I'm back from the dead!

[Solid Snake]

I'm about six chapters into Valkyria Chronicles.

...So far, as someone who isn't a huge fan of SRPGs (aside from Front Mission 3, which for some reason I adored,) Vaklyria is very impressive. I love the presentation style with the book, I love the obvious WW2 parallels (though I imagine this game would have difficulty procuring fans from Germany), and the main character is one of those rare JRPG heroes who has a unique personality, isn't constantly emo, and doesn't have a wacky hairdo.

I'm a particular fan of the dual-layer battle system, which actually gives something akin to a real-time sense of urgency to an otherwise turn-based strategic system.

I wouldn't classify it as a 10/10 or A++ game, though. Welkin has a solid voice actor, and so does the female reporter, but the rest of the voice acting so far has ranged from average to outright abysmal. The AI, at least in this stage of the game, is pretty terrible. (Doesn't realize it can attack with the same tank multiple times in a single turn kind of terrible.) The leveling up system eschews individual growth and favors leveling up one of four classes with a single stroke, and characters level up even when they're not fighting, which cumulatively leads me to not feel quite the same connection with the cast as I did in other SRPGs, where individual characters are customizable and losing them can be devastating.

The classes aren't really well balanced, either. Right now I use a single Engineer (just to heal the tank,) rarely bother with a Sniper and only bring along one or two Scouts and anti-tanks. The vast majority of the units I employ are machine gunners, because they are beasts in most situations (and Welkin handles everything else.) Hopefully the more specialized classes will get some better abilities to make them worthwhile later in the game.

So far Valkyria's been pretty good, though. Not incredible, but definitely worthwhile. And (in my opinion) certainly far better than FFT, and very different from it.