Valkyrie Profile

[DF]

Come to me, dark warriors, battle awaits us!

I could've sworn this was the third time I wrote about this. Anyway, I talked a friend into playing the PSP version of this game instead of the sequel due to the sequel's weird nature as prequel and sequel, and I thought I'd race him to the finish. We're both playing Normal difficulty, so I also thought this would be a good refresher for that experience since I almost always play Hard...but I think the game's obtuseness and lack of explanation might have gotten him to quit!

Retroarch claims I beat the game in 22h 05m, and my final save was at 20h 42m, a bit faster than my most recent Hard save at 25h 20m.

What is Valkyrie Profile?

This is an RPG for the Sony Playstation. It was later ported to the Sony Playstation Portable as Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, but apart from new FMV cutscenes, the games are almost identical. The PS1 copy has two discs while the PSP is all on one UMD.

Setting

When you start the game, check out the Prologue with Platina and Lucian. That pretty depressing opening sets the tone for the rest of the game. Things in Midgard are pretty dire, a high-fantasy land that's circling the drain. War between countries is the big topic, but smaller villages are suffering poor harvests to the point where children are sold into slavery just to put food on the table. Oh, and venturing outside of town is dangerous because of all of the monsters and undead roaming around. In the realm of the gods, Asgard, the gods are preparing for the end of the world, Ragnarok. The war between the Aesir and Vanir would reach its climax then...but there is still time to prepare. As the Valkyrie Lenneth, you are tasked with journeying to Midgard and finding worthy human souls that can then be sent to Asgard to fight in the coming war.

Weirdly, even though the game has roots in Nordic mythology...there are no vikings. No characters, no enemies, no mention of them. The game's setting is your standard European medieval society with a Japan stand-in just off the coast. It's just amusing that, you know, Valhalla being viking heaven and all...has no vikings!

Gameplay

There is a very long introduction sequence where the Valkyrie doesn't even appear, and you play as Arngrim. After that, you're tasked with clearing out a tutorial dungeon and are pushed out into Midgard proper. From here, you're tasked with using Spiritual Concentration to seek out new allies and dungeons, but you're also running under a time limit. Finding new points of interest with your 'radar' and visiting towns and dungeons eats up a certain number of Periods, and each of the game's eight Chapters is made up of so many of them. You're also reminded of how many total Periods remain until the end of the world every time you return to the world map.

The gameplay flow is as follows:

In the intermission between each Chapter, the goddess Freya makes a request of what kind of Einherjar that Asgard needs. She'll display a list with Hero Value, Traits, and other Skills they need. In the first Chapter, you're not given any concrete requests, however.

You're brought to the world map. Use Spiritual Concentration several times to find new heroes to recruit and dungeons to conquer. While dungeons and some characters are set in each Chapter, some characters are semi-random and may show up in a short range of Chapters between two different new games.

When visiting a town that pings off of Spiritual Concentration, you're shown a lengthy cutscene showing a snippet of the character's life. Depending on the character, you may see them die on-screen! There are no decisions to be made, just dialog and text to go through. There are some characters whose recruitment event leads to a dungeon that you automatically enter, and this visit is 'free' regarding the time limit.

When visiting a dungeon, you explore the area in 2D platformer gameplay. Enemies populate some rooms, so hit them with your sword to get the jump on them. Dungeons have multiple rooms, and there might even be puzzles to interact with to advance. When you face down the boss and win, the rest of the enemies in the dungeon you didn't fight disappear until you leave to the world map and return, but the boss won't be back.

While you fight and level up, you and your allies gain Capacity Points that can be spent on Skills and Traits. Einherjar can gain Hero Value by raising positive Traits and lowering negatives, and several Skills may be necessary for getting a good score from Freya. So, the dungeons are there to help your allies be more capable for fighting for the gods.

