60GB PS3 at a Hastings in Denton, Texas.  The game was even better than I expected. You didn't have an omniscient view of the battlefield like in other SRPGs, so your soldiers had to be your eyes and ears when the enemies were moving, and the oh-so-trendy Gears of War cover mechanic was put to pretty good use in this game. I also liked how individualized the soldiers were, not just Welkin and Alicia, but even the members of Squad 7, who would have otherwise had generic names and graphics. My favorite wasn't the usual fan-favorites like Marina (in the US) or Edy (in Japan), but Cherry, whose English localization gave her an amusing Valley Girl persona.

I was also impressed with some of the nuances in this game. VC is one of the few WWII video games to really deal with the theme of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, which in this in this game is shown through prejudice against the Darcsens. The Darcsens have been unjustly blamed for the past 2000 years for the "Darcsen calamity", which is supposed to be the VC world's version of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Even in the ranks of Squad 7, there is still prejudice against the Darcsens, and one of the major plot points involves one of Welkin's sergeants learning to overcome her anti-Darcsenism. One of the major missions of the game is the liberation of a Darcsen concentration camp.  

I've actually quadruple-dipped on this game. I subsequently got it on Steam, then the HD remaster on PS4, and now the Switch version. All in the name of supporting the series.

Valkyria Chronicles 2 (2010)

Sega, unfortunately, didn't make a lot of money on VC the first time, and that probably prompted them to do as so many other Japanese developers did in the 7th gen and move development of the series onto the PSP. This was a bit of a disappointment, but I was just happy to get a second game.

VC2 actually did add a few small improvements, such as more customizable characters and options. Similar to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance compared to FF Tactics, VC2 made a few changes in the game's structure to fit in with the sensibilities of handheld gaming. The missions were more non-linear and bite-sized. However, they also made a couple of other concessions to the Japanese handheld scene, such as dating sim-style dialogue with still pictures and putting it in a school setting. You're the leader of a squad at a military academy in the midst of a Gallian civil war triggered by the revelation that Princess Cordelia, ruler of Gallia, is a member of the pariah Darcsen race, but this game still has a lot of Japanese high school drama as seen in visual novels and the Persona series (which is now owned by Sega along with VC). I enjoyed it, and I even got the digital version on the PlayStation TV device that Sony sold from 2014-2015. But it was still a step down from the original. At that time, though, the Japanese game development was in a downward spiral where only Nintendo and Kojima Productions were still in high regard. So it was a case of "it is what it is."

Valkyria Chronicles 3: Unrecorded Chronicles (2011)

Valkyria Chronicles II at least got a US release. VC3, also made for the PSP, didn't even get a localization. Due to the fact that the PSP was dead outside of Japan by then as Sony half-heartedly threw its resources behind the Vita, Sega didn't even bother releasing the game outside of Japan. And that's a shame, because it actually has a darker and more mature story than the high school drama of VC2. It centers around a Gallian squadron made of convicts who perform black ops that would otherwise disgrace the Gallian government, since Squad 422 does not officially exist and its missions are off the books. It was generally assumed that VC3 would be the end of the series. The only game that we saw after that for the next few years was a mobile card game, which was the ghetto of the ghetto for game series that weren't even selling on handhelds.

Valkyria Revolution (2017)

Surprisingly, Sega decided to bring the series back on PS4 with an experimental action RPG title. It was actually even more action-based than the final product. Sega tried to shoehorn in more RPG elements based on an unexpected tide of negative feedback, but they did get the message loud and clear that gamers wanted the turn-based combat of the original game back. They gave it the name "Valkyria Revolution" to distinguish it from the SRPG line. This game was not set during EWII, but in an earlier time, at the dawn of the VC world's industrial revolution. A small country called Jutland (analogous to Finland) was at war with the Ruzhien Empire (analogous to Russia) over the newly discovered Ragnite. VR was not a bad game, but it was heavily panned, and it didn't give fans much hope for a full-blown sequel.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 (2018)

Instead, Sega surprised us once again by not only announcing a fourth mainline entry to the series, but promising a full-blown return to form in terms of graphics, sounds, story, and gameplay.

And in my opinion, Sega more than delivered in its promise. VC4 is phenomenal.

Although the principality of Gallia still figures prominently in this game, VC4 centers on the Atlantic Federation, the game world's equivalent of the Allies, whose principal members are the United Kingdom of Edinburgh and the United States of Vinland, which are, of course, the in-game counterparts of Great Britain and the United States of America. The main plot of the game is "Operation Northern Cross," where the Federation is making a final drive towards the Imperial capital to end the war once and for all, presumably in a race against the Ruzhien Empire, though they aren't mentioned in the game. In many ways, the game does play it safe. Lieutenant Claude Wallace is once more a commander who must prove himself to his ragtag troops, who are members of an elite Ranger unit. However, VC4 does add quite a few new gameplay mechanics. The Grenadier class is almost game-breaking, allowing you to bombard enemies from a safe distance and even able to engage in interception fire. The game also added the ability for classes such as snipers and lancers to provide assistance in fighting at enemies. In previous games, they could not engage in interception fire or assist when your current character was attacking an enemy. It also allows you to form fireteams of up to 3 soldiers at a time, where older games only allowed you to move one soldier at a time, you have an armored personnel carrier that can get slow, fragile units like snipers and grenadiers through enemy fire, and snow is a major mechanic in the game. I would have been satisified with more of the same excellent gameplay, but VC4 actually managed to improve on a good thing. I bought the collectors' edition of VC4 on Switch. Unless some other game released this year turns out to be really f***ing good, most likely Dragon Quest XI (which I haven't gotten yet), VC4 will likely be my 2018 GOTY.

So that's my retrospective on the Valkyria Chronicles series. Here's to hoping that we'll see more from this series, which has been my favorite game series born since the turn of the century and a series which has made Sega one of my top-tier publisher/developers.