Valkyria the Story Killer
From a “professional” writing perspective, there can be a lot to found to criticise in video game story writing. But often I end up finding these criticisms somewhat unfair. Because, video game narratives have unique challenges that other mediums don’t have. Your story needs to be accustomed for the gameplay, often meant to be played in more than 10 hours, in a lot of games the experience the player will have is near impossible to control, in AAA studios the writers often have very little creative freedom and control. Intent of the design is important here as well, obviously you wouldn’t criticize Super Mario Bros because it doesn’t have a well-developed story. Often, even when they don’t look like that at first sight, video game plots are not much more than just a more elaborate and well presented excuse plot. This is I am usually why I am more easy-going towards video game writing, A narrative that seems flat on it is onmight just work enough when you experience that in game yourself.
I am saying all these because I want you to imagine how I truly feel when I you read this sentence: Valkryia Chronicles has the worst story among video games I have played. If it was just an anime or a film, it would just made my eyes rolled. But during 71 hour of playtime, your expectations get crushed much harder and disappointment sets in much much strongly, it makes you less motivated to continue to the game. And if you didn’t hear its name before just to make it clear: Valkryia Chronicles is neither some kind of shovelware nor they just added some dialogue for the hell of it. The game has absolutely beautiful graphics, great music, exciting strategy gameplay, good voice acting (I played with Japanese audio). If you like turn-based strategy games, you will have a great time and a good damount of content. In that department, I fully recommend the game… I also recommend skip-forwarding most the cut scenes. Because the story of VC is not just something that waits in he background, oh no, it’s here to give you “the feels”, it’s here to impress you, it has messages. And that is why I am going to rant about it, obviously spoilers ahead.
The setting of the game sets in a fictional WW2, where a Bad Empire attacks a Good Kingdom for resources. And our militia squad goes on battlefield to battlefield, for stopping the invasion. At first sight, nothing really stinky. The game makes a point about camaraderie between soldiers, you can form your squad from dozens of people who has unique names, faces, voices and personalities. Then we get obligatory “War is bad” message, and the game wants us to think about the enemy soldiers too, it’s alright, sometimes even effective too, such as these moments when the game wants us to cry-yes it made my eyes wet, I am a baby- The character interactions are often adorable. The uniforms are dare I say, very anime-like. There are even honest-to-God beach scenes in the game, it’s saccharine as you can imagine. Honestly if the game solely focused on such moments and dialogue between squad moments and kept the actual war in the gameplay. It could be a serviceable if not a charming story.
The first problem of the story starts here, the game is way too ambitious for its own good, takes itself too seriously and tries to be too many things at once. Racism is tackled for example. and we even get full-blown allegory about Jews and Holocaust. It’s cringeworthly liberal, it condemns literal Nazis -duh- but when it comes to casual racism, the game tries to make the racists at least somewhat reasonable and it is solved by proving “the minority characters are not bad as Casually Racist Character previously thought”. The game also throws in some “evil aristocrats, bad standing army, good militias” for good measure, adds the personal conflict of squad members to the mix. The plot can’t just settle on and develop one thing, it has to talk about everything.
The game doesn’t focus on squad enough either. While it is succesful to make you care about your fellow soldiers, when all cut scenes entirely revolve around 6 people who are protected by Plot Armor, this effect comes much weaker than intentioned. It’s much worse with enemy soldiers, the videos I showed to you are pretty isolated in the game. Outside of that, everyone has no bad memories and ill feelings about killing people, we shoot hundreds of faceless soldiers without questioning , seriously would it be too hard to give those soldiers some face?
All of these would result in a messy story with some good memorable moments. Then “Valkryia” enters the plot and we start to get in to the real narrative-hell.
Valkyria are nigh invincible women who possess the ability to create true havoc in the battlefield. Unfortunately for our soldiers, the Empire has one Valkyria on their side: Selvaria Bazingas. In the first encounter, our squad barely escapes by luck. When our squad meets with her for the second time, things truly look grim…
Faldio, our protagonist’s — Welkin, the guy in the video — best friend researches about some ancient stuff and finds out Alicia — the gal in the video — is in fact a Valkryia too! After giving it some thought, for saving his country he shoots Alicia to awaken her Valkyria powers. And in fact, she just wakes up unconsciously at the middle of the battle with Ms. Bazingas and completely floors her. Thus, Selvaria retreats and the squad, possibly with rest of the Kingdom, is saved for the moment. Of course it feels quite cheap that someone who started to use her powers couple of seconds ago easily defeats someone who had used her powers for years but fine, if that’s the angle they want to go for, whatever.
After that people are relieved but some drama starts. Obviously Welkin is now furious that his best friend did something like that and Alicia is quite shocked to find herself with such a destructive power. She fears that people won’t treat her like a normal human, which is understandable to some degree. I have bad news, because from this point forward, nothing in the plot will make sense, we are truly in the abyss now.
Welkin decides that they don’t ever need such power. At no point in dialogue, no one brings up they actually saved their arses thanks to Alicia’s power. Alicia never cares about that part of the question, all she does is whining and crying, despite everyone around her being fully accepting as who she is. Of course no one has any idea how to defeat Selvaria without Alicia’s powers or how the war could end quicker with using Alicia’s powers. No, it’s bad, because Welkin decrees so, he is the moral arbiter of the plot, he also perfectly voices writer’s opinions, so we players should think too Valkyria powers are terribly bad and never to be used. But it’s ok, the Imperial prince conveniently orders Ms. Bazingas should sacrifice herself in a suicide mission because she gets defeated once, of course he doesn’t think that Selvaria would be most useful at the moment the enemy gets their own Valkryia, despite supposedly being a great military commander, but that’s okay too, because he is so darn evil. It’s perfectly good to write characters who are irrational, irrationality is an unavoidable human behavior after all. However, it is a bit too convinient when no characters act with some semblance of rationality, just write anything and readers will accept it without question!
In the last battle, Alicia throws a final hissy fit and ends up damaging the most dangerous weapon Empire ever brought. Then, with power of romance she is being calmed down and liberated from her powers. After that, they defeat the said weapon and the Prince thanks to said damage, Faldio sacrifices himself in the process. The invasion ends, everyone’s happy. *unenthusiastic yay*
“But wait, Didn’t they technically use Valkyria powers to defeat the enemy?” you can ask. Yes, dear reader, you are absolutely correct. Two times in the plot, the day is saved totally thanks to Valkyria powers. Not because some cookie cutter “Squad power”, not great tactical leadership. But because Alicia kicked the Ms Bazinga’s butt, the lance of Alicia pierced through the absurdly giant tank. What’s worse is when you think retroactively, the squads that got destroyed by the giant tank could be saved if Alicia was more proactive, Faldio wouldn’t die, so many other people in the war wouldn’t die! But who cares about consequences, Welkin has the moral victory and everyone is happy, right? Right?…
You know why all of these happens? Because Valkryia power is a nuclear weapon allegory. Nuclear weapons are bad, so Valkyria is always bad too, it doesn’t matter actual reality of the situation or how many people will affected from our decisions. Nope, writers bended the universe itself to make their morals victorious and still failed. The moral they try to give is so detached from the plot and the setting, even everyone acting like a 3-year-old couldn’t salvage it.
While I played through the game I got angry. Now thinking about it gives me a faint smile. But the overwhelming emotion I have about it is disappointment. Imagine, dear reader, instead of totally ignoring every single lingering question, the characters actually had to face with the reality. The squad’s moral righteousness ended up causing so many unneccessary deaths, and despite being hailed as heroes, they have to live with the weight of the decisions and carry the scars forever. That would be so powerful that it would redeem the most of irrationality in story and dramatically increase the moral complexity of story.
This is why I wrote this article. A possible powerful ending that gets ruined by simply not caring about what player gets from the story. It’s a great lesson about how we need to think about the implications of our works, how stories we write is actually much more than what we dream in our head, how we should focus what people will hear, more than what we say.
Well, I also wrote this because you can find a lot of people saying the game has good story or something, I sincerely can’t see how people might think so…