Once you've had your fill of dungeoning and are out of Periods for the Chapter, the Sacred Phase intermission begins. Freya fills you in on the war's status in Asgard, and you can check on the status of the Einherjar you've sent previously. You can see the conversations or events that character participated in during their time away plus any significant battles they were a part of. Positive conversations and good battle performance grants a positive gain to Hero Value, while negative conversations can lower it instead. If you send someone to Asgard unfit for the job and underequipped, it's even possible for your Einherjar to permanently die! Even though they're kinda already dead to begin with, but like, their soul is destroyed.

You also receive an amount of Materialize Points based on the quality of the hero(es) you sent up this past Chapter, plus you receive a number of item prizes to boot! She then gives you a new request, and you're sent back to Midgard to start a new Chapter.

This pattern continues until the end of the eighth Chapter, where you're brought back to Asgard to participate in the final battle against the Vanir on the default Ending B path, but things take a much drastic turn if you can figure out how to unlock Ending A.

Okay, flow aside.

This is a game that mixes platforming action gameplay with both turn-based and action RPG battles. In the towns, Lenneth takes a disguise and can only move and jump, but there are no foes to be fought. In dungeons, she wears her full Valkyrie guise, and can attack enemies in the field with her sword. Battles are turn-based, but each character in your four-man party are assigned one of the Playstation face buttons: Cross, Square, Triangle, Circle. When you press the character's corresponding button, they attack. Instead of just sending one person at a time, you're encouraged to mix attacks up to make combos!

Your non-mages can have up to three attacks per turn, but the attacks they can use are determined by the weapon you give them. Weapons have Xs and Os by attack numbers when you inspect them, and Os indicate if they allow a character's first, second, and/or third attacks. You're also able to change the order of attacks, but only by shifting the order. You can have 123 or 231 or 312, but you can't do 321 or 213 or so on. When your characters land their attacks, a Hits count appears and under it, a green arc begins filling. The number of Hits in the current combo boosts every future Hit in the combo by that number as a percentage (25 hits = 25% boost, 37 hits = 37%, etc). This arc is the Energy meter, and when it hits 100, characters who participated in the current combo are able to use Purify Weird Soul (or Soul Crush as it's called in later games). These flashy special moves do additional hits and generate even more Energy, and it's possible to chain all four character's PWSes together to really do extreme damage to the enemy! Combined with the Hits mechanic above, chaining together a ton of Hits and ending a PWS chain with a heavily-damaging move can really put the opposition in the dirt.

Mages only get one attack, but their PWS differs depending on their weapon specifying Great Magic or not. Normal PWSes merely cast the spell three times in succession, but Great Magic is a full motion video attack that hits all enemies! Unfortunately, most of the Great Magic wands have a chance of breaking when used in this manner, so feel free to use regular spells with them at least.

PWSes and mage spells each have a Charge Time cooldown that prevents the mage from acting or your other characters from doing another Purify Weird Soul. CT reduces by one each turn, but if you combo an enemy on the ground, you have a chance to knock out purple round Flame Gems from them, and these will fly towards your characters that have accumulated CT and reduce it by one for each gem that lands...though the gems actually hitting anyone is unfortunately uncommon. If you instead knock an enemy into the air and juggle them, you have a chance of gray-blue Magic Gems falling out, and each one of these increase the battle's EXP by 5%. You can get up to 40 for a 200% bonus! Enemies also have a chance of dropping one item each.

So with all that in mind, the battle system is a balancing act between timing your four characters' attacks so they all land, setting everyone with weapons that allow you a good flow of attacks, trying to either score a bunch of Flame Gems or Magic Gems and items, and also generating enough Energy to trigger a chain of Purify Weird Soul attacks if you still can't kill the enemy in one turn. Once everyone on your side has acted or missed and forfeited their remaining attacks, the enemy takes their turn, and once they're done, you're given all non-magic attacks for another round.

Outside of battle, Valkyrie can shoot crystals at floors/walls/ceilings to act as temporary footholds or objects to stand on to give her a little extra height, and there can sometimes be puzzles where you have to destroy crystals and then use the remnants to form a stack that allows you a taller platform to vault from that a standard crystal alone wouldn't reach. A crystal can grow bigger when shot once and explodes when shot again, and this leaves a descending cloud of dust that acts as a temporary platform. In almost every dungeon, this is only necessary for getting out-of-reach treasures or so on, so playing with crystals isn't necessary. And if you'd like to avoid an enemy, you can shoot him with a crystal in the field to freeze him for a few moments, but note it doesn't work on every enemy out there!

When you kill the boss of the dungeon, a number of blue chests appear. These hold Artifacts, things of great power that may be equipment, useful items, or just things better turned into something else. You're prompted to offer the item to your lord Odin since supposedly every Artifact on Midgard is rightfully his...but you can keep it for yourself. Keeping the item docks you five Evaluation Points, but returning it grants you just one Evaluation. Several items can be very useful, and if you send good enough Einherjar to Asgard, you'll have high marks regardless. Be greedy! Once you've opened the last blue chest, the area theme changes to signify that you're done here, but you can still go back through rooms you didn't check for treasure now they're empty of enemies.

There are no shops or stores in the game. Even though you can go down to Midgard and into towns, you can't buy anything. There's no money for one, and I don't think stores would take Materialize Points if they could. Instead, these MPs act as your currency. You can use the Divine Item menu to create new items while spending these points on things like restoratives and new gear. You also can break items down into MP in lieu of selling. Valkyrie also has the ability to Transmute items, though what turns into what is set in stone, and not every item is able to become something else. There might even be two items you can track down to expand the list and make some things become entirely different things!

While you have a limited time to visit dungeons and towns and all, you still have way more than you need to see everything in each new Chapter. It's more generous than Mega Man X5 by all means! The only way you can really screw up is if you don't actually visit the new dungeons and recruit the new heroes each Chapter, or if you perform so badly in battle that you keep getting ejected and have to waste Periods redoing dungeons. Easy gives you an extreme amount of leniency due to the lack of content, Normal is still generous, and Hard puts a bit of pressure on you, but you can still do everything and have time left over to screw around.

That's largely the game. You're given a laundry list of qualities, you recruit and train up Einherjar in dungeons, you send them to Valhalla, you repeat until the end of the world.

Gameplay Modes, Minigames, and Character Classes

There technically aren't additional modes, though saving at the final save point in either Ending A or B unlocks the Seraphic Gate bonus dungeon. The greatest treasures and most difficult challenges await you here, but secret treasures and characters are Hard difficulty exclusives.

There aren't minigames here.

There are character classes, but each character is firmly locked to just one.

Valkyrie is the only character who can either equip a sword or a bow, and she has completely different attacks for each. She's also the only character who needs to be in every fight, so while you can shift her position in the formation around, you can never take her out of it. Valkyrie must remain on Square/Triangle/Cross when using a sword, but she can sit on Circle with a bow. She's still worth putting in the front since she can wear unique heavy armor bought from the Divine Item menu.

Warriors equip swords, but some of them use two-handed swords, and some others can use katanas. Spearmen are similar, but they exclusively use spears instead. Archers unsurprisingly use bows, and they can fight from the back row or target the enemy's back row.

Mages are also long-ranged characters that can target either enemy row, but they act like artillery with their cooldown on regular spells and being able to hit the entire field with Great Magic or some spells cast from the Select menu. Mages can learn a number of spells, but you have to set one for their button 'attack' in battle, but you can select another spell from the Select menu for a one-time cast that is hard to combo into. They also get exclusive access to support spells like Heal, Might Reinforce, or Sap Guard, and these spells can't be set to their button.

There are no limits on what characters you can and can't use, just no more than four in battle and whoever is available at the time versus what the Chapters offer and who you've already sent to Valhalla. If you regularly send two Einherjar per Chapter, that naturally is going to constrain your staffing options.

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

There's nothing here. Content-wise, the PSP port is identical to this, just some cutscenes are entirely new. You also aren't able to sort your items since the port was based on the original Japanese PS1 release, for what value there is for that.

How I Played

Remembering how easy this game was, I decided to give myself a little bit of a challenge. I still did use Guts, but I didn't set up Auto Item to ensure immortality. I also eventually stopped using a bow on Valkyrie and stuck with the sword. I also decided to branch out for a change and actually made and used Combo Jewels on all characters. +2 Energy per hit is no small wonder, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it works on PWS attacks, too! That really gives you a ton of leeway for figuring out the order your characters should do their finishers.

I didn't do much differently than I normally play. Valkyrie on Square, a mage on Circle, the Einherjar I want to level on Triangle and Cross. I know I resorted to doing Great Magic once I got an unbreakable wand for most battles just to wipe out enemies faster, and with some team compositions, I had a difficult time killing enemies otherwise! For the last leg of the game, I decided to do a for-fun Valkyrie and three mages team composition. It actually worked pretty well despite only having one unbreakable Great Magic weapon, so I really only used the other mages to get more hits to make the unbreakable mage's Great Magic hit that much harder.

The last time I played on Hard, I burned my leftover Periods by revisiting old dungeons to powerlevel my team, but I didn't even bother with that. Once I was done with clearing out places and recruiting, I'd just Rest the rest of the Periods away. This didn't really impact my experience much overall, I think.

Controls

The Dpad moves Valkyrie to the left and right, up and down ladders in dungeons. Cross slashes the sword to attack enemies, jump is on Circle, Square shoots crystals, and Triangle opens the menu. Down+Circle slides! You can shoot crystals upwards or downwards in front of you, and you can slash up and down too. R2 opens the area map showing where you've been, but an Eye of Heaven can be used to show the entire map with areas you've yet to visit in blue. The map is sort of like Metroidvania Castlevania games, except you can actually go into the background or into the foreground for different 'layers' of dungeon to explore. Each character is on a button in battle, so pressing the face buttons gets your characters to attack. The Select button in battle brings up a menu where you can end turn early, use and equip items, rearrange the team's formation, have your mage use a spell, or you can attempt to run from battle.

You can pick up items in the field by pressing Cross in front of them and throw them by pressing it again, or drop it at your feet with Circle (good if you accidentally pick up a treasure chest so you don't destroy its contents on throw!). To open chests, crouch and press Cross, but some chests may be trapped. Some may explode after a delay, some might shoot out gas, some might shoot an arrow.

I didn't have a problem with the controls. You can reassign buttons in the Options menu, but what's default was fine enough for me.

Difficulty

There are three difficulty levels, and you're only given the option to pick when you're starting a new game, so choose wisely!

Easy has the least amount of content, but it has the most EXP. Normal has slightly more content but less EXP. Hard sets every new recruit to level 1, and there are more dungeons exclusive to Hard. There are also items found exclusively in Hard difficulty that unlock doors in Seraphic Gate that hold new characters and powerful gear.

Easy ironically can be the most difficult option. You're given fewer characters and are locked out of some powerful items. Hard, in turn, can be pretty easy. Characters starting at level 1 is hardly as crippling as it sounds. You gain Event EXP in dungeons that can be doled out to characters as you choose, and some overpowered gear can ensure they survive battle against foes well out of their league...but you can also use Bracelets of Zoe (gain 300 Divine Materialization Energy/HP per level) and Emerald Necklaces (+100CP on level up) to seriously power up your Einherjar from nothing.

When a character runs out of DME, they're removed from battle. If Valkyrie dies, the remaining team members have three turns to finish battle before a forced party wipe happens. If everyone in battle dies, you're just kicked back to the world map except in the finale of either A or B ending where you get a standard Game Over instead. The monsters you beat in the dungeon will be back, and it'll cost you another dose of Periods to go kick their asses again. Enemies don't respawn in dungeons until you leave to the world map, but I noticed Jotunheim Palace had enemies respawning as soon as I left the room they were in!

The Guts Skill gives characters a chance to resist dying. The Auto Item skill allows characters to use items to revive or heal other characters without wasting their turn. These two together can completely destroy any semblance of challenge as long as you remember to keep your item stocks up. A team of four with maxed Guts and Auto Item set to 100% Union Plume will be very hard to wipe, and when anyone does die, survivors will use Union Plumes to revive them. If you really want to crank up immortality, give everyone Angel Curios (revives user on death, 25% chance to break however).

