Valkyria Chronicles 4 is structured in such a way that it plays perfectly well by itself, but by the same token I'm fairly sure the developers at SEGA went in assuming that just about everyone that was going to play this was already familiar with the original, and this was an opportunity to flesh out the broader world some more. Put together you start to build a more complete picture about the real scale of the war. It's like having two different books about two different campaigns in World War 1 or 2 individually they're interesting enough. I was, however, more than happy with the way Valkyria Chronicles 4 acts as a companion volume, showing the world and war being fought over from a different perspective. Yes, the narratives are divergent, but in practice both titles feel like a sequence of tactical battlefields that offer similar objectives, meaning that there's not enough of a difference distinguishing the defensive campaign from the aggressive one. Unfortunately, because both games are broken down into chapters, with the playable bits being just the battlefields each time, there's actually very little to distinguish the flow between those two campaigns. The enemy's the same empire, but where you were fighting a desperate defensive action in Valkyria Chronicles, this new title kicks off with you in control of a unit for another nation, which has decided to try and end the war by going on a desperate offensive, targeting the empire's capital. Valkyria Chronicles 4 upends things slightly by positioning you as the invading force. and the impact of war on otherwise normal people. It would have been so easy for that game's narrative to simply justify everything that happened as appropriate, given that you're following the story of a resistance force, but nonetheless Valkyria Chronicles kept asking hard questions about the behaviour of soldiers in war. In the original Valkyria Chronicles, you took on the role of a unit of soldiers in a nation that had just been invaded over rare resources.
![valkyria chronicles 4 valkyria chronicles 4](https://assets.vg247.com/current//2018/09/vc45-600x338.jpg)
![valkyria chronicles 4 valkyria chronicles 4](https://i0.wp.com/www.segalization.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/VC4_New_Features.jpg)
Valkyria chronicles 4 series#
What does disappoint me is how a series that has always done a great job in pushing forward the right kinds of discussions that we should be having about war in video games (yes, even Valkyria Revolution), would settle back into such safe territory this time around. The hand-drawn aesthetic is nothing short of stunning, and the tactical gameplay is as robust and challenging as ever. I don't mind that the gameplay and visual style have closely matched what the original Valkyria Chronicles pioneered. In one sense, Valkyria Chronicles 4 is actually a little disappointing in that regard. Related reading: Our review of Valkyria Revolution