RMG Reviews – Valhalla Knights 2: Battle Stance

By: Michael Carusi | March 16th, 2010

Valhalla Knights 2: Battle Stance is an upgrade of Valhalla Knights 2, the latest in a series that has struggled to develop an identity beyond a generic template for JRPGs. How does it do?

Developer: K2 LLC
Publisher: XSEED Games
Genre: RPG
Console(s): PSP

The verdict: Some essential improvements raise this upgraded version of Valhalla Knights 2 to passable status, but there’s still nothing noteworthy. Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend.

I noticed rather suspiciously that Valhalla Knights 2: Battle Stance was an updated version of a game that had been very recently released. This is rarely a good sign, and indeed, the original Valhalla Knights 2 was not well received, to put it lightly. So what does Battle Stance offer to redeem its predecessor? Battle Stance does provide a badly needed fast travel system that was absent in Valhalla Knights 2, but it merely makes Battle Stance tolerable, and the game never rises above mediocrity.

Another orphanage?

Valhalla Knights 2 (and Battle Stance as well) don’t exactly push the bar in terms of innovation, so in an attempt to spruce up this obligatory summary I’m going to use a counter of JRPG clichés as I narrate. Every millennium, a catastrophe strikes (one) in the form of the evil Goddess of Judgment punishing mankind (two). This particular time, the Witch of the Crystal managed to injure the Goddess, and thus sent her into hiding (three). You play as a young hero whose orphanage is burned down by heretics supportive of the Goddess (four) and escapes to join the Royal Latroci, a group of Crystal Witch supporters out to stop the Goddess (five). In short, the story is filler. It says nothing meaningful, does nothing innovative, and doesn’t stand out in any way.

There’s a degree of customization since you have the ability to create your character, though from a fairly limited palette. In addition to a gender, you’ll be able to choose whether you’re a human, an elf, a dwarf, a Halfling, or an akatoki, with two other unlockable races. There’s a relatively scant six preset facial templates and six hairstyles. It’s nice to have some customization, but given the level of in-depth modeling we can do in other games, this seems fairly threadbare.

Kill this number of monsters again, and again…

The game’s biggest problem is that the story never goes anywhere, owing in part to the fairly monotonous gameplay progression. Your main base is a town that features the usual inn for your resting and saving as well as an armory for items. You’ll be spending a fair amount time at the Royal Latroci guild building, where you’ll receive all of your quests. The problem is that it’s difficult to tell which quests advance the story, and most of them have no depth. They broil down to the same type of quests you would find in most MMORPGs, like killing a certain number of monster however many times. In tandem with the completely interchangeable story, there’s just not much to keep this story going.

Battles are decent enough, but very button mashy. Fights are real time in arenas, and while your four allies are handled by competent AI, you’ll be doing pretty much nothing but hammering the X button to attack. There are ten different character classes with various strengths and weaknesses, and additionally you can equip two sub-jobs per character. While a job itself enables a character to use gear specific to that class, a sub-job only allows you to perform spells allowed by that class, which still allows for a neat element of counterbalancing strengths and weaknesses. How often you’ll need most skills or even class differences is debatable, since even when enemies get harder they can be taken down very quickly; it’s just a matter of killing them before they kill you.

So what does Battle Stance do to improve the Valhalla Knights 2? Well, in the original game, the lack of a fast travel or teleportation system meant players would have to do a ridiculous amount of pointless traveling that padded the game out mercilessly. Battle Stance implements a teleport system that gets rid of a lot of backtracking, at least making game progression a little smoother. Beyond that you have four allies instead of six in a fight, not that it changes much.

Closing thoughts

Valhalla Knights 2: Battle Stance fixes the game-breaking problem of its predecessor and elevates it from snore-inducing to passable. It’s nice being able to customize character builds but there’s nothing that stands out here. The story is cookie cutter, the battle system is interchangeable, the job system is clever but bland, and there are far better RPG offerings out there on the PSP.

Disclaimer: This game was provided by XSEED Games for review purposes