This level of defense isn't really necessary...except the first battle in Lost City of Dipan in Chapter 6 kind of necessitates Guts. If you can't destroy the boss in three turns, he uses an instant Great Magic that hits everyone for close to 35,000 damage each! That was double the health any one person had. Worse, even if you do beat him, you're thrown into a rematch immediately without a chance to heal or restock, so it's very easy to bite it here. Guts won't keep everyone alive 100% of the time, but it might be just enough to let you revive and get back into fighting shape. There was one other massive difficulty spike in a random encounter in the Forest of Spirits even on Normal, and that was another party wipe. Even the Ending B final boss was fairly tame other than his sponginess.

I think, overall, the game is pretty easy, even if you don't use these broken features except where absolutely necessary. The most difficulty you'll have is understanding all of the different systems at work with the puzzles in Hard dungeons probably a distant second. There are still some spikes in places for combat, but keeping up on healing can mitigate most encounters.

Saving

You can save any time on the world map, but you can't save during recruitment sequences, and you can only save in dungeons at the Memory Camp or save point. At least standing over one lets you use Divine Item to resupply, though you can also do it anytime on the world map or when you're in Asgard for the game's finales. You have seven saves per Memory Card.

Graphics

The game has prerendered backgrounds with 2D sprites. I also noted there was a lot of parallax scrolling applied to not only backgrounds, but some foreground elements to give the illusion of depth. Pretty interesting. Characters and enemies are sprites, and there are portraits that are in a hand-drawn style with a small number of expressions for major characters and some Einherjar. The game is still an entirely 2D affair despite the graphics.

Striking enemies or running into them in the field causes a fight woosh, and Lenneth summons the remaining team members in a separate area themed like the dungeon you're in. There aren't any obstacles or the like to worry about here. Your characters have an animation for each of their attacks, and attacks might have properties like 'launches enemy' or 'spikes enemy' or so on, so experimentation is key. Purify Weird Soul attacks are quite flashy, and Great Magic sequences are low-res full motion videos that replace the entire battle background, so they blank out everything but the enemy sprites until the animation's done.

There isn't actually a UI when you're in the dungeons, other than the name of the area appearing on the first entry. When you pass by doors into the background or foreground, you're given a prompt. In battle, the UI is mostly on the bottom of the screen, showing Valkyrie and her allies' names, their health, and any CT they've built up. On the upper-right corner, the Playstation face buttons are shown with green bars and numbers showing how many attacks the characters on those buttons have for this turn, and there is a turn count on the upper left. If Valkyrie is dead, there's also a 'Limit #' near the upper middle part of the screen counting how many turns you have left before you're forced out of the dungeon.

When you go to attack an enemy, the UI disappears and is replaced with the ENEMY HP readout. This yellow bar turns red as you damage the foe, and there is also a Hits readout in big numbers. The smaller number with the growing green swoosh slash whatever is your Energy meter, and getting that to 100 is ideal since it only stays at its current level for a moment. If you keep slamming the enemy when its health is zero, you're given a big red "Over Attack !!" warning, but you can continue to abuse the enemy's corpse to get more gems or items out until you run out of attacks. When the enemy attacks, it's your character's DME shown instead. The enemy doesn't have an Energy bar to fill, but some bosses can use Great Magic every few turns without the need to build up. When attacks hit the entire party, only one life bar is shown, and I didn't figure out whose it was.

Audio

There is quite a lot of voiced dialog in this game, but unfortunately, not all of the Einherjar recruit sequences are voiced completely. Recognize any of the voices? That's the cast from the early Pokémon anime! It's been forever and a half since I've seen it, but one character was a dead-ringer for Ash, and another was 100% Jessie. The voices were kept for the PSP port, but the new video sequences had to use new voice actors.

There are also quite a lot of songs in the game. Each dungeon has its own theme, though there are a few songs that get reused. There is one general battle theme, one general boss theme, and the bosses in the finale get their own themes. And then the Seraphic Gate reuses the Cave of Trials theme from Star Ocean: The Second Story along with some of the Ten Wise Men boss themes for certain battles!

Here's your soundtrack link.

The music is pretty good in this game. I'll still maintain that All is Twilight really sells the 'town on the brink' feeling that applies to a lot of places in Midgard, and Through a Thin Haze is also a pretty sad piece overall. A lot of the higher-energy songs come from dungeons and battle, so to put a flowery spin on things, it's like the music is even encouraging you (from the point of view of an Einherjar) to leave your worldly bonds behind and get pumped about fighting in Asgard.

Stability

I only really had one issue. One character's recruitment scene just halted like the game failed to load a voice file. Reloading fixed that, thankfully. There were some other minor issues, like characters who clearly landed attacks not being able to participate in the Purify Weird Soul chain, and I never figured out how to stop that from happening.

Replay Value

There is quite a bit of value here given the semi-random nature of recruiting, the different scenes your Einherjar can be part of in Valhalla, and if that's not enough, then it's worth going through the game once on Normal difficulty to get Ending B, then go through again on Hard with a guide to figure out how to get Ending A to trigger. Then take that save through Seraphic Gate since you assuredly got the keys to the doors, right?

Ending C is a glorified game over sequence. You have to basically piss Freya off by not sending Einherjar repeatedly. She appears to destroy you in an unwinnable boss fight, then there's a short sequence where you're forcibly put back into slumber while your replacement is talked about.

Ending B is a short congratulations sequence from Freya before you're given your due rest...but there are cryptic messages after the credits stating that things are not yet over and vague hints on how to get a better ending...but you're still gonna need a guide.

Ending A is much more satisfying and gives the game an actual plot instead of "Ragnarok coming, gimme Einherjar from Midgard!", though there are a few dungeons in regular play that hint at there being more in the background than just that.

There is also a Voice Collection that records every voice line in battle across all of your saves, and some bosses even get entries. Trying to get as many voice samples as possible is a pretty serious undertaking since there are so many things counted: Battle cries when attacking, lines when countering off an enemy miss, cries when dying in battle, activating PWS, enemy survives PWS, enemy defeated by PWS, victory quote, and mages get a ton of lines since they have one for each spell being cast and one for every Great Magic! Seraphic Gate has bosses that can fill in some lines, but I think you only need to reach 95% total overall to have the rest of the entries fill in automatically, so you need to only get almost all of the way there instead of actually all the way there.

What Worked For Me

Let me work out this combo
I really like the way the combat system is set up. In the past, I've compared it to a fighting game, but not like I'm good enough at those for a decent comparison. If you play to where the cast is constantly rotating out, you have to tweak more and more to figure out good combo strings and timings to use, so that keeps the game pretty engaging. Granted, keeping certain characters despite Freya's demands can be good for complacency reasons...and button-mashing does work!

An interesting concept
There might be other games where this applies, but in what others do you staff your party with the souls of the recently departed? The setting is pretty depressing and the death scenes are worse in that regard, but the way you get new characters is something I hadn't seen before when I first played and is something I'm drawing a blank on having seen since.

A good variety of enemies
You have your standard garden variety mook, you have your melees that can block and need Guard Crushed, you have mages, you have flying foes, you have enemies that attack at the same time so one drops into a feint while the other lands their attack (and I never noticed this before!), you have enemies that heal and buff another when it dies, you have two enemies that revive the other if they're not killed on the same turn... There are a lot of archetypes to work against, and along with the constantly rotating cast, there is a lot of freshness over the course of the game.

What I Didn't Like

More questions than answers
I'm not sure how to title this part, but I guess it's more to do with how undercooked parts of the game feel.

For one, the long intro with Arngrim and Jelanda sets poor expectations for how the rest of the death stories go. The other character stories can be slightly lengthy or short, and some don't even show the character dying, like Lawfer's. And some don't even have Valkyrie actually talking to the hero, so you just cut to black, Valkyrie flies back into the sky, and you now have +1 to your roster. Huh?!

The Spiritual Concentration sequences play voices and sound effects from around the time of the hero's impending death. For some reason, Aelia's plays voices from something entirely different that's never seen in-game, and Grey's is the same way. I guess this is one way to give context to Celia's actions in hunting Grey since this too is never shown in-game, but these are the only weird exceptions. Why not just show the event in-game? I mean, Belenus got new sprites and a new portrait for his flashback when he first met Asaka, and that scene was a minute long at worst!

The sequences in Valhalla are also pretty varied on how much content there is. The red text war sequences always have a text scroll, sometimes Freya appears and has voiced lines giving the Einherjar a mission, sometimes there is just text dialog between the gods or other Aesir...and sometimes, there's just the text scroll that goes right to the victory screen. I get that the development team might not have been focused on the Asgard war side of the game, but it just feels lacking. I mean, considering it's the entire reason you're on Midgard to start with, I figured there would have been more to it! The worst part of this is knowing that the entire Asgard war is completely fluff. There's no way to actually lose it so long as you avoid getting Ending C, and that ends the game for a different reason. I'll admit this is fair so you can't easily lock yourself into an unwinnable scenario, but that makes the afterthought feeling of this even more apparent.

Normal is pretty sparse
This kind of defeats my suggestion to play the game twice, once Normal once Hard, but I didn't realize how little there is to do in the later half of the game when you're on Normal. Excepting the Caves of Oblivion that open in every Chapter, even Chapter 8 on the Ending B route on Normal had exactly one dungeon to do, and that also is where you recruit a character! Normal has just four exclusive dungeons and only in the first four Chapters, while Hard has eight, though zero in Chapter 1 and two in 8. Amusingly enough, the PSP port has CWCheat codes to unlock the Normal difficulty exclusives while in Hard![gamefaqs.gamespot.com]

Might be worth a look when I try that port out again...

Out of focus
I get this was probably necessary to avoid having a few dozen flags for every event, but once a character becomes an Einherjar, they basically stop existing as far as the story's concerned barring a few examples on the Ending A path and the few scenes when they're in Asgard. Nobody has reactions to anything that happens, and there are no comments to be made about the other characters you encounter or the like. The absolute worst case of this happens when you recruit Lorenta in Flenceburg. You're immediately taken to a dungeon where her murderer is, but when you confront him...nothing! The only way Lorenta wouldn't be with you is if you for some reason left the dungeon, Transferred her, then returned, but why would you leave in the first place?! There's even a save point in the room you start in!

This is probably stepping into 'what could have been' territory, but for the game putting so much focus on these characters (to the point a later game suggests renaming the series Mortal Profile) in a throwaway joke, extending that focus to just the part where they're alive is pretty disappointing.

"It looks like we'll be spending quite a bit of time together." (they never interact ever again)

Verdict - 4/5

What this game needs is a randomizer. Some of the Einherjar are already semi-random, but it could be kind of fun to shuffle people around. You can probably still do it without messing up the Ending A route if you keep those characters where they are normally, but what do I know?

I used to say this was my favorite game. I still think fondly of it, but this last trip through Normal really showed off its warts. I don't know, it's still a pretty good game, just is the 'only' way to enjoy it on Hard? You'd still have to follow a guide for Ending A since that's such a bunch of hoops to jump through at almost specific times. There's no way anyone accidentally stumbled upon that.

This is worth checking out, but you'll probably have to reach for a guide anyway due to how some of its systems work. The tutorial is serviceable, but some things weren't ever explained, like the Select button in battles letting you change equipment/use items/cast spells/etc. I mean, my copy didn't come with the manual (let alone a case!). The discs weren't even in good shape...

The only other downside I can say apart from the above is that if you go in expecting a good plot, it's not there unless you're doing Ending A. Even then, several Chapters just have nothing happen, just you picking up heroes, clearing dungeons, moving time forward. It's probably really jarring for those used to JRPG stories! You're gonna have to work for (and research) it instead